dumb bent lamination question

[Jim Barstow]

I've used bent laminations in couple projects but they were fairly simple and straightforward. I'm now going to try it on a much larger scale and build a queen-sized bed frame loosely based on the Windsor bed in the Taunton Press "Bed" book.

When I've done laminations before, I just milled lumber to the thickness of the laminations and ripped off the strips. For this bed, the strips are much thicker and finding stock has proven to be difficult. Is there any drawback to rotating the stock 90 degrees and ripping so that the face grain is glued up? I know I'll have to be careful about the grain selection. This would mean I could use thinner stock as a source of the lamination strips.

[Frank Drew]

Is there any drawback to rotating the stock 90 degrees and ripping so that the face grain is glued up? Jim, I'm not sure I understand the question; by "face grain" do you mean the flat sawn surface (as opposed to the quarter sawn surface)? What's the dimension of the stock that you want to rotate 90 degrees?

Either way, gluing long grain to long grain will work fine for a lamination as long as your mating surfaces are clean and smooth and you get good glue coverage and clamping pressure.

[Jim Barstow]

The bent laminations I've done (and the way I learned) was to use the edge grain as the glue surface of the lamination strips. I know that gluing up the face grain will hold just as well but I'm wondering about the bending characteristics and what the final result will look like. I also think that edge grain hides the lamintions better than face grain.

If I could get quartersawn stock in the required dimensions, that would render the issue pretty much moot but I've never seen it.

[David DeCristoforo]

The determination as to which way to slice the laminations should be based on which face is the "show" face. You should try to avoid having the glue lines on the "show" face.