Cross Grain Cutting

I just returned from a much needed vacation (Puerto Rico), I highly recommend it if you need a beautiful place to enjoy and relax. Before I left, I got a question about why I always seem to cut across grain while carving seats. I kept finding new reasons that it makes sense and coming up with ways of demonstrating and explaining them. Don’t worry, I did lots of nothing on the trip, but I find it fun to bat these things around in my head. Here is a short video of one of the main concepts.

Besides lowering the resistance and reducing the effort to cut, cutting across the grain doesn’t risk tearing out below the surface. You might already be resisting this, after all, the “cleanest” cuts are made by cutting along the fibers downhill, right?!

Bear with me, we’ll get there.