I've got a few pieces of this seriously dense, seriously heavy, quarter-sawn white oak. The grain has these weird ripples all through it which creates this incredible sort of tiger striped effect that you can see all along the face of the board. For starters, I can't easily cut this thing apart to add in accent stripes or do anything like cutting it down the middle to add in a separate piece. I can try but I'm pretty limited with my power tools but in a pinch I might be able to get access to a table saw or something along those lines. Anyway, that's not the way I wanted to go to begin with. I wanted to take a block of wood that looked amazing by itself without having to add in any accent strips and make that the basis of the riser. Just a solid chunk of incredible looking wood with the riser hewn out of it - something that would look amazing just on the basis of the qualities of the wood without any extra fancy stuff added in. The only issue I could see with this would be that it's quarter-sawn and thus the grain is running top to bottom forward to back. In other words parallel to the limbs and string versus perpendicular. I think ideally perpendicular would make for stronger grain orientation in the riser, but I can also add that I'm not running super heavy limbs here either - just 45# limbs. Oh yeah, this is for a recurve if that makes any difference. The other issue I could see would be the limb attachment maybe not being as secure going into the grain on a quarter-sawn chunk of wood. However, a quick check of where the limb bolt insert would go shows it's going to run through at least 4 or 5 layers of the grain of the wood and at an angle of course. All in all I can see this riser being pretty darn tough, but at least one person has expressed some concern that white oak may not be suitable for a riser without some type of reinforcement coupled with the fact that almost all the take down risers I've seen pics of tend to show all kinds of accent strips and such worked in to the design. Now that whole accent strip thing - I gotta wonder if that's really necessary in every case but whether maybe everyone seems to do it because it looks flashy and that's just become the mindset - that if you're going to do a take down you need to jazz up the riser with some extra stuff sandwiched in there. Anyway, here's a pic of the riser sitting on a scale to show you this dense chunk of wood weighs 3lb. 7oz. - pretty heavy. Granted it's going to end up be bit lighter, maybe by a pound even but that's still going to equate to an approximately 2lb. riser when I'm done with all the shaping. So, thoughts, suggestions? Run away screaming, buy another piece of wood, break down and add in some accent stripes even though I really don't want to?
Topic: Solid block of white oak for take down riser? (Read 319 times)
