Cut table legs from thick plank?

[Chris152]

Looking for maple suitable for fairly short/ slim legs for a coffee table, the only wood I could find was in large planks, about 50mm x 200 - 250mm and 5 metres long. I want the finished legs to be about 30mm square and 500mm long - is it reasonable to rip a plank of that thickness so once it's planed and cut to length it'll be 30 x 30 x 500, or will the lengths twist/ spring too much to work as legs?

Thanks for any thoughts.

Chris

 

[custard]

As long as the board is fairly straight grained you should be okay.

Couple of points,

1. 30 x 30 really is on the margin, the problem is getting enough depth for the apron mortices. I find 32 x 32 is a much more comfortable dimension, you can always taper the leg below the joinery if you want a slimmer look. Whatever your final dimension it pays to draw out the joinery full size or double size on a piece of paper, then you can see exactly what you'll be dealing with.

2. You want the grain on all four legs to look the same from any side or any angle. The way to ensure that is with "rift sawn" timber where the growth rings visible on the end grain run diagonally from corner to corner. You can see in this photo that if you take your legs from the very edges of the board you'll probably get the grain pattern you want,

Good luck!

 

[Chris152]

That's great - thanks Custard. I'll aim for 32mm in future, no need to taper really as that's plenty slim enough for what I need and I want to keep a simple, right-angled look to the work. And I didn't know about rift sawn for legs, so that's something else I've learned. I'm trying to move toward a small stock of wood so I don't have to keep heading out on the road each time I want to build something, but mistakes can be pretty expensive with hardwoods! Looks like I'll be heading down to Yandles again next week...

 

[Myfordman]

When coming down from the nominal 50mm to 30/32, minimise any twisting/distortion by planing equal amounts off each face not by sawing.

 

[Chris152]

When coming down from the nominal 50mm to 30/32, minimise any twisting/distortion by planing equal amounts off each face not by sawing.

So - if I cut a 50mm width off one edge of the plank I'll have a 50x50 section, and saw then plane 9mm from each face to achieve 32mm - is that right?

Thanks.

 

[custard]

Chris, here's how I went about a similar job recently. I was making a pair of occasional tables, I sourced a sawn board of 36-38mm thick Maple with some nice fiddleback figure. Call around timber yards in your area and you'll find similar thickness Maple boards, you won't find fiddleback quite so easily but you should be able to track down Maple in what was the old 1 1/4" spec, in sawn board form it usually comes in at 36-38mm. Find a straight grained board and you'll be fine.

I cut it slightly over length and then planed it down (equally on both sides) to 34mm. I left it for a few days to settle and then planed it down to 32.5mm (32mm plus a 0.5mm sanding allowance). At which point it looked like this,

The end grain growth rings looked nice and diagonal like this,

Which means the grain on all four sides of the leg will be consistent, in this case with wrap around fiddleback figure, but even without the fiddleback it's still a pleasing and harmonious consistency from face to face.

I'll rip off the leg stock at about 34mm wide and then plane it back to 32.5mm. This board will yield two or three fiddleback legs from each side. The wood from the centre of the board (which will have "cathedral" grain but in the case of fiddleback boards the centre usually has less or no fiddleback figure), will either get used up elsewhere or run through the wood burner.

 

[custard]

Here's an example of a timber yard stocking and selling sawn Maple boards at 38mm thick. It's not a difficult combination to source.

https://www.slhardwoods.co.uk/products/ ... sawn-board

 

[Chris152]

That's a beautiful piece of wood. Looking at what you've written I can see I got caught up on 50mm boards I'd seen and failed to think about something nearer the size I actually want (and which they probably had in the yard anyway) - 50mm means lots of waste and maybe more potential for distortion once resawn? Tbh I think this comes down to inexperience in the timber yard/ being overwhelmed by all the wonderful things in there.
Thanks for the advice/ pictures, I'm clear what dimension and grain to use now. Can't help feeling it'd be tragic if the centre of that maple finds its way into the fire, though. :shock: