Face gluing wood to plywood

[Justin Freund]

I'm making a countertop for some built in cabinets in my home office and came to an issue i could use some help with.

I'm laminating two layers of 3/4" ply for a 1 1/2" top. The bottom layer is some birch veneer core and the top is veneer core maple. Because the cabinets are 9' long and the ply is 8' I came up with an idea to use 2 3" wide tiger maple accent strips to separate the three pieces of ply on the top layer. I'm fine with laminating the two layers of plywood, but am unsure of how best to attach the tiger maple to the bottom layer. Should I glue and screw it and not worry so much about the expansion/contraction, or should I screw it in the middle allowing for it to move and omit the glue?

[Paul Symchych]

The plywood shouldn't move much if at all and a 3" strip won't either. I'd glue it and forget the screws unless you want to put in contrasting wood plugs to cover the screw heads as a decor feature. Sections of walnut or cherry dowel make attractive screw head covers on maple.