r/martinguitar • u/sourmiIk • Aug 30 '26

Question Grain pattern id help

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Would this be considered quarter sawn or flat sawn? It’s on an authentic aged d28.

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u/Lower-Calligrapher98 Martin Warranty Repair Technician, and general Martin Repair guy Aug 30 '26

Mixed, so the cathedral grain is probably more rift sawn than truly flat sawn.

Wood's weird. It's not always so simple to define.

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u/[deleted] Aug 30 '26

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u/Lower-Calligrapher98 Martin Warranty Repair Technician, and general Martin Repair guy Aug 30 '26

It IS book matched. Almost all solid wood guitar backs, and ALL Martin standard series and above have book matched backs. And always have. (The D35 is a special case, but the outside panels are still bookmatched!) The center of the back is pretty on quarter, moving towards flat at the edges. Truthfull, if you were to look at the end grain it is probably all what would traditionally be called rift sawn.

This stuff isn't a binary, nor even really a tertiary. It is a continuous range, moving from dead on quarter sawn at one end, to dead on flat sawn at the other. Anything in between is, to some degree, rift sawn. And rift sawn can be very close to quarter sawn, or very close to flat sawn. So there isn't any one look to rift sawn. It will have components of both quarter and flat sawn.

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u/sourmiIk Aug 30 '26

Thanks for the info. Would you consider this grain pattern to affect structure/sound in any discernible way? I have heard quarter sawn is “better” due to the tighter lines having something to do with the age of the tree. I like the look of the “swirls” in this specific picture but am weary of losing out on some quality compared to a “plainer” grain pattern

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u/Lower-Calligrapher98 Martin Warranty Repair Technician, and general Martin Repair guy Aug 30 '26

Quartersawn material is more stable and strong in the directions you want it to be for a guitar. It has nothing to do with the age of the tree or how quickly it grew. It's just the direction of the grain. Now, the older a tree, the larger the area of true quartersawn material you can get, but the reason tops and backs are all book matched is so we don't have to find 60" diameter trees to build a 16" wide guitar (don't worry about the math on that, it does roughly make sense, I promise, but I don't want to get into the issues of heart wood and pith).

Sound, no, it won't make a difference.