Daruma wrote: ↑Tue Sep 26, 2017 11:15 am
Its no doubt working with slabs is a time consuming process that involves using properly cured wood but I more often than not find the unique grain characteristics of flat saw material more interesting than quarter sawn material. The exception would be figured or curly quarter sawn material and that is the most expensive and hard to find wood and is often improperly cured as it is in many cases rushed to market.
Of course everyone has their own definition of what is interesting or beautiful. Whether something is attractive flatsawn or quartersawn depends partly upon what material it is. Flatsawn red oak - or any oak for that matter - I consider quite ugly. Ditto for flatsawn Douglas Fir. If you want to see white oak with ray flecks then you need quartersawn. In Japanese architecture it is normal to choose riftsawn orientation for timbers where possible, so that what is presented on adjacent faces of a timber is harmonious, instead of the clash you get with one face quartered and the adjacent face flatsawn.
To me though, quartersawn connotes quietness and dignity, while flatsawn is tending to be a bit loud, a bit garish. Quartersawn is elegant, while flatsawn is rustic.
Knowing about wood movement, I see flatsawn material as cheap and likely to have problems over time, while the opposite holds for quartersawn. However, most people do not relate to wood in the same way that I do, they don't see the 'meaning' in the choice of grain. Most people, when they think of wood's 'graininess', are thinking of flatsawn.
I've never heard of wood suppliers "rushing wood to market" because it happens to be quartered and/or curly. People do rush wood to market which is improperly cured, cutting corners in the drying to make a buck, and I've been a victim of that as a buyer, but it doesn't connect to anything so specific as what the wood's grain orientation might be. Maybe that is a thing in Japan(?)
If anything, what drives the process, in North America at least, is that wood is STUFF (might as well be plastic or cement, etc.) that you saw out of a log, and the faster and more simply you can saw it out of a log, and the faster you can dry it, then the more money you can make potentially. This invariably means logs are sawn plainly, or through-and-through, producing almost mostly flatsawn stock, and those boards are 1" thick. Thick stock is sawn less and less often as the drying cost makes it relatively less profitable.
And most sawyers will fight you on it if you ask them to saw for quartersawn wood, as it takes longer for them. I've had that happen so many times when dealing with guys and their Woodmizer mills. Finding quartersawn stock is difficult in many species since they simply don't saw for it, and haven't for a very long time. Try buying quartersawn siding boards for your house and see how far you get. It used to be a thing though, a long time ago.
Daruma wrote: ↑Tue Sep 26, 2017 11:15 am
Slabs have a definite and permanent future in furniture making as they are often unique and beautiful pieces.
I hope not. To me things like slab dining tables they are a fad, and another avenue, like Hummers, McMansions, fancy bling on your wrists and neck, for flaunting wealth in a more or less gaudy way. I'm not saying this is true for all owners of course, but certainly a portion. Loud and attention-getting stuff tends to do well here.
Any shop with a wide belt sander can crank out a slab conference table out of whatever wood in a matter of a week or two- and hey, it can be profitable. That's why they do it. The base typically is some welded steel thing, or indifferently designed and executed nasty wafer-jointed laminae of the same species. It's not craftsmanship, not to me at least. It says to me that the maker lacks imagination and/or skill. With a slab it is easy, and you really don't need to understand much about wood grain relative to movement or sound design practice.
Taking a log and sawing a big slab of wood out of it is the most obvious and easiest way to obtain a table top. Of course this would have been, from the earliest days of cutting up trees to make wooden things, the first thing to try. As woodworking evolved though, and observation of how wood behaves as it dries and moves deepened understanding, humans moved to more sophisticated ways of putting things together from wood. It's only in comparatively recent times, when 'perfect' surfaces are readily produced industrially, that people yearn for something which looks like a natural thing, like a wood slab. In the day though, the demonstration of high craftsmanship was to produce such perfect surfaces out of a natural material, for it was hard to achieve. Things have been turned on their head in modern times when it comes to making wooden things. Few people really relate to wood anymore in their daily lives, and it has become something akin to wallpaper or paint in their minds, devoid of any other qualities but surface appearance.
If you look at furniture made during an era where industrially-produced alternatives were not readily available, like glass, plastic, steel, concrete, melamine, and all the rest, you will not find much in the way of surviving examples of large slab pieces. I've looked in plenty of Museums - I always go to the furniture displays at museums and ignore most everything else - and have yet to see any slab furniture from the 1600~1800 period. Maybe it was made, but it didn't survive. Perhaps it didn't survive because after it had warped and moved to a point, it was a better idea to simply cut it up into other lumber and make something else from it. This recyclability is, in my view, the only positive thing I can say about slab pieces. When high end furniture making was at its Zenith, craftsmen made things using frames and panels, even though it was the more costly time-consuming method.
In Museums where I see old pieces which have slab elements, like a table with a folding leaf, say, it is invariably the case that the slab component has warped and distorted so as to no longer lay or sit flat. I would say this is 100% the case in what I have seen. With furniture made with joined solid board carcases, it is very common to see splits in those carcase sides, or problems between that carcase and the attached frameworks due to wood movement.
In the furniture I admire the most, Ming Chinese, there was only one type of furniture piece in which slabs were employed, namely a type of long and narrow hall table in which a slab of squared up rosewood was placed upon a pair of pontoon-like framed stands. Survivors of this type though are very rare, and one normally finds only the stands have survived. Seems that owners of these pieces, in hard times, valued the stands and held on to them, but cut the slabs up into firewood to keep warm. They valued the thing made artfully by the craftsman (stand), but looked at the slab as essentially a piece of material and nothing more. I tend to see it the same way.
A slab represents a lot of possibility, but for me all of those possibilities involve slicing it up to employ it in the most intelligent way relative to the natural propensities of wood as a material.