I'm going to go pick up a few more big sycamore butts this weekend, I ran out of sycamore big enough to QS. It's a sad day when you don't have any sycamore left to QS.:crybaby2:
What's odd I've made lumber out of quite a few different kinds of trees, give me a big ole sycamore and a little extra time to study how to slice it and I'm one happy camper...
The more I saw em the more I'm learning how to pull the ray flake out them. I'm discovering it's a little more involved than just quartering the log and sawing out boards. I have yet to see a sycamore with round growth rings, they are more like a loosely formed oval. If you just split the log down the center, it's a crap shoot if you'll pull the flake. Even if you line up the blade perfectly perpendicular to the growth ring oval and saw down through the pith you may end up a 1/2 board or maybe even up to two boards off from finding the flake. The closer you can get the grain line up 90 degrees with the face the more brilliant the flake will be. It's much more challenging than QS'ing something like oak which is pretty easy to pull the flake. Oak is very forgiving, you can still be in the flake with the grain running down to as little as 60 degrees from the face. Sycamore on the other hand is not near as forgiving, the flake seems to want to disappear somewhere around 75 degrees. Another difference is the wider the growth rings the wider the flake, this the exact opposite of oak. It's tightly space growth rings in oak that produces bigger flake. I know Blah Blah Blah... simple minds are amused easily aren't they?. But the truth of the matter is I just need more big Sycamore logs to play with :cry: