I'm making some blades for a friend of Der_Echte and he is mainly interested in combination blades with drastically different properties on each side - it's a tough to create a blade with dissimilar playing properties on each side while also making sure to create a stable piece of wood.
I've done a considerable amount of reading about ply-wood construction and best practices to maintain a "balanced" construction (e.g., an odd number of plies is preferred), but there is so little information on how far you can push certain factors out of balance before the ply-wood starts to experience negative consequences (e.g., warp). For example, would some glues provide more resistance to warp (surely those with less creep would be better, right)? Would a fiber layer make the entire panel more resistant to warp? Even thickness of wood layers is in-line with best practices for a stable/balanced panel, but how much thicker can you get away with? Woods differ in dimensional stability, so how could you maintain a balanced ply-wood panel AND use different woods?
In the past, I've made combi-blades with the order of outer- and medial- plies switched on one side, which I consider very little risk in regard to creating an unbalanced panel. I've also created one with the outer- and medial-plies switched AND a different glue between the outer and medial plies on one side - this seems slightly riskier and more likely to result in warp (though the blade seems unaffected 1.5 years later). Thus far, I haven't tried drastically different woods on each side or different thicknesses, but I am getting curious about what I could get away with. I'm thinking about trying out a carbon-aramid core with completely different woods on each side (albeit, I will keep the thickness of each layer mirrored on each side). Thoughts on the viability of this design?
