Posted earlier "Pith - The Pits!? and learned some more
about "pith in" cracking. With some of the feedback
from those responses, some reading in Hoadley's
"Understanding Wood" and some playing with tables
of radial and tangential shrinkage values for a bunch
of woods and some work in a spreadsheet to calculate
T/R Ratios I'm starting to get a feel for what's going
on and why the pith propogating cracks might be
aviodable.

http://web.hypersurf.com/~charlie2/T...hrinakge0.html

Would appreciate feedback - illustrations and text make
sense and are correct?

Still need to do the "what you can do to reduce or eliminate
pith generated cracking" illustrations and text but want
to get thisfirst set of info right first.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

charlie b