Thread: I need a second opinion on the orientation of wood for making surfaces.

With the 2nd method it's not cupping and bowing that you have to worry about: it's wood movement.

Timber will absorb/lose moisture from/into the air depending on ambient humidity, so it expands and shrinks constantly. Where it becomes a problem is that it shrinks at a different rate across the grain than it does along. For some timbers this difference is almost negligible but for others it can be quite dramatic.

This places quite a bit of strain on the glue joints when end-grain is butted to long-grain, until eventually they fail. (In general, the smaller the squares/glue-lines involved, the longer they'll last. It's still not a good idea though.)


Personally, given what you've said, I'd go for option A. If you look at the end-grain on each board you should be able to see if it's rift-sawn, quarter-sawn or flat-sawn (aka plain-sawn).


In the first two cases cupping shouldn't be a major problem, but if the latter...

One workaround for this is to alternate the directions of the rings when laying out the boards so that even if they do cup they sorta cancel each other out. ie. for each board determine which side the heart of the tree would be, then lay the boards side-by-side as heart side up, heart side down, heart side up... etc.

The joins between each square will break/crack - I guarantee it.
Because timber moves (due to changes in humidity and temperature) much more over the width than the length, you'll essentially end up with rectangles instead of squares and they won't line up.

If the ratio of width to thickness is about 3 to 1 you should not have much of a problem with option one. Just be carful with the method you use to attach the final surface. Allow for changes in dimension over time. How you dominos depends on what you are making.