Replies

1. 
   mudman | Nov 07, 2005 11:11pm | #1

   I saw Norm do it a couple weeks back..... so I assume that it must be OK. :-)

   Mike

2. 
   SgianDubh | Nov 07, 2005 11:31pm | #2

   It sounds like what you plan to do is quite normal practice.

   Over the centuries furniture makers have found ways to shave costs, and one way is to use less pricey but serviceable and functional woods on hidden and interior parts.

   Adding a show strip of maple to the front edge of a panel of poplar should be fine. You might have a slight discrepancy in wood movement between the poplar top and base and the sides, but this should not be enough to cause problems.

   I've done exactly this many a time over the years with this and other mixes of species with no ill effects that I'm aware of.

   My one caution is to try and select secondary woods that have similar movement properties to the primary wood. For example if your show wood is mostly mahogany on a wide panel I'd tend to avoid using European beech as the secondary material. Mahogany exhibits relatively small expansion characteristics with atmospheric relative humidity (RH) changes whereas beech shows relatively large movement characteristics in the same range of RH change. 

   You can also sometimes run into trouble if you mix 1/4 sawn material with tangentially sawn material where the latter exhibits relatively large movement across the width and less across the thickness, and the former which tends to expand and contract relatively more in the thickness and less in the width-- just something to think about before you commit yourself to doing this. Slainte.

   Richard Jones Furniture

   
   

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   Edited 11/7/2005 6:01 pm by SgianDubh