I feel like I must be missing something here. When I look up in my basement at floor joists, they appear to be oriented with the wood grain running at a 90 degree angle to the flooring. I always assumed that was because it was less likely for the floor to flex because of that orientation. So why not use that grain orientation for building a banjo neck? I am a newbie, so I really have no idea.
Correct. Now look at the grain orientation at the end of the planks. This orientation should be quarter sawn for use in necks. Somebody will put up a photo or a sketch on here to set you straight. Two matching pieces of quarter sawn glued together for stability. You can also add a piece in the center. Once you start adding laminations it should be kept to an odd number.
One of a neck's tasks is to resist length variations under influence of tension variations from vibrating strings. The neck shouldn't get longer and shorter. For, if so, most energy generated by the strings would be lost by putting the neck in motion. For a good sound, you'd want the neck as stiff as possible length wise.
This particular material property (the factor, representing this stiffness) is the modulus of elasticity (look up Young's modulus).. This factor (in most banjo woods) will be somewhere near 6 times larger lengthwise than across the grain. There's your answer...
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Edited by - RB-1 on 08/15/2026 14:43:33
Thanks!
When we look up at floor joists from below, we will almost always see wood that was milled the most economical way: flatsawn.
Spruce (commonly used for framing lumber, along with pine and fir (SPF)) is about as stiff one way as the other; quartered or flatsawn. The same holds true for most timbers used for banjo necks, like mahogany, walnut and maple.
We can notice a little more stability in quartered lumber in some situations because tangential shrinkage is almost always larger than radial shrinkage.
Bottom line, flatsawn lumber is what we find to be most readily available because it is the most economical to produce, and it is what we find in use for many purposes because it is most readily available.
Edited by - sunburst on 08/16/2026 13:18:24
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