testing screens and screening assemblies for empirically characterizing the produced wood particles in such size ranges are available from the well known gilson company inc lewis center ohio us www globalgilson com in a representative protocol approximately 400 g of the subject particles specifically the output of machine 10 with 3 6 u2033 wide cutters and u2159 u2033 conifer veneer were poured into stacked u00bd u2033 u215c u2033 u00bc u2033 no 4 no 8 no 10 and pan screens and the stacked screen assembly was roto tapped for 5 minutes on a gilson u00ae sieve screen model no ss 12r the particles retained on each screen were then weighed table 1 summarizes the resulting data thus the invention provides precision wood particles characterized by consistent piece size as well as shape uniformity obtainable by cross grain shearing a veneer material of selected thickness by a selected distance in the grain direction our rotary bypass shear process greatly increases the skeletal surface areas of the particles as well by inducing frictional and poisson forces that tend to create end checking as the biomass material is sheared across the grain the resulting cross grain sheared plant biomass particles are useful as feedstocks for various bioenergy conversion processes particularly when produced in the size classifications described above wood particles of the present invention were manufactured as described in above described machine 10 using 3 16 u2033 wide cutters from a knot free sheet of douglas fir u2159.