One piece, or rip and joint
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20 December 2018 at 1:00 am #554050
I’m building a bespoke amplifier case. I have to go for at least 10 inches wide and I’m shooting for waterfall grain across the sides and top. I’ve got a beautiful 12 inch board of Walnut. Should I rip and re-join the board or would I be all right with movement across the 10 inch wide piece . I’ve included pictures of the first cabinet that I’m finishing up this one is in Cherry. I didn’t have boards wide enough so I joined them to make the 10 inches on this one. Thanks in advance.
- This topic was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Ronald Kowalewski.
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You must be logged in to view attached files.If I had (could afford?) an beautiful 10″ piece of Walnut, I would not rip it! Several thoughts. First, people often join narrow pieces to get wider ones. But I think that is because narrow pieces are more available, and also because they fit easier in power planers. Second, I doubt that ripping and rejoining would limit expansion and contraction. Wouldn’t a 10″ board made out of two 5″ boards expand and contract that same as a 1`0″ board? Also, any expansion and contraction should be harmless in making a box sides since all sides expand and contract pretty much the same amount and the same direction. Except for the tops and bottoms of course. Maybe I am wrong about all this, but in any event, 10 inches is not really all that wide.
Oh, you do sometimes see people advocating making table tops out of thin strips, alternating the direction of the smiles and frowns in the end grain. The idea is that flat sawn boards with smiles cup one way and those with frowns the other, so rather than the whole top cupping in one direction, it sort of ripples as adjacent boards cup in opposite directions. I have no idea whether that is really a good idea.
I might not understand the question, so please correct me if I’ve made some invalid assumptions, but here we go:
Panels move just as much as “single piece” boards. Glue doesn’t get the panel a free pass to disobey the laws of physics.
As long as the grain wraps around the case (IOW, the grain flows in the same direction up a side to the top, across the top and down the other side to the bottom and then back up the original side), all the sides will expand and contract together, so the width is a non-issue.
But if you truly want waterfall grain continuity, you can’t use through dovetails. All that end grain showing breaks up the continuity. I’d go for blind mitered dovetails, aka full blind dovetails (example video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hpavdqau2g ), or choose any one of many mitered corner options to preserve the grain continuity.
Also, make sure you re-saw a thicker piece to get your sides and top, that way you’ll have maximum grain wrap. Joint a face, re-saw, then butt the ends together with the jointed faces up, and maybe you’ll have to adjust one piece or the other by a tiny bit to get the grain to line up perfectly. This will cause the edges of your boards to be out of alignment, so rip or plane off the strips which stick out from the now-aligned center. Do all your thicknessing on the opposite (non-jointed) face to preserve the grain wrap as much as possible.
Here’s a FWW video where Doug Stowe touches on another way to get good grain alignment from re-sawn boards: https://www.finewoodworking.com/2008/02/08/resawing-and-mitering-with-doug-stowe
and Matt Kinney from FWW has also published on the topic.You can, of course, skip all this wood movement stuff and just veneer any old box. The grain match will be perfect, you don’t have to try technically challenging joinery like full blind dovetails, veneer orientation can disobey or just ignore all the rules of wood movement, and you can use all kinds of exotic woods.
Just some random thoughts
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