Thread: Best combination to join boards?

Just my preference but i would put the narrow board in the centre, or if you want to split the narrow go wide, narrow, wide, narrow, wide

Are you gluing solid wood to ply? You may have issues

Originally Posted by double.d

Just my preference but i would put the narrow board in the centre, or if you want to split the narrow go wide, narrow, wide, narrow, wide

Thanks for the reply, that was my initial thought and then I started to think about it too much.

Originally Posted by pippin88

Are you gluing solid wood to ply? You may have issues

Yes, I have some of the hardwood tops from Bunnings but they are only 18mm so I plan to join the 3 hardwood pieces as mentioned and then glue that to a single piece of ply to increase the thickness.

Your basic options with the planks, Stu, are as follows:

Planks.jpg
The choice is largely aesthetic. I'll leave it to Pippin to explain risks of timber expansion and contraction.

I'd first look at the ring pattern on the ends of the boards to see whether they've all been ripped in the same way. eg. If two were more or less quarter sawn and one was obviously closer to plain sawn, the latter would be my candidate for trimming into a narrower board. Or if the rings in one board are a tighter radius than the others, that'd be my pick.

This is purely to minimise the potential for future cupping issues.

I'd also carry out an inspection looking for any defects, no matter how minor and see what sizes I can get if I cut them out.

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

Your basic options with the planks, Stu, are as follows:

Planks.jpg
The choice is largely aesthetic. I'll leave it to Pippin to explain risks of timber expansion and contraction.

Thanks, going to go with the 150 option.

Thanks, the boards are the composite hardwood jobbies from Bunnings, made up from lots of strips glued together, they should be pretty stable.

Let us know how it turns out

Originally Posted by Dimo

Let us know how it turns out

Gluing the top went really well, squared the edges up on the table saw first and used biscuits to help align the boards. I ended up using MDF as a base to thicken the top and I will take this out of the clamps today. However, I don't think this was as successful as I didn't have as many clamps as I would have liked. Although this is only a project for my shed I was very impressed with the hardwood boards and would definitely consider them for an indoor project.