Is Flat Sawn White Oak Suitable for Furniture

[JohnM Martin]

I recently came across an opportunity to buy some flat sawn 4/4 white oak at a really good price. I’m just getting started making furniture and haven’t used white oak very much except for making a workbench. My question is would you consider flat sawn white oak suitable for building furniture? Everything I’ve read online suggests quarter sawn or rift sawn oak for furniture making.

A follow up question would be are there any good online dealers for quarter sawn white oak? I have had a hard time locating it from sawyers or hardwood dealers where I live.

[Nicholas Lawrence]

Quartersawn will be more stable. Quartersawn will show more of the medullary ray pattern many like.

If you indicate where you are somebody may be able to suggest a source.

Whether flat sawn boards are suitable probably depends on what you are trying to make as much as anything else.

[JohnM Martin]

Good point, Nicholas, I’m in Oklahoma City.

[Robert Engel]

IMO best use is for tabletops, chairs, etc. but you could build anything out of it. Flat sawn WO is very blah comp to QS.

There can also be some finishing issues due to the fact it has an open pore type grain. Sometimes you need to fill grain.

Its also a pretty hard wood, so it will be tougher on your blades and bits.

As for QS sources, I'm in the SE US but I pretty much gave up trying to find an online dealer due to shipping costs, minimum orders, can't select boards, etc. The QSWO I have purchased I drove 7 hours bought direct from sawmill.

Nowadays I buy 80% of my lumber direct from a sawmill and I encourage all ww'ers to get away from teh surfaced lumber most commonly available at suppliers. You will find a project will go much better if you mill the lumber yourself.

I've been lucky to find some really good guys who I can call and they will put together what I want. Plus, they cut boards a tad heavy so a 4/4 board is actually 1" thick when you get it!! :-D

[Phil Mueller]

Here’s an old desk with quarter/rift sawn side panels (original to the desk), and what is probably a newer flat sawn oak veneered plywood top that’s been banded with oak strips. The point is, it looks fine. Maybe not as attractive as quartersawn, but I don’t find it offensive in any way. In fact, a quartersawn top may have been too much...?

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Side note: you’d think if there was a woodworker in the house, he’d spend a little time freshening up this top...
Another side note: for you youngin’s out there, that thing sitting on the bottom left corner of the photo is a solar powered calculator.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Due to the lack of reasonably priced hardwoods in my locale, I'd use it for furniture if I had a reliable, reasonably priced source.

[Edwin Santos]

Flatsawn White oak is as suitable for building any furniture as any other hardwood.
Someone else pointed out that quartersawn is "more" stable than flat sawn. Yes, this is true, but it should not imply that flatsawn WO is uniquely unstable.
QS or riftsawn WO have a different grain appearance, so the main difference is aesthetics, especially if one were trying to re-create a period style like Mission which is associated with QS grain.
Depending on the width of the flat sawn boards, the edges will most likely be rift grain. Some thrifty woodworkers will buy thick flatsawn boards and cut the legs from the rift grain sections on the edges.
The more important question regarding stability is the moisture content of the wood, and that your design and construction techniques allow for wood movement regardless of the species.
Edwin

[Andrew Seemann]

Flat sawn oak, white or red, is absolutely fine for furniture. Quartersawn is and always was a specialty item, expensive and often wasteful to mill. Woodworkers have a habit of over rating (obsessing?) quartered wood. Yes, it has nice properties for some things, and sometimes -not always- has a nicer figure, but it is not the only option for wood. Not all furniture is made from quarter sawn, actually the minority is, mostly due to cost and availability. For that matter, not all Mission furniture was from quarter sawn white oak back in the day, just like not all was fumed (and not all was oak).

I occasionally use quarter sawn wood, where the application is helped by its properties, like on a table tops. But even then, only oak tends to be available quartered, so if building with cherry or maple or walnut, the top would almost certainly be flat sawn. Walnut and cherry are almost always flat sawn, to maximize the available heartwood.

Oaks in general are harder to work with hand tools due to the higher density (i.e. hardness :) ) of the wood but certainly not impossible. If you can do you roughing with power tools, thicknessing & rip sawing, it will make your life much easier.

One thing to remember about quartered oak, is that is really needs to be seen up close to appreciate the figure --Stickley recommended flat sawn oak for wainscoting for that very reason. Most woods actually look rather plain when quartered, oak having the medullary rays being the main exception.

I did the below entertainment center about 20+ years ago, when Mission style furniture was becoming all the rage in hobby woodworking, unfortunately so was using dye rather than pigment stain. From more than a few feet away, you can't see that nice ray fleck that I paid so much for. It also doesn't help that the dye stain mutes the ray fleck rather than empahsizing it (walnut Watco would have looked much more impressive). Unfortunately, the overall effect is that it looks like it was made of mahogany rather than quartered white oak. Which defeats the purpose of using quartered white oak in the first place.

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[JohnM Martin]

That's a nice looking entertainment center. I do have some power tools that I plan to use for rough dimensioning and thicknessing.

[Robert Hazelwood]

If the boards are reasonably wide you can get a lot of rift sawn parts out of them, ripping off the edges. The center few inches of the boards will be straight flat sawn cathedral grain, so use those for non-shown surfaces or burn them.

Visually I prefer rift sawn over quarter sawn for many furniture parts. The ray flecks on QS can be too much sometimes, in particular on narrower parts. If a part has two adjacent show surfaces then reift is better.

So yeah, if the price is great and the boards are straight I'd buy all you can.

[Art Mann]

I have built more cabinets and furniture out of flat sawn white oak than I can begin to remember over the last 40 years. It is plentiful and cheap where I come from. The question isn't whether the material is appropriate for the application. It most certainly is. The question is does it look good to you? To tell you the truth, I have gotten tired of the so called "cathedral grain" of flat sawn white and red oak and I don't build with it any more. I only use quarter sawn. That is just my personal preference and not a general statement about oak.

[lowell holmes]

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Don't overlook other wood species. I built the this chair out of mesquite while at a Paul Sellers class conducted at Homestead Heritage in Elm Mott Texas
(near Waco Texas). Thus was about twenty years ago. It sits in my living room.

[Mark Rainey]

Don't overlook other wood species. I built the this chair out of mesquite while at a Paul Sellers class conducted at Homestead Heritage in Elm Mott Texas
(near Waco Texas). Thus was about twenty years ago. It sits in my living room.
Lowell, that is one fine chair. Paul Sellers was teaching in Texas 20 years ago? Was he mostly hand tools back then or did he use a bandsaw for most of the chair? Thanks Mark

[lowell holmes]

We cut the general shape of the pieces on the bandsaw and did the final shaping with spoke shaves.
Paul was making display racks for cards to be used by the bookstore. It was all done by hand.
I would say the work was 60% handwork. They still have the chair classes with Frank Strazza.
Frank and other instructors there are as skilled as Paul. I think he taught them.

I have since built chairs for my adult children and grand children.

[steven c newman]

Just think what something like this could be made into...
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Friend of mine's, where I usually buy my hardwood supplies, now has two of these...white oak slabs 8/4 thick....that is a normal sized walk-through door. Second one is "only" 10' long....this one is 12'.
That recent Microwave Cabinet Project I made for the Boss...was white oak.

[Tom Bender]

Hi John
Just a word of caution. Lots of woodworkers acquire too much wood, some way way too much. I try to bring home just what is needed for the next project, but opportunities come knocking and there are always offcuts. It might be a good time to establish good habits before you drown in wood.

[lowell holmes]

He was hand tool oriented. I saw him make a card holder for a desk in about an hour one day using only hand tools.

[Jim Foster]

To the original poster. If you find yourself knee deep in white oak and get bored with the plain sawn look after a while, I think getting creative with finishes can make a big difference. Small pieces can be ebonized, and a multitude of other finishing techniques can be researched and tried.

[roger wiegand]

Of course it is suitable, as the millions of pieces of furniture made from it will testify.

The question is, for hand-made custom furniture, do you want to spend a couple hundred hours on building a very good piece with plain wood when for an extra few bucks you can make an extraordinary piece with spectacular wood. For everyday or more utilitarian furniture it's a great choice.

[Tony Wilkins]

Of course it is suitable, as the millions of pieces of furniture made from it will testify.

The question is, for hand-made custom furniture, do you want to spend a couple hundred hours on building a very good piece with plain wood when for an extra few bucks you can make an extraordinary piece with spectacular wood. For everyday or more utilitarian furniture it's a great choice.

Are you talking about quatersawn or another species.

[roger wiegand]

Well is this case I was thinking very high quality quartersawn, but I go through the same thought process in choosing quilted cherry or birdseye and curly maple instead of plain.

[Tony Wilkins]

For everybody: Out of curiosity, what percentage of the wood you buy do you specify quatersawn? How much does that vary with wood type?

[Andrew Seemann]

The only quarter sawn wood I've seen regularly available in quantity locally is Red & White Oak, and sometimes vertical grain Fir. Sometimes vertical grain Sitka will be available in a few pieces at Woodcraft; maybe some of the specialty wholesalers would order it if you agreed to buy enough. For other species you may run into the piece that happened to be the cut on the quarter, but it isn't separated out.

I always see people saying, "You should use quarter sawn wood for that" and wonder where they think you would get it.