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Spiral Grain - How much is too much?

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Crogacht:
Hi all,

I'm just starting out, and I have split a few logs, but have encountered a bit of spiral grain.

One log which I know is a write-off has 180 degrees of spiral over 2 metres  :o, so that one has been set aside for firewood.

I have another log which has a mild spiral in it. So my question is, how much spiral is too much? Do I need to be searching for very straight grained wood?

I know wavy grain/knots/pins etc can be worked around in most cases, but spiral grain seems like a big problem.

Any help would be great,

Thanks,

Ben

aaron:
I think even a little spiral is too much, especially for a beginner. What species are you working with? I recently brought home what I thought was one of the best vine maple staves i ever saw only to discover it was the only VM i ever cut with spiral grain. Most species, you can tell by the bark, but not with VM

Crogacht:
Thanks for the reply :)

Well, I'm actually in New Zealand, it's a beautiful place, but there are very few people making bows here.

I'm basically looking at the mechanical properties of a wood and trying to target certain species with a little advice from the few other bowyers I know and then going from there.

Most nz natives have mottled or patchy bark, so it's hard to tell what the grain is doing a lot of the time, but I have learnt to look at the shape of the trunk now. Many natives form buttresses and even on young trees the ridges and raised parts on the trunk give away the nature of the grain most of the time.

We have a little black locust where I live, but it's mostly inaccessible. Yew is very uncommon, osage is non-existant.

The species is native to New Zealand, and is called Black Beech. There's a link here which will give a bit of an idea of the properties of the wood.

http://www.nzffa.org.nz/specialty-timber-market/showcase/new-zealand-beech/black-beech/

As I said there's not too much info around where I live, especially in regards to native timber. The native people of New Zealand (Maori) had no use for bows, and never made any.

I've read the bowyer bible series quite a few times, so I've picked up a lot from that, and it talks about how to deal with most issues, but spiral grain doesn't seem well covered that I could find.

Any idea how you deal with it? Or is it best to just avoid?

It seems like if you took a log with a spiral grain and cut a stave as you normally would, you'd have fibre running off the edge of the bow and when you tiller it and draw it back I imagine the wood would probably have some twist it in then also.

Pelo:
I've invested a lot of time in spiraled lilac (straight dense beautiful) staves only to have them blow apart dramatically in final tillering. I've tried making them as wide and narrow as possible. Not to say it can't be done.

Crogacht:
Yeah, it seems like some of the stronger woods might tolerate a bit of spiral, but most woods won't. I might need to keep searching. I have some pretty nice elm to keep me busy for awhile anyway :)

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