About sawing wood

the maple eyes and curls usually only show on 2 sides of a round piece...............they go straight through the piece


Kim

The bird's eye is visible only on the flatsawn side, so the only way to have that pattern around would be to use three or four wedges glued up, or veneer. Or make the forearm the diameter of the tree.

It's trash. Toss it and find a better piece. At the end of the day, it's your name on the cue. Your customer will be showing it to everybody they know, telling them YOU made it. Nobody said cue making is cheap or easy. Eat it and start over with a real piece of birdseye. My birdseyes have birdseyes on all four sides of their birdseyes. When my guys want birdseye they get birdseye. Yours should, too.

qbilder said:

It's trash. Toss it and find a better piece. At the end of the day, it's your name on the cue. Your customer will be showing it to everybody they know, telling them YOU made it. Nobody said cue making is cheap or easy. Eat it and start over with a real piece of birdseye. My birdseyes have birdseyes on all four sides of their birdseyes. When my guys want birdseye they get birdseye. Yours should, too.

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If they want birdseye, then of course, you are right. That's not really a piece of proper birdseye.

But is it really trash?

Looks like a lot of nice figure in that piece, with some birdseyes, and he said straight grain which is a plus IMHO.

I have seen forearms with a mix of birdseyes, curls, burls, flames, and more that are really very nice.

Sometimes those non-birdseye sides have a lot of "chatoyance" when finished.

Beyond that, couldn't pieces that are only birdseye on two sides be slab cut for inlays like butt sleeve windows?

It might be a nice piece with some points in it as well.

I just would not call it a piece of birdseye. I would call it figured maple and be done with the terminology. Then maybe wet it or throw some finish on it and see how it looks. Might be nice.



If his goal is to build a birdseye cue, then I agree, this isn't the right piece of wood, especially for a merry widow forearm.


Just my thoughts as an observer. I hate to think of such a piece as trash. But I am not a cue builder so I could be way off.

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If you are going to trash it, think cue extensions and jump cue handles .

Whenever you saw, figuring is second to grain direction imo.

You talking about this?

send it this way if your going to trash it, I am over here practicing with Pine hahaha

JC said:

I agree it's not an attractive piece of wood and I don't intend to use it. Wondered if sawing differently would help defy mother nature and get the eyes all the way around. Apparently it does grow that way. Never been a fan of BEM anyway and since I'm building cues for my own eye I probably won't be acquiring any more of it. There's just a lot more interesting wood out there.

I don't ever plan to burden myself with trying to build what anyone else likes. There's plenty of folks filling that market. Just going to make what I make and if I like them someone else probably will too and they will have a new owner. Tons of respect to the guys who have the skills and patience to make another person's vision come to reality. My observation of this industry is that has been the death of many a promising cue maker and their reputation and the lifeblood of others. And it seems to be a fine line.

JC

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There's absolutely no other way to saw the wood to get a "better" view - it's being turned, so you have a 360 degree view of said piece of wood. Is it trash? That's debatable. It might make one hell of a player. You may find you play it more, simply because you're not caught up on its looks and not worried about a couple war marks; unlike many of the "closet queens" out there. The ones I played the most were the ones that happened to be the plainest, yet I wanted the "hit" that a certain builder was known for. Plus I didn't want to attract too much attention.

Pick your saying - the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, one man's trash is another man's treasure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder - if you find it is of no use to you, it may be a good idea to pay it forward, not chuck in a dumpster or fireplace.

JoeyInCali said:

If you are going to trash it, think cue extensions and jump cue handles .

Whenever you saw, figuring is second to grain direction imo.

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I would tend to agree with this. Especially with acoustic guitars, when one is dealing with a back that can potentially be .085" thick or even less. I love figured woods more than anyone, but in acoustic guitars, special provisions must be made to ensure the guitar lasts - at least as long as the builder is still alive! The most stable configuration for woods is straight grained, of which the wood in question seems to be. In acoustic guitars, quartersawn woods are prized because for the same strength and stiffness as a flatsawn piece, it can be worked a lot thinner, and is more stable. But the woods we work with are flat and thin. With cues, or anything that has a long, thin shaft, having dead straight grain in both flatsawn and quartersawn sides is imperative. I've seen quite a few shafts that look perfectly quartered, but split cleanly at a diagonal on the flatsawn side because of undetected grain runoff. Having a tree that grows absolutely dead straight is the exception, not the rule, because a tree will tend to spiral at least slightly as it grows. Thus cuts parallel to the axis of a tree trunk may yield perfectly quartered pieces, but not necessarily straight in the flatsawn side. The only way to absolutely guarantee straight grain is to split the wood, and thus it will fracture along it's true grain line. The master guitar builders do this with their top woods or at least have it done. Time consuming and lower yield. But they have to deal with 160-plus pounds of string pull on a piece less than 1/8" thickness. Figuring in wood is basically grain runoff, even when well-quartered. In the acoustic guitar world, the boards are kept a bit thicker, which requires different bracing, and produces a different response. In the cue world, I'd expect such pieces to be cored (unless it were maybe full spliced) that it maintains integrity throughout its life.

JC said:

No, this

View attachment 477993

JC

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Compare the top third of your pic to Dave's

JC said:

I have what I thought might be a decent birds eye maple piece that I thought would be good for a cue but the grain is so straight that when I turned it round it has the confluence of grain lines on each of two sides (not sure what to call this) like a good shaft has where all the grain lines are compacted together at those opposite lines. This of course makes for a beautiful shaft but not so much a forearm.

Is there a way to saw this kind of wood to get rid of that in the finished turn yet still keep structural integrity? This particular piece I bought as a turning square so there wasn't any options to it. I'm thinking of starting with larger pieces and wondering if sawing it in a different manner in relation to the grain would end up better. I haven't really paid attention to other finished cues made out of this type of wood to know if it's just present or somehow gotten rid of in the cut. Or is my fuss about nothing and this is an acceptable feature and the nature of the wood?

Hope my question makes sense. Here is a photo.

View attachment 477925



Thanks,

JC

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Maybe I just misunderstood what you were asking.

It's not trash. In fact it's actually a typically nice piece of birdseye suitable for nearly any level of cue. My post was being sarcastic (indicated by the silly humor comments about eyes having eyes) because initially I thought the question was a joke......apparently it wasn't. I didn't expect anybody to take me seriously.

Birdseye figure is technically a bunch of knots. As with any knot on any tree ever, it is oriented exactly perpendicular to grain. This means no knots can exist in the grain, only across it. Therefore, the birdseye figure will show up on two opposite sides of a round piece, while the edge grain lines show on the other two. It doesn't matter what wood from what tree from anywhere in the history of Earth. It's one of the few concrete facts when dealing with wood.

While that all may sound a lil technical to some, it should be elementary, common, most basic knowledge to anybody who works with wood, let alone building cues, hence why I thought the initial post was at least partially in jest. There's no way to saw the wood for figure it doesn't have, figure that doesn't exist anywhere in nature. Minus doing a veneer wrap, you're stuck with the rules of nature.

BarenbruggeCues said:

Maybe I just misunderstood what you were asking.

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Me too. May I borrow a rubber band? :shakehead:

qbilder said:

It's not trash. In fact it's actually a typically nice piece of birdseye suitable for nearly any level of cue. My post was being sarcastic (indicated by the silly humor comments about eyes having eyes) because initially I thought the question was a joke......apparently it wasn't. I didn't expect anybody to take me seriously.

Birdseye figure is technically a bunch of knots. As with any knot on any tree ever, it is oriented exactly perpendicular to grain. This means no knots can exist in the grain, only across it. Therefore, the birdseye figure will show up on two opposite sides of a round piece, while the edge grain lines show on the other two. It doesn't matter what wood from what tree from anywhere in the history of Earth. It's one of the few concrete facts when dealing with wood.

While that all may sound a lil technical to some, it should be elementary, common, most basic knowledge to anybody who works with wood, let alone building cues, hence why I thought the initial post was at least partially in jest. There's no way to saw the wood for figure it doesn't have, figure that doesn't exist anywhere in nature. Minus doing a veneer wrap, you're stuck with the rules of nature.

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I think my faith in humanity has been restored. I for one got sucked in the vortex; my sarcasm indicator did not set off. An emoji of some sort may have signaled us... :thumbup:

JC said:

What I was originally wondering was whether sawing it differently would expose more eyes, if a person was going to core it anyway. Sorry if it was a stupid question.

JC

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You can't subtract from a piece of wood and get more of anything... It should be painfully obvious that turning a square piece exposes all sides. If you took some flat stock, went to the drill press and drilled holes in random spots, and then turned the wood, do you see more holes? You wouldn't. Also the holes would only be visible from two views.