Reading a Flitch: What to Ask to See Before You Approve the Veneer

Approving veneer from a small sample approves the species and roughly the color. Approving a flitch approves what will actually appear on the wall.

A veneer sample the size of a sheet of paper tells you the species, approximately the color, and very little about what will appear on a twenty-foot elevation.

For sequenced work, the meaningful approval is of the flitch — the bundle of leaves sliced consecutively from one log section, kept in order. Asking to see it, and asking the right questions about it, is where control over the finished wall actually lives.

What a Flitch Is

A log is cut into sections and each section is sliced into leaves. Those leaves are kept in sequence, and the bundle is the flitch.

Because the leaves come from the same piece of wood in order, consecutive leaves are nearly identical, and their figure evolves gradually through the stack. That continuity is what makes book matching and sequence matching possible.

Leaves from a different flitch will not sequence with these, no matter how similar the species and grade. It will read as a different material, because it is one.

Size and Yield Are the First Question

The flitch has to be large enough for the entire elevation, plus fabrication waste, plus attic stock. If it is not, there is no recovery that preserves the sequence.

Ask for the number of leaves, the leaf dimensions, and the total square footage. Then compare that against the elevation area with a realistic waste factor, remembering that leaves get trimmed to panel size and that the trim is not recoverable.

Discovering at installation that the flitch was short is the failure mode that has no good outcome. It is entirely preventable at submittal with arithmetic.

Figure Varies Through the Stack

Leaves at the beginning of a flitch and leaves at the end can look meaningfully different. Figure intensity, color, and grain scale drift through the bundle.

A sample taken from the middle represents the middle. If the elevation consumes most of the flitch, the panels at one end of the wall will not match the sample as closely as the panels at the other.

Ask to see leaves from the top, middle, and bottom of the stack, or to see the flitch spread. For a critical elevation, this is worth doing in person or by photographs of the full spread rather than by mailed samples.

Defects and Usable Yield

Natural characteristics — knots, mineral streak, splits, bark inclusion — reduce the usable portion of each leaf.

Grade governs what is permitted, but grade is a general standard and this is a specific bundle. Ask what the usable yield is after defects, not the gross square footage. The difference can be substantial in figured material, which is precisely the material most likely to be specified for a feature elevation.

Attic Stock in Sequence

Require attic stock from the same flitch, in sequence, and require it to be identified and stored.

Damage happens: during installation, during the rest of construction, and years later. Replacement material from the same flitch is invisible. Replacement material of the same species and grade from a different flitch is a patch that reads as a patch.

This is inexpensive at the time of purchase and impossible to obtain later.

What to Require at Submittal

Flitch identification and photographs of the full spread. Leaf count and dimensions. Usable yield after defects. A layout showing how the elevation maps onto the sequence. And attic stock quantity, from the same flitch, in sequence.

Five items, all available at submittal, all impossible to reconstruct afterward.

VCS fabricates to drawings. Bring the elevation package.

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