Quote Originally Posted by John Samuel View Post
The next time I make a piece like this one, I am thinking about making the grain on the skirts run parallel with the grain in the legs.

The idea is to shape the legs and skirts to within about 1 mm of their finished size. Then 2 mm will be removed from the back of the skirts and a veneer is glued on so the grain of the veneer is at right angles to the grain of the skirt. Should be able to do this in a vacuum press. Providing I choose fairly straight grain for the legs, the grain on the legs should now run in the same direction as the grain in the skirts. Also planning to use end grain for the lips of the MDF on two sides.

I am guessing I will not have timber movement problems so long as the finished size of the veneer is 2 mm or less ... but is this the case? It would be easy to glue two 30 mm (or thereabouts) boards together to make the skirts, where the face board had grain at right angles to the inner board, but this would likely introduce horrible wood movement issues. So, easy is not always the answer.

Questions:
  1. Am I likely to avoid wood movement and delamination issues if the veneer's finished thickness is 2 mm or less?
  2. Does anyone have any other approaches or better ideas?


Thanks,

John
If you were to use a good quality ply for the skirt substrate I would think that you would be ok gluing the veneer on in the short direction, I don't know how you would go with solid wood as the substrate tho and I probably wouldn't use MDF either.
Darren Oates did an article on end grain lipping for a table in AWR a few issues back, might be worth a read.



Pete