ahvia_musicom
Member
Another factor is that good quartersawn hardwood lumber is getting more scarce. The trees being harvested are smaller than in the past, and quartersawn or rift-sawn lumber produces less yield per log than plain-sawing. Flat-sawn/plain-sawn planks aren't as stable as quartersawn, because the grain lines are oriented parallel to the string plane, unlike quartersawn, where the grain is oriented perpendicular to the string plane.
Adding a couple of channels for CF or Ti rods is easy to do in a production process, without having to change to a multi-laminated neck blank.
hi darren i got this from potvin's facebook,
Juha Ruokangas When I studied guitar making back in the early 90's, we got an assignment to test the stiffness / bend-strength of hard maple. So we planed a bunch of square (thickness=width) sticks. We had some slow growth stuff with tight grain, some faster grown, and pieces with straight grain, and some with grain run-out...The test environment was really simple - the pieces were planed to identical size, and we clamped them one by one to the end of a workbench and hung a weight to the other end and measured how much did the piece bend. In ALL the tests, without exception, the pieces bent the least when stressed to the flatsawn direction. I did these testings 20 years ago so I felt I had to refresh my memory, so this morning I pulled on my long white coat, squared a piece of straight grained hard maple, went to our secret wood research laboratory in the shop cellar, clamped the piece of maple to my scientifically approved test bench and hung an old Mercedes Benz break disc to the other end of the stick. I measured the amount of bending of this single piece of maple to both directions - flatsawn and quarter sawn. See the pics. The QS direction this piece of maple bent about 5mm more than to the flat sawn direction. This is very similar result to our school tests, which were done in a more controlled environment than my quick test today. Myth Busted! Test it yourself and you'll see. There's a lot more to making a good neck though - as anyone knows who has built enough guitars to really understand how these materials behave... Pic 1 - the test environment, sorry about the blurry image, too much secret stuff goin' on in the cellar...
![](https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/s261x260/1381394_10201853965858453_278395319_n.jpg)
Juha Ruokangas Pic 2 - the readings on my measuring stick - I measured the amount of bending using an aluminum spirit level (distance from floor to the lower edge of the maple stick).
![](https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/s261x260/1375811_10201853985018932_448615315_n.jpg)
i do agree with juha and jack briggs though that no two woods even if they are the same species are alike