Engineered Quartersawn Walnut Flooring | Wide Width 2024

Guide to Quarter Sawn Wide Width Engineered Walnut Flooring

What is Engineered Quarter Sawn Walnut Wood?

Quartersawn Walnut is simply Black Walnut lumber cut in a quarter-sawn grain orientation.  In our case, we primarily use American Black Walnut.

Juglans nigra, the eastern American black walnut, is a species of deciduous tree in the walnut family, Juglandaceae, native to North America. It grows mostly in riparian zones, from southern Ontario, west to southeast South Dakota, south to Georgia, northern Florida and southwest to central Texas. Wild trees in the upper Ottawa Valley may be an isolated native population or may have derived from planted trees.

Black walnut is an important tree commercially, as the wood is a deep brown color and easily worked.

source: Juglans nigra (Wikipedia)

What is Engineered Flooring? 

Engineered wood flooring is a composite wood floor made by combining a solid wood top layer (or lamella) with a lower platform (or substrate or core) to make a composite wood floor. 

Engineered flooring  combines the visual qualities of solid wood with the stability of a plywood platform.

Why is the Engineered Quartersawn Walnut Flooring Platform Plywood?

In truth, the engineered flooring core is not always plywood. Cork, CDX, particleboard, finger-joint pine or virtually anything can be used. 

However, there are 3 important reasons why Baltic Birch plywood is the platform of choice for most reputable custom engineered flooring manufacturers.

1. The platform is critically important to stability. Accordingly, Baltic Birch is generally well manufactured with multiple precision cut layers. The platform is consistently of high integrity construction.
2. The core choice adds little to no visual value to the engineered wood floor. Accordingly, it needs to be solid and reliable but also inexpensive. Again, Baltic Birch meets this requirement.
3. The platform represents a small percentage of the total manufacturing cost.  Thus, replacing Baltic Birch with an inferior core saves little at the expense of stability. 

Why use Quartersawn Wide Width Engineered Walnut Flooring?

• all long length,
• heartwood
• really clean   

Why is Wide Rift/Quartered Walnut Flooring Rare?

1. It takes large walnut logs to yield wide width lumber boards. Plain-sawing those expensive big logs yields better than quarter-sawing. 
2. There is a relatively small demand for quartersawn walnut lumber.  Plain-sawn walnut turns faster than QS. 
3. The price difference between FAS grade plain-sawn and FAS quartersawn walnut is small. Accordingly, for many sawmills quartersawing walnut gives a poor return on investment.
4. Demand for rift/quartered Walnut is primarily in Select/better grade. Thus, developing lower grade r&q walnut is unlikely to fetch a premium. 
5. Many designers and contractors consider walnut sapwood a defect. Quartersawn boards are likely to contain sapwood on the outer edge. Therefore sawyers are left with two options: remove the sap and reduce the board width or leave the sap in. 

Do We Make Solid Rift/Quartered Wide Width Walnut Flooring? 

Yes. However, it’s not really our niche.

One reason we prefer engineered is that it is a much more efficient use of a scarce resource.

For us, it’s a depressing waste when really expensive wood performs the function of Baltic Birch plywood. In truth, the Baltic Birch is a significantly better platform. Accordingly, the engineered product is functionally and ecologically superior, in our opinion.  

Contact us with your crazy quartersawn walnut project.custom