Excellent point! One of the many benefits of harvesting your own wood for modeling is avoiding the problem of grain runout on milled stock. When I mill a straight-grained two-foot-long section of log, which is often no more than six or eight inches in diameter, I will split it with wedges into quarters or eighths where possible. If it has checked at the ends, as it usually does, the checks give me a good indication of where best to split it, beginning with the checks. (Sometimes I'll run a circular saw down the length of the log, beginning with the split, if there is one, to place the wedges.) The faces of the splits can then be planed flat and sawn with the grain. This yields spar stock and strip wood with little or no runout, which makes turning, planing, scraping, and carving far easier and, in the case of properly dried wood, virtually eliminates warping and twisting. It should be noted that this exercise is probably not worth the trouble when working with a species that has interlocking grain, but I've not had occasion to encounter such species when milling wood for models.
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Spar milling
- Thread starter Ted Robinson
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Excellent point! One of the many benefits of harvesting your own wood for modeling is avoiding the problem of grain runout on milled stock. When I mill a straight-grained two-foot-long section of log, which is often no more than six or eight inches in diameter, I will split it with wedges into quarters or eighths where possible. If it has checked at the ends, as it usually does, the checks give me a good indication of where best to split it, beginning with the checks. (Sometimes I'll run a circular saw down the length of the log, beginning with the split, if there is one, to place the wedges.) The faces of the splits can then be planed flat and sawn with the grain. This yields spar stock and strip wood with little or no runout, which makes turning, planing, scraping, and carving far easier and, in the case of properly dried wood, virtually eliminates warping and twisting. It should be noted that this exercise is probably not worth the trouble when working with a species that has interlocking grain, but I've not had occasion to encounter such species when milling wood for models.
Now that's the way to control the quality of the material that goes into your models! Harvest the wood, season it, split it, plane it, and saw it. No doubt that this will result in superior stock. One can, however, do pretty well by starting with appropriate species of commercial lumber that you have inspected for grain characteristics and then sawn to requirements. In any case, dowels are often the worst choice. They sometimes are of questionable wood species and have grain going any which-way. Remember that dowels are made for assembling furniture not for fitting out model ships. Fair winds!