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Scroll Saw Wood Supply
Scroll saws can typically cut wood up to 1 3/4" thick although that might be stretching a saw's capacity if it is a relatively inexpensive model. Likewise most saws have the ability to cut hardwood, softwood and plywood, although again, thick chunks of hardwood will be a challenge for those scrollsaws with smaller and less precise mechanics.
Thus it is not the tool's capacity that limits or dictates what type of scroll saw wood supply you might select or have.
It is usually your skill, or the aesthetics of your particular project that might suggest the right options, but lets first discuss what your options are?
Scroll Saw Wood Options
- Plywood: this typically comes in sheets that are 4' wide x 8' long x various thickness from 1/8" to 3/4". It is made by gluing up multiple layers of very thin wood in a stack, reversing the direction of every second sheet and then adding heat and pressure until they fuse all together.
Think of a deck of cards that I stacked and glued up. Plywood is just like this with the number of "laminations" referring to how many cards i put in the stack.
What is most often used as scroll saw wood, is furniture grade plywood that has been faced with a decorative wood surface. You can buy it with an oak, cherry, maple, birch or any number of types of real wood veneers that are glued to one face of the plywood or two faces if both sides will show.
Often the lumber yards will sell you a full 4' x 8' sheet and then for a small premium they will cut it down to a more manageable size to fit in your beetle. Many times they already have certain types of plywood precut into these smaller 4'x 4' or 2' x 4' panels, so be sure to ask.
Inspect whatever you buy, before you buy because these sheets can often suffer from voids or holes in the plywood layers. Checking the edges is far from perfect but will give you some idea of the quality of lamination. Buy the higher grades for more assurance.
- Baltic Birch Plywood: This is a specialized version of the regular plywood and it does come from the baltic states ( Norway, Finland and Russia). It is made in the typical construction methods of traditional plywood. All the face and interior layers are "birch" as one would expect based on its name.
Baltic Birch Plywood always has more layers in the stack than a traditional plywood (ie. in 1/4 BB they have 5 layers vs. 3 in traditional plywood). it is for this reason that scroll sawers love this plywood. It is less inclined to have holes in the middle of the stack and the extra layers of lamination make it more stable allowing finer cuts.
It is a core scroll saw wood. Note that is does come in different 'grades' or qualities with 'patches' in the holes obvious in the lower grades.
- MDF: this stands for Medium Density Fiber Board. Its cousin is HDF or high density fiberboard. They both look pretty much the same, but the HDF has more sawdust particles compressed into each sheet making it heavier, denser and stronger.
For most scroll saw applications MDF is more than suitable. MDF does make an excellent substrate (middle part of the sandwich) for sheets that clients choose to have laminated with an hardwood veneered face.
This is especially true for the cabinet door industry, where you can now find 1/4" MDF sheets with an oak, cherry or maple veneer glued onto each side. It is wonderful for the interior panels on a kitchen cabinet door.
For scrollers it is a great product as well, offering a uniform product that scrolls easily and retains it flatness. BUT you need to experiment to see if the MDF core will have appropriate visuals. In other words, you are going to be able to see in the cut lines, the sawdust that makes up the interior thickness of the sheet so its colouring has to work with your overall design.
- Solid Wood: solid wood for scroll sawing can suggest anything from rock maple to pine, 1/8" thick to 2" thick. Just don't think that asking for softwood or hardwood necessary implies how hard it will be to cut, or how strong it will be after you've added 500 vein lines. It really does require experimentation.
Basswood is a hardwood and anything but hard. It is sought after by the carvers, and even made into wooden plates for the scrollers given its ease of cut. Cocobolo, on the other hand really is a HARD wood and yet Cindy tells me it cuts like a charm. It contains a lot of natural oil, that makes traditional woodworking with it a pain, but really helps out in scrolling. The oil constantly lubricates the blade.
The biggest challenge in using solid wood, is finding inventory. Standard lumber comes most often in widths from 3- 7" and most of our scroll patterns are more likely to be asking for 12" wide panels; not an easy thing to find in solid wood. Thus you are forced into gluing up narrower boards to make wider panels.
That being said, solid would can't be beat for appearance. It's a wonderful scroll saw wood. Supply outlets offer it in a rainbow of colours and because it is solid wood you don't have to address the 'ugliness' of plywood edges. - Alternatives: Don't think you have to stop with scrolling traditional wood and plywood. Fabric, aluminum, brass, paper, plastic, stone and even glass can be cut with very specialized diamond tipped blades if you have the mind to take on the challenge.
In page 2 of this discussion, I'll try and include some scroll saw tips on why you might use one type of scroll saw wood over another ... read on
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More Information
Read all of our other scroll saw info with lots of tips on just about anything related to scrolling and general woodworking.
Scroll Saw Wood Supply - offsite links will open in a new window
theWoodBox.com random selection of short boards for various crafts, US & Canada
Sloan's Wood shop.- good selection of wood, only sells into the US
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