Making QuarterSawn boards

[Bob Jones]

You may remember that I recently posted a complaint about some soft maple that I tried to use for drawer sides. The great comments that you shared with me there inspired this “how-to” post. I decided that I needed quarter-sawn boards for the drawer sides for the chest of drawers that I am building (mostly a hand tool project). This is how I experimented with making quarter-sawn boards for drawer sides.

I looked locally for QS material and could only find QS oak. Oak was not on my list of woods to use. Several suggested buying 1inch thick, really wide boards and cut a few inches off each end. That way too wasteful for me. Even if I found a use for the “middle material” I plan to make the sides 1/2in thick and I don’t want to plane away that much material by hand because it is a lot of work and the center of the board may not be stable. Here was my alternative.

Buy thick flat-sawn boards. Joint one face flat and make one edge straight. These are the reference surfaces for sawing. Rip the thick boards through their thickness into strips of QS boards. I ripped them to about 9/16in thick. Locally, I could easily get 3in Poplar, 2in cypress, and 4in cedar posts. I think it may be western cedar, but I really don’t know. Here is a picture of all three types cut into strips and a close-up of the poplar strips where you should be able to see the grain orientation.

[Bob Jones]

I let the strips sit on edge for a few days to see if any move. If they moved much, I tossed them. Very few moved any. About the only wood wasted was eaten by my bandsaw. Next flatten one face of each strip and mark the grain direction. Lay out the strips with the flat side all down or all up and label them in order.

[Bob Jones]

Now, book match the adjacent strips. Bob at the Logan Cabinet Shop did a great podcast on this. Watch it. The only tip I would add is use a plane with a STRAIGHT blade – no camber at all. If the strips have one flat face and you use a STRAIGHT blade, then getting them perfectly edge jointed is a no-brainer. I got 90% on the first try. The other 10% turned out to not have flat faces. The pic shows 2 full width shavings coming from the matched strips. The third pic shows the strips (no-glued yet) after edge jointing. Yes, they are standing on edge unassisted.

[Bob Jones]

Now glue up the panel with you method of choice. I only have pipe clamps for this scale work. I rubbed each joint well and then used very light clamp pressure. I worked from left to right and did not disturb the previous joints as I was adding boards. Here are a couple more pics. Here you can see all three panels glued up.

[Bob Jones]

I waited until the glue was set to remove the excess. I used this 4in scrapper from Lowes. It works pretty well, but it is easy to dig too far into the softwoods.
Glue removal

I then planed the panels like I would a solid piece of wood. Here you can see a few shots of the finish planed panels with the cherry top to the chest of drawers below them.

[Bob Jones]

I did this to see if it would work and to decide which type of wood I wanted to move forward with. I think I have decided on Cypress for the sides and cedar for the backs. Why? It looks the best, to me. The cypress will contrast with the cherry drawer fronts and the cedar will contrast with the Cypress sides. Plus, the cedar and the Cypress smell nice. What do you think????

Each wood has pros and cons and all three would work.

[Harlan Barnhart]

Hi Bob,
I don't see any problem with glue-ups for drawer sides. I am concerned about using soft woods since they will wear against the rails. If it were mine, I would use something harder than cypress or cedar

[David Keller NC]

Hi Bob,
I don't see any problem with glue-ups for drawer sides. I am concerned about using soft woods since they will wear against the rails. If it were mine, I would use something harder than cypress or cedar

There are several reasons why one finds near 100% use of softer woods for drawer sides, backs and bottoms in furniture from the age of handwork (generally before 1820 or so in the US). The first one is speed of production - time is money, and clients would generally only pay for the external appearance of a piece (much like today!). So on early american antiques, the insides are typically quite rough.

Soft woods like poplar, eastern white pine, white cedar, cypress and others are far easier and therefore faster to surface, square, saw and chisel, which makes the resulting piece of furniture less expensive.

Counter-intuitively, furniture before about 1720 or so typically uses oak for the drawer sides. This is an artifact of the special nature of red, and to some extent, white oak and the state of metallurgy at the time. Before the early to mid 18th century, producing a piece of steel that was 6 feet long and of a uniform thickness and hardness was very, very difficult and therefore very, very expensive. This meant that a pitsaw was tough to come by, and it was far easier and cheaper to rive wood than to saw it into planks. Ergo, red and white oak saw a lot of use because the trees in the US yeilded logs that were huge, old-growth and largely free from knots. That's ideal for splitting, which is far, far faster and less labor intensive than sawing.

Moreover, the drawer construction of the time was typically side-hung, which required a thick and strong drawer side, so EWP and poplar wood not be suitable.

Once metallurgy advanced to the point where pitsaws were fairly common, and drawer construction techniques changed to what we're familiar with today, the use of broad, sawn soft wood boards in drawer construction became the norm.

The second reason for the use of soft wood for a drawer side has to do with dovetail construction. Since the drawer front is normally a strong, dense hardwood such as maple, walnut, cherry, etc..., it's advantageous to have the pins on the drawer front crush the wood on the tail board. Even if you slightly mis-cut the tails, the resulting joint will be nice and tight. Using an equally hard wood for the drawer sides puts one at extreme risk of splitting either the drawer front, the drawer side, or both unless the joint is absolutely perfect. Again, time is money, and the master of the shop would've been very displeased by an apprentice or journeyman having to spend a couple of hours selecting, dimensioning and cutting more stock to replace the split board.

Finally, and this may be the most relevant to us today, it is far, far better to have the drawer side wear and require repair than it is to have the drawer runners wear and require repair. This is easpecially true for "London Pattern" construction of a carcasse where dovetailed drawer blades and full dustboard construction is used.

[David Keller NC]

Bob - One thing I'm scratching my head over is why you glued up panels instead of using a couple of the strips to glue up a drawer side. If you intend to use them as drawer bottoms, I should point out that quartersawn wood is entirely unnecessary for that application. Because of the way a drawer is (typically) constructed, wood movement is a non-issue for the bottom.

Where it matters is the drawer side - cupping or bowing will wreck a drawer if it occurs in the side. Even the back doesn't need to be quartersawn - if it cups slightly, it will never be noticed since this isn't a part that's involved in the drawer opening/closing.

Also, while I laud your reluctance to "waste" wood by having to come up with a use for the flat-sawn centers of a wide board, you will quickly realize when doing hand work that it is far better to avoid lots of surfacing and dimensioning with a handplane than saving wood. In my particular case, I can't remember the last time I joined wood into a panel. It's far cheaper and easier to buy wood in wide boards than it is to do all of the work necessary to glue up panels. It also looks better in the end if the panels are to be used on the outside of a piece of furniture.

Finally - if you have a bandsaw, you could relatively easily re-saw the edges from the 1 inch or thicker boards you could find for drawer sides. I do this all the time, and it's pretty easy once you set up your bandsaw to do it. Also, don't view the flat-sawn center of the board as unstable and therefore less than ideal for use in a piece of furniture. Some 90% of the wood in a traditionally constructed chest of drawers is flat-sawn. As far as the secondary wood is concerned, that would include the drawer bottoms and backs, the chest backboards, the bottom panel of the dovetailed outer carcasse and dustboards (if used). The only piece of a board that you wouldn't want to use would be one that contains the pith (the very center of the tree), and that's not typical to find at a lumberyard. The center board from a log that would contain the pith is usually cut into narrower boards, and the pith is discarded as waste.

[bill tindall]

Why did you , as you say, use "very light clamp pressure"? Franklin recommends over 100 psi of clamp pressure for optimum edge gluing (I think the range is 150-300 psi but I need to look it up in their manual to be sure). Optimum is to squeeze out all the glue that will squeeze out. Ideally, only a tiny layer will remain.

There is a myth of squeezing the glue out of a joint with "too much" pressure. I have never been able to confirm this belief with several hundred psi of pressure, nor has the laboratory at Franklin glue company. It takes only two molecular layers of glue between the wood surfaces to make a bond and the glue is much to viscous to be able to squeeze so much out that none remains.

[Bob Jones]

Great questions - I think I can answer them.
David, thanks for the explanation. That is all new to me.
I called them "panels", but really they are the right size for the deepest drawer size (12in deep). I figured I would experiment with the deepest drawer as a "worst case". I am actually cheating on the drawer bottoms and I plan to use plywood. We will see if that works.

Bill, I used light clamping pressure because I did not want to buckle the panels. They are pretty thin and it made sense that less torque on the clamp would give higher pressure (less area). I rubbed each joint really well before clamping. I think that is key. I plan to cut off 1in from the ends to test the glue strength.

[Jim Neeley]

"Franklin recommends over 100 psi of clamp pressure for optimum edge gluing"

Bill,

That recommendation is not total clamping pressure but the number of pounds oer square inch of joint.

Franklin's recommendation reads: "Enough to bring joints tightly together (generally, 100-150 psi for softwoods, 125-175 psi for medium woods and 175-250 psi for hardwoods)"

If the "generally" applied to the kind of woodworking we do, laminating the boards for a 3" thick x 8' long maple workbench would require 50,000 (3" x 96" x 175#/sq in) to 72,000 pounds (3" x 96" x 250#/sq in) of clamping pressure.

It that order of magnitude of clamping had been required, most of our workbenches would long ago have fallen apart. The best I can make of those numbers is that they're "legalese" to protect the company from liability for "wood hacking bubbas" who expect the glue to correct for their failure to flatten the stock before gluing.

I'm not saying that pressure would hurt anything and, perhaps it'd be even stronger that way, I do not know. I *do* know my bench is still in one piece and I didn't approach that kind of compression. :)

[Bob Smalser]

Interesting. I've never laid up a drawer side, but there's certainly no harm in it. The practice falls into the category of "highgrading" available stock and making best use of waste.

But there's also no real need for qsawn drawer sides. You just have to be able to read the ring cups to determine the likelyhood of the board cupping. The tighter the ring cup, the more likely the board will cup...and in the direction shown in the USDA graphic below:

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL12/1104763/3075040/189555324.jpg

In the same vein, be sure to save all that cedar and softwood rip waste to reuse as crossgrain drawer bottoms, and the hardwood for butcherblock-style jigs and work tables. If I have extra time at the end of the day I go through the scrap piles and lay up a few bottoms or table tops to be stored for later finishing. Also notice a top clamp or two removes the worry of cupping your panel with the clamps:

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL12/1104763/2594265/50414150.jpg

And the better rip waste becomes easels I donate to local schools:

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL12/1104763/2594265/367998451.jpg

[bill tindall]

Your analysis is incorrect. The clamping pressure recommended is total pressure, not pressure per joint. It is all clearly described in their literature on setting up clamping stations in furniture factories.

[bill tindall]

Fair enough. Noting more disturbing than to have a thin panel unexpectedly buckle and leave the clamps.

You will come to realize that you are worrying about drawer side material more than is required. But no harm in starting cautious. One advantage building for yourself is that if in a year's cycle the drawer expands and binds in the humid part of the cycle you can just take it to the shop and plane a bit off as needed.