Don Stephan
Posts: 825
Joined: 2003-07-18
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
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Rob:
I'm going to take a stab at your question, and if I'm wrong hopefully Darryl will educate both of us.
For me, backer veneer is a veneer used to balance stresses by covering secondary surfaces, such as the bottom of a tabletop and the inside of a door; and the lower layer of a two-ply. The underside of a tabletop will not regularly be seen, so the veneer used there can be featureless and even of a different color - the selection may be for ease of use (wide, flat leaves) and cost. The back side of a door will be seen when the door is opened, so the appearance of this "backer" veneer will be given more consideration, but it again may be selected more for convenience and cost than to match the front of the door.
Long ago I was told that "backer mahogany" was simply a wide leaf of mahogany. It's width meant fewer seams were needed to make a wide assembly. I'm guessing it's simply flat-sliced mahogany as opposed to quarter or other slicing methods, and without special figure such as fiddleback, plum, et cetera. It's also veneer that won't require flattening before use.
My understanding is that a tabletop or door with a relatively stable show veneer, perhaps mottled anigre on the primary surface applied directly to the substrate, might have a backer veneer on the secondary surface, again applied directly to the substrate, of perhaps plain anigre (for the door) and plain anigre or plain wide mahogany for the tabletop. If the show veneer is something relatively unstable, such as a highly figured crotch, that crotch might first become a two ply of crotch and a backer veneer. Many people would glue this two ply to the top surface of a substrate and a single backer veneer to the under surface; but if one wants the best possible balancing of stresses a second two ply, with both layers being perhaps backer mahogany, could be glued to the under surface of the substrate. In that instance, four layers of veneer would be applied to the substrate, as two two-plies, and one could call three of the four layers "backer veneer".
That's my understanding, awaiting Darryl's red pencil and grading of my report.
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