cross grain

Feb 16, 2014 8 Replies
L

I'm in the midst of building 7 bookcases for our new house. I've got the cases together and am starting on the face frames. Usually I do my own design, but I ran across a plan I really liked the looks of so I'm using it.



The face frame has a 2.5" wide top rail and a 5.5" wide bottom rail. The stiles are 2" wide. Not worried about the top rail but that wide bottom rail seems to me to be pushing the limits for cross-grain construction.



A bottom trim piece will cover the lower 3.5" of the bottom rail. I'm considering splitting the rail into 3" and 2" pieces and leaving a 1/2" gap, which will be covered by the trim, between them. But that's a bit of extra work I don't want to do if it isn't needed. Am I being overly paranoid about wood movement?



BTW, between shelf pin holes, holes for connectors, screw holes for levelers, and holes for screws to attach the trim, I drilled almost 1000 holes! I don't want to see a drill bit for the next 6 months :-).


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L

----------------------------------------------------------- Purely personal but I stay away from 5+" wide pieces for furniture.

Who knows what the next 50 years will bring.

Lew

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S

I wouldn't be all that concerned about it providing your FF stock is at least 3/4" thick and you're using M&T joinery on your FF?

That said, some other important factors are the kind of material/wood, and the cut of the wood (quarter sawn, flat, etc). Basically with most woods, the closer to quartersawn you can choose for the wider rails, the less movement across the width, so the less the concern.

For M&T joinery on a wide rail (a "wide rail" generally considered to be more than ten times its thickness, like the lock rail on a door, etc), a haunched, double mortise and tenon is usually used, usually with the distance between the two M&T about 1/3 the width of the rail.

So basically, what kind of joinery are you using for your face frames?

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L

The original plan called for 2 biscuits in each end of the wide rail. I don't have a biscuit joiner (other than the mini-Ryobi) and was thinking of either dowels or Kreg screws. The screws would allow for a little more movement.

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D

Measure the rails in a wood door sometime. A year or two ago I made four 1

1/2" thick wood doors; the lock rails are either 5" or 5.5", don't recall at the moment; bottom rail is 8" wide.
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L

Check them in 20 years :-).

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D

Can't, won't be around then. However, I made about a dozen passage doors - solid butternut - about 14 years ago with approximately the same dimensions and they are just fine.

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B

oh, nice , what color did you paint them? :)

basilisk

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D

There are any number of solid panel doors 100+ with at least 8" bottom rails that are still just fine--there are three within view of the desk here where I currently sit in here that will turn 100 within the next two years. One (the exterior door rather than interior) is actually a full-length (nearly) single-pane glass with the bottom rail of --well, let's just measure it, actually, instead of estimating--ok, it's 18".

These are a mixture of Doug fir and SYP.

What's your material?

If you're concerned, only rigidly glue the top half or so; let the rest float but it'll likely be just fine.

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