Thick Veneering and Wood Movement

[Paul Joynes]

I am in the design phase of a kitchen project and am considering applying a thick veneer to the drawer fronts. I have a source for 12/4 quilted maple and am considering resawing this down to 1/4" thick veneers that I will glue onto a 1/2 inch maple substrate. While both woods are maple, they are different species of maple and I am concerned that I may have problems with expansion/cracking. If money were not an issue I would just make the drawer fronts out of solid but the quilted maple is on the pricy side.

I have yet to purchase the wood and was wondering if I would have problem with machining the quilted maple. My last experiment with birds eye proved that it was difficult to get good results. I have a drum sander on order from Laguna which should be here by month's end so I may be able to sand it to final dimensions if there is too much tear out from the planer.

Any insight would be appreciated,

Regards,

Paul Joynes

[Neil Lamens]

Paul:

Just a few thoughts on an approach............

1. rather than purcahse 12/4 quilted maple, why not purchase commercial quilted maple veneer and a maple backer and with a ridgid glue, veneer to your solid substrate.

2. or..........Start with 3/4 inch MDF, treat the edge by framing the mdf with solid maple, then with commercial veneer, lay-up your quilted maple.

[Jim Becker]

Paul, check wood movement tables for both the quilted maple and the intended substrate maple and see how they compare. But I suspect that as long as you have the grain running in the same direction, you'll be fairly ok with this lamination. But Neil makes a good point about using thinner veneers. When you have the drum sander available, you can avoid buying commercial material and just get your shop-generated veneer down to about 1/8" or so to be even safer with a lamination of "thick" veneer...don't try and thickness it down that far with the planer if you can avoid it...way too chancy for destruction.

[Paul Joynes]

Thanks for the input. I will look up some wood movement tables.

Paul

[Jamie Buxton]

Thanks for the input. I will look up some wood movement tables.

Paul

An excellent book about the physics of wood is Bruce Hoadley's Understanding Wood. It belongs in every woodworker's library. Among a great deal of other stuff, it has wood movement tables.

[Ralph Barhorst]

Don't use your planer on the quilted maple. You will get too much tearout. I just tried that and no matter how thin a cut I took, it still had tearout.

The pieces that I was using were only 2 3/4" wide, so I put my Woodworker sawblade in my table saw and cut the maple to the final thickness. I had a very smooth surface that looked great.

You might be able to do that on your table saw and cut to 1/8" thickness and not use so much of the expensive quilted stock.

[Paul Joynes]

Thanks for the info Ralph, I will purchase a small quantity this weekend and do some trial mock ups to see which methods work the best. The planks that I have sourced are 12/4 by 12 wide so I would be resawing them on my band saw which would not give as nice of a finish as the Forrest blade you mentioned. I envision the final process will be as follows.

- plane the face of the plank
- use this planed face against the band saw fence and resaw the veneer to approximately 3/16 thick.
- glue the veneer to the substrate with the planed surface against the substrate.
- place the laminated board through the drum sander to bring to final thickness and remove the band saw marks

Are there any flaws in this logic?

Regards,

Paul Joynes

[Greg Cole]

When planing the figured maple make sure you have sharp blades, lightly dampen the surface to be planed and skew the material going through the planer... all add up to helping minimize the inherent tearout of figured stock.
I love curly-quilted maple and have made some projects of it out of solid stock, and peering into the art veneering and was sort of wondering about the thicker veneers too.....

Greg

[Earl Kelly]

Paul,

Depending on the kerf of your bandsaw blade a 1/4" sliced off will eat up almost 3/8" of wood. Getting to the point, your actually saving less than 50% the material cost when figuring the premium the 12/4 goes for over 4/4. In other words, if your 12/4 material goes for $25 bdft and 4/4 goes for $12.50 it will cost the same with no bandsawing and glueup labor, for 3/4" panels.

Neil brings up a good point about commercial veneer. It will be much more economical and you can actually get much better material than slicing the solid quilted. Unless your willing to purchase Instrument Grade, which can quickly get astronomical in price.

Be very careful gluing just one side of a panel. Most don't realize that the glue pulls much more than the veneer. Also, if your profiling the edges, be aware that a .001-.002 thick glue line can become quite wide, visibly, when cut thru at an acute angle. So if your going to glueup thick veneer on the solid panels a sample with profile might be a good idea.

Earl

[Paul Joynes]

Earl

Can you expand on what you mean by "Most don't realize that the glue pulls much more than the veneer."

Your comment about the profiled edge is something that I had not thought of and I will be sure to test that out on the mockup. This wasn't going to be a problem for the drawer fronts but the raised cabinet doors would have profiled edges.

The reason that I was thinking of using a thick veneer was that I felt it would be exceptionally durable. I have never liked how fragile edge banding is and was thinking that regular veneer might have some of the same draw backs. This may be a mute point with something that has such a large surface area glued down.

This online brainstorming is proving to be quite useful and educational.

Thanks for your input

Paul Joynes

[Earl Kelly]

Paul,

I use a urea resin glue unibond 800. When I do glueups I always place a small amount of glue on a scrap of melamine so I can tell when it's cured good and hard. Which can take an hour, to 7 or 8, depending on temperature. Well, it takes a few days but the cured glue will almost always pop off the melamine because it pulls itself hollow kinda like a Pringles chip, even though it's been hard as a rock for a day or two.

The problem with PVA glues like Titebond, is they introduce water into the glue joint and when they dry back out fully can pull unevenly.

I've seen doors with laminate using contact cement, warp 1/4" in their 24" length. When only the face was laminated. This was done to save time and money. Some were able to be salvaged by laminating the back side. Others had to be redone.

There's no guarantee you'll have problems, but it is something to be aware of. And of course someone has done these very things for yrs without problems. But I'm relaying my experiences of gluing veneer starting in '88 with Titebond and nothing more than a bunch of clamps. I threw away my share of panels, after I took out my frustration on them. It always happens when you're chasing a deadline it seems.

Whichever way you decide to work it out don't let any failures get the best of you, learn from them and keep plugging away.

Earl

[Paul Joynes]

Earl

I have never heard of this happening before! Thanks for the advance notice. I will have to put more thought into this before I proceed.

Paul