Hi everyone:
I have some 15/16″ thick cherry I want to glue up to make 2 13/16″ square legs for a bed I’m building (three boards’ thickness per leg).
I detest glue lines and I remember reading someplace a way to hide them, cover them, or somehow avoid them when gluing up boards to make thicker stock. Can anyone refresh my memory, either with a reference to an article or some tips I might follow?
Thanks
Replies
Make up a hollow leg from four boards. The edges of each board are mitered, so the seams between boards are on the corners of the hollow leg. Your eye is expecting the grain appearance to change at the corner, so you don't see the seam.
Some people like to use a lock-miter joint instead of a straight miter, arguing that it makes the glue-up somewhat easier.
What a wonderful idea! Why didn't I think of that?Any ideas what to do about the taper at the base of the leg? I suppose I could just reduce the angle somewhat so it didn't cut into the hollow core. Or perhaps I should plug the base of the leg with a wood insert?
Good luck on mitering edges to make legs. You need VERY straight, square stock, and exact miters, or you joint will be highly visible -- not exactly on the corners, open at spots, etc.
I find it quicker, easier and stonger to glue up legs as laminations so the cross section is a rectangle, about 1/4" less on the short sides. (The short sides would be the sides without the glue lines.) Then simply laminate a 1/8" strip on the sides with the joints to cover them. The thinness of the strip helps hide its own joints, especially if you use straight-grained stock.
As for tapering, that makes it even harder to keep the miter on the exact corner. That would involve some pretty complex angle cutting. I'm not sure there is any easy way to avoid glue lines on a built-up leg that is tapered less than full length, other than to use solid stock or VERY carefully matched & laminated straight grained stock.
Mike HennessyPittsburgh, PA
As you can see, many of the good solutions involve some fairly challenging mitering and glue up.
Why not just bite the bullet and get 12/4 or 16/4 cherry, preferably rift sawn, and make the legs from solid wood. A lot easier and less risk of problems down the road, paticularly if your 15/16" cherry isn't all from one tree.
Stickley called it Quadralinear (sp) construction they used a form of lock miter and used a core to fill the hollow , the core was usually a secondary wood .
This gave a continuous grain pattern that seemed to wrap around .
I have made many a table leg and such without mitering the corners if the design allowed I cut some Vee grooves or beads where the joints were to hide them .
Why couldn't you cut the taper after glue up as long as the taper did not go too deep into the core ?
dusty
Steve has the right idea. It's rarely worth it to get into a lot of stock preparation and tricky glue-ups to avoid purchasing thicker stock. It makes sense to do it on an Arts and Crafts piece that's made of oak and you need the medullary rays on all 4 sides, but it doesn't make sense in almost all other cases.
You could, of course, generate a taper in a leg by making tapered laminations and gluing it up, but that also doesn't make a lot of sense unless you're making a tapered, bent lamination that needs a lot of strength (like a Sam Maloof rocker runner).
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