Brian recently send me an offcut of his AYC "Kez practice beam". As you'd expect it's a near-perfect piece of wood, extremely uniform with very faint rings.
To get a quick look at the structure I planed it with a 40 deg cutting angle and took a picture with extremely harsh raking light oriented perpendicular to the grain. Each pixel in this image is 2.6 microns, and the entire image is 2.6 x 2.6 mm at the wood surface. For reference this surface appears uniform with fairly high sheen to the naked eye.
planed_ayc.jpg
A couple notes:
- Individual fibers average about 12 pixels = 31 microns in diameter. The "book value" for AYC is 30 um per some papers I've seen, so this piece doesn't appear to be exceptional in that regard. 30 um is just over 1 mil, so when planing competitors make thinner shavings than that they're actually slicing fibers into pieces lengthwise.
- Rings average about 240 pixels = 0.6 mm in width. If you look closely you can see 5 light ring boundaries in the image. Did I mention that this is some *very* finely-ringed wood?
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