Thread: Kitchen benchtop - narrow or wide boards?

I have never done one, and I am sure others will chime in, but personally I would use the narrow board option for ease of use and grain interest.

Also just be advised, depending on the thickness of timber used, it could be quite heavy.

More boards equals more joints that may creep during glue-up... something you need to consider when it comes time to flatten the top.

Theoretically using more, narrower boards (and alternating heart direction, which you'll be doing anyway, right? ) will give you a more stable piece. ie. less prone to cupping and twisting. It's also generally the cheaper option when it comes to materials.

Personally I usually prefer the appearance of wider boards but it depends on it's final location; in that pic the counter boards are similar in size to the floorboards it's resting on, so it works.

I recommend narrow boards up to 150mm wide and alternate the grain direction/growth rings as much as practicable. Pretty much all boards cup unless they're cut dead quartersawn and stored in a humidity controlled environment, the wider they are the more pronounced the cupping will be. For the design you are showing that can translate into the corner joins ripping themselves apart due to the stresses which is one of the reasons the manufacturer decided on narrow strips and called it a "feature"

My kitchen benchtop is 900mm wide-ish and was made from pretty well quartersawn QLD Redgum 30mm-ish thick; the planks averaged ranged from between 90 and 150mm wide. Each plank was cut from waney edged rough sawn planks using a circular saw along a chalk line and then a hand power plane to rough out the dimensions. A 6" long bed jointer was used to dress the first two reference edges and then thicknessed using a 12" segmented head thicky. Once the planks had all been measured, laid out and maximum yield worked out they were sawn to the desired widths and hand jointed using a Stanley 7 jointer plane to ensure the best possible gluing surfaces and identical plank thicknesses. Once assembled and glued up it was finished off with smoothing planes, a Stanley 112 scraper plane and given a power sanded oil finish to 1000grit.

Biscuits are good for your application as they assist in aligning the faces. I used Titebond III glue but now wish I'd used Polyurethane as I do have minor glue creep. Also, despite Titebond having a 10-15 minute advertised working time I found that I had to have every plank set up for a dry run first or run the risk of buggering up a joint. Poly would have given me a longer open time but would have extended the build.

My bench is 5m long; there was no way it could be assembled and then fitted into place; the whole thing was constructed in situ. For yours; the leg section can be done on a bench or trestles but the main body being 3m long will be somewhat heavy so unless you have 3 strong mates I'd be assembling that in the kitchen. Boot the missus and kids off to rellies for a couple of days; and live off of beer and BBQ!

Buy lots of pipe or sash clamps; you need to carefully calculate the number you'll need to do each stage of the build and add at least 10%. Then double that number. Plus one for luck.

I would go the narrow option glueing 2-3 pieces together at a time and then glueing the 3 wider boards together in the last glue up.

Thanks for all the thoughts so far, very helpful.

Originally Posted by Skew ChiDAMN!!

(and alternating heart direction, which you'll be doing anyway, right? )

Naturally

Originally Posted by Chief Tiff

...

That’s an incredible amount of detail, thank you. Picked up about 10 sash clamps on the weekend at garage sales in preparation, but that’s probably not enough...

I had a similar plan in mind for construction: build the entire board, mitre the leg portion off (slightly oversize in case it all goes up the creek), install it to cabinets, then install the rest of the board on top of the cabinets.

There's some great advice above, and nothing that I can really expand on.
I will comment on your proposed sequence of installing the two pieces once they are ready. I would fit the large piece to the top of the cabinets first, then fit the "leg" to it. The reason being that if something doesn't fit "just right", I'd rather be moving and adjusting the smaller "leg" than the much bigger and heavier top.

Hi Railer
I am just compleing a desk 2300 X 560 X 35 in Tas Oak .... I used quartersawn Select timber, 140 wide. Good quartersawn timber has almost no cupping so wider planks can be used.

I wanted the grain flow from the top down the one waterfall end ... so I bought 3300 lengths.

I made the mistake of cutting the boards to rough length of top and sides before jointing and glue-up. AS a result of jointing and straightening I ended up with differences between the widths of the top boards and the waterfall boards (the grains were out of alighment) .... this was fixed by passing the boards edgeways through the thicknesser (it took a bit of doing to ensure the grain lines matched ... a bit from the top edge... a bit from the bottom edge). It also meant that I had to add a 5th plank (25mm) to get the width right.

Lesson learned ..... Next time I would keep the boards in one piece and cut only after glue-up.

I used 9 pipe/beam clamps for the top and this worked well for me. I started off gluing 2 planks together (repeated twice) and then I joined those together in a separate glue-up. I found this much easier to do than trying to join 4 in one go. I added the 25mm piece separately.

I start clamping from the middle and work outward ... I use a Kreg Face clamps to force the boards to align at the joins and they easily reach the 140mm to the joint.

I know I will have trouble doing the 565mm bevel cut for the top and sides on the mitre saw ... so the block plane may get a bit of use fine tuning the mitres. Do you have a saw that can do such a bevel cut in one pass .... I will need to do a partial cut ... flip over and complete the cut on the CMS.

Regards

Rob