Rift Wood Flooring
For wood flooring this means that rift and quarter sawn material is less prone to seasonal gapping expanding contracting or cupping making it very desirable for flooring.
Rift wood flooring. An rq flooring board expands up and down as opposed to side to side as plain sawn floor board would. Rift sawn lumber is usually used with oak to avoid the flecks that are common in the species. Quartered only quarter sawn at least 50 of the piece must contain quartered characteristics. Below are the national wood flooring associations nwfa description of rift and quartered cuts.
What is rift and quartered flooring. Below are the national wood flooring associations nwfa description of rift and quartered cuts. In cross section the angle of the annual ring tangent to the face of. Our white oak flooring contains only small amounts of white sapwood and is composed mainly of a medium to dark brown heartwood.
Comprised mainly of true forked leaf white oak quercus alba tennessee white oak has been valued for generations in the export trade to europe for its slow growth and relatively uniform color. Also see picture which will show how the lumber is cut and the look it will produce. From a technical perspective rift and quartered flooring is made from planks where the growth rings intersect the face of the flooring at an angle from 30 degrees to 90 degrees. Rift quartered white oak flooring.
Similar to quarter sawn lumber rift sawn lumber is also referred to as radial grain. In the photograph to the right the planks a to c and 1 to 3 are quartersawn the growth. While rift and quartered is generally used in white oak flooring reserve hardwood flooring provides it in many different species lengths and widths of solid and engineered flooring.