These three words describe one thing: the angle between the growth rings and the face of the board. That angle is decided by where in the log the board was taken from, and it settles both how the board behaves and what it looks like.
- Quarter sawn — rings meeting the face at roughly 60 to 90 degrees.
- Rift — roughly 30 to 60 degrees.
- Plain sawn — roughly 0 to 30 degrees, the flat cut.
What Quarter Sawn Buys You
Stability, mostly. A quarter sawn board moves across its width far less than a flat sawn one as humidity changes, which is why it ends up in table tops, doors and anything that has to stay flat for a century.
In white oak it buys you something else. Quarter sawing white oak cuts through the medullary rays and produces ray fleck — the flashes of figure lying across the grain. That is the entire reason Mission furniture is quartersawn white oak, and it is not an effect you can add later. It is either in the cut or it is not.
What Plain Sawn Buys You
Width, yield, and the cathedral — the stacked arches on a flat sawn face. Cathedral scales with the diameter of the log, and that is worth stopping on. A 30-inch board off a two-hundred-year-old oak gives an arch that simply cannot exist in a board off a plantation tree, because the tree was never big enough to hold it. On a log that size the flat cut is not the cheap option — it is the one that shows what the tree was.
Rift Is Not Quarter Sawn
Rift comes off the mill whether anyone plans for it or not. It sits between the two, it is the most stable of the three, and it wastes the most wood to produce deliberately. It is worth naming for one reason: selling rift as quarter sawn is the kind of thing that gets noticed once and remembered, and anybody buying quartersawn white oak for fleck will spot it immediately.
You Get All Three Out of One Log
This is the part that gets lost when quarter sawn is talked about as an upgrade. Cut a big log flat and the boards nearest the centre come out quarter and rift on their own, because that is where the rings run steep — the outer boards are the flat sawn ones. So a single log gives cathedral on the outside and fleck near the heart, and the sensible thing is to take what each part of the log is already offering rather than force one cut through the whole tree. Large-diameter logs are a different job for exactly this reason.
Everything leaves rough sawn either way. What comes off one tree, butt to crown, is on the frugal milling page.
Contact
Old Growth Mill
Axson, GA 31624
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (912) 310-0650
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