Benefits of Sequence Cut Boards
George VondriskaYou may have heard woodworkers refer to sequence cut material and how cool it can be. What does that mean? In this video George has two amazing pieces of maple in his shop, fresh off the sawmill, and they’re perfect examples of sequence cut boards, and the benefits they can bring to your projects. Once you see how cool this is, you’re going to start keeping your ear to the ground, looking for the opportunity to bring sequence cut boards into your shop.
More on sawing and sawmills
Once you know how cool sequence cuts boards are, you may want to start cutting your own lumber. You can do this on a bandsaw. Our video on using your bandsaw to cut logs will show you how to do this in your own shop. You should also look at our video on cutting lumber from logs to learn about using a sawmill.
Learning about lumber
Want to know about other options for project material? Be sure to look at the great videos and articles that Woodworkers Guild of America has on understanding wood. From solid wood to man made products, you’ll find lots of great info.
Shop tips
Now that you’ve got your material choices nailed down, be sure to check out our other shop tips. They’re sure to help you be successful with your projects.
When you look at videos that we've done on logs to lumber whether it's using a band saw or a sawmill, one of the things I've talked about a bunch of times is the benefit of sequence cut material. And big scale like we're gonna look at here or smaller scale, stuff you're cutting on your own band saw, the song rings true every time And here's the deal sequence cut means that when the log is being cut, you pay attention to there's board number one, board number two, board number three. And that's what we're gonna look at here. When you look really closely at these two boards and there are two here, you can tell that they were cut from the same big chunk of wood, from the same log. You can tell by just looking down that front edge and see how all the saw marks align.
Now, when they were cut apart, I kept track of them. So one of the things we get out of this is the big reveal which is when I opened this up like this, fire in the hole, and push them together. This is just so cool. Just like when you resaw lumber on your bandsaw and we talk about a bookmatch same thing. Look at the bookmatch that we have in these two boards.
We've got up here by me, we've got some compression wood surrounding these knots what was a branch in the tree. A little bit further down we've got some spalting. So imagine if you're making a big old harvest table and recreate a glue seam here in the center put these two boards together, how beautiful that would be with the grain perfectly mirror imaged on either side. So this, when we talk about sequence cutting, keeping track of the logs, this is why you do it. Keeping track of the boards.
This is why you do it. So that when this is dry and it's gonna take quite a while cause they're dripping wet right now. When the lumber is dry I can bring the boards back together take advantage of the bookmatch that I have here and end up with beautiful grain and the finished project. Definitely worth keeping your eye on the sequence and making sure you keep track of the boards.
What are the dimensions right now of the wet boards and if used in a table, What do you think the dimension will be of the resulting finished top after dried and processed if you try to save as much as possible?