Residential Architecture 101: Wood Veneer

Architect Bob Borson explains veneer terms:

Don’t know what a flitch is? Then this post is definitely for you. When talking wood veneer (a thin slice of wood), a flitch is a stack of sheets of veneer all cut in sequence. If you lay them up side by side with the same side up on all of them, this is a flitch match. If you flip every other sheet of a flitch, it is book matching … got it? Pretty clear isn’t it? No, it isn’t, and I think I just made it worse.

Let’s back up a bit and start with the different cuts of wood – how you cut the wood has everything to do with how the pattern of the wood appears in the finished product. In my world, there are three main cuts –

• Plain Sawn,
• Quarter Sawn, and
• Rift Sawn

Read the rest at Life of an Architect