12-17-2015, 02:29 PM
I'm just finishing up my first project with the stash of quilted maple I acquired - a mirror frame LOML saw in an old catalog. I used curly maple for frame, quilted maple for top:
Some questions:
We usually prefer darker tones such as cherry but I'm wondering if lighter tones are better for highly figured wood? I'm thinking of building a chest of drawers with drawer fronts of curly maple, light toned, and the carcass and top of darker tone.
It seems a waste to use quilted maple for the full thickness of drawers so my thinking is I will re-saw down to about 1/4" thick and laminate to a substrate of some sort. Since the practice to avoid cracks is to not assemble cross grain, does quilted maple have a grain direction or does it expand and contract both ways? And what kind of glue should be used?
For those interested I tried to plane a piece of the quilted maple in my DeWalt 13" on low speed and tear-out was bad. A Veritas BU jack plane with toothed blade worked great. I haven't quite got the hang of tuning my Veritas BU Smoother but my WoodRiver 4 1/2 smoother worked flawlessly (zero tear out) with a 10 degree back bevel on the iron and close set chip breaker. Can a BU plane with no chip breaker work as flawlessly as a bevel down plane?
Some questions:
We usually prefer darker tones such as cherry but I'm wondering if lighter tones are better for highly figured wood? I'm thinking of building a chest of drawers with drawer fronts of curly maple, light toned, and the carcass and top of darker tone.
It seems a waste to use quilted maple for the full thickness of drawers so my thinking is I will re-saw down to about 1/4" thick and laminate to a substrate of some sort. Since the practice to avoid cracks is to not assemble cross grain, does quilted maple have a grain direction or does it expand and contract both ways? And what kind of glue should be used?
For those interested I tried to plane a piece of the quilted maple in my DeWalt 13" on low speed and tear-out was bad. A Veritas BU jack plane with toothed blade worked great. I haven't quite got the hang of tuning my Veritas BU Smoother but my WoodRiver 4 1/2 smoother worked flawlessly (zero tear out) with a 10 degree back bevel on the iron and close set chip breaker. Can a BU plane with no chip breaker work as flawlessly as a bevel down plane?