You don’t need perfectly quartered stock for making braces nor do you need the raw billet to be cut perfectly along the grain the way this is. However, if you want maximum strength and stability per gram then you do need to split it and follow the grain and then cut each brace on the quarter. Of course this is easier and creates less waste if the billet looks like these. I always split my stock for braces as well as my stock for necks. It introduces some repeatability which is pretty hard to come by in guitar-making. These pieces made some nice stiff fan braces and the process was quite fast. However, I split a few more billets at the same time and some of those weren’t quite so perfect. In the end I spent considerably more time on the off quarter pieces especially the ones that split diagonally through the length. I used three different saw setups and three different planer setups through this whole process. One of those billets had a little surprise for me but I will talk about that in the next post.

So I now have hundreds of triangular-profiled sticks; some stiff and some not so stiff and some lightweight and some a bit heavier. I will use the stiffer ones for the centre fan braces and the lightweight ones on flamenco guitars. Because of the splitting beforehand every one of them is as strong as it can be and when I scallop the ends after they are glued to the soundboard they will carve very nicely.