I have an old exterior door I have been splitting up for bracewood. The wood is well seasoned probably about 4o years old fending off hot humid summers and cold dry winters. Forgive me as I know I am about to use the wrong terminology and likely ramble as I explain myself. One of the boards has some squirrely grain that shows in the flatsawn dimension. It splits very nicely when I split perpendicular to the grain. In fact, I was able to take a brace width slice that was 34 inches long and split it end to end. When I split with the grain, the split wanders back and forth along the width of the would be brace. This runnout isn't very deep but it reverses back on itself in a more or less straight line along the brace. When viewed along the flatsawn edge it looks like a hot mess.
Here is a shot of the flatsawn face. I split in this dimension and then sawed as close as I could to the average line the runnout made and ran it through the thickness sander hoping to get a picture showing the grain:
I tried to get a picture of the worst part of the runnout looking at the quartered face, you can see that at worst it runs about 3/4 the thickness of the brace before it comes back:
Other than looking bad, and perhaps being a pain to carve the parabolic profile, do any of you see a reason not to use this for brace wood? This particular rail has a few guitars worth of bracing. . .
