Saint Simon":a7yyp3t5 said:
I have some beautiful brown oak bought especially for the drawer fronts but have just realised I don't really know what to use for the generally invisible sides and back. It seems a shame to use my precious oak for these and wonder if people could advise me on what they would normally use for such parts. I have some what I think is ramin lying around and wondered if I could use that.
Hello Simon,
you ask a good question, unfortunately there's no one definitive answer but I can give you some things to think about.
You need to beware of drawer sides warping slightly and causing the drawer to jam. The practise at the workshop where I trained was that when building any piece with drawers the first thing you cut was the drawer sides, you left them slightly over thickness, and watched them careful over the next few days for any movement, bringing them down to final dimensions in small steps to allow the wood to adjust. You also chose the straightest grained, quarter sawn material for drawer sides.
The choice of wood for drawer sides was determined by balancing stability and appearance.
Here's a hall table I made out of Cherry with Mahogany drawer sides, Mahogany normally scores extremely well on the stability front, but there's not much contrast with the Cherry drawer front, so it's less successful from an appearance point of view.
Alternatively here's a desk I made with Rippled Sycamore drawer sides and a Pear front. This combination really makes the dovetails stand out.
Someone mentioned Beech as a drawer side material. I remember making a desk for a client who wanted some subtle Beech elements to match existing furniture, we agreed that a flash of the distinctive grain pattern of quarter sawn Beech would do the job whenever a drawer was opened,
Beech isn't often used for drawer sides because it has a bad reputation for warping. The bible for British hardwoods is The Handbook Of Hardwoods by HMSO. This book details the amount of shrinkage that timber will usually experience, both radially and tangentially, when humidity goes from 90% to 60%. Ideally, you're looking for a shrinkage number that's both small, and where the tangential (first figure) and radial (second figure) shrinkage is as similar as possible.
Beech, 3.1%, 1.7%
Ramin, 3.1%, 1.5%
Sycamore, 2.8%, 1.8%
Maple, 2.6%, 1.8%
Oak, 2.5%, 1.5%
Cherry, 2.0%, 1.2%
Honduran Mahogany, 1.3%, 1.0%
This table would suggest that Beech and Ramin aren't the best choices. However, it's been my experience that the technical timber data is a good place to begin, but it shouldn't have the final word. In reality the
most stable piece of Beech will actually be
more stable than the
least stable piece of Mahogany. I've had plenty of examples of serious warping in Rosewood, Teak, and Mahogany (all supposed champions of stability), while I've known individual Beech boards to remain dead flat. So I wouldn't discount your Ramin boards out of hand, but I would be suspicious of them. They'd need to prove that they'll behave by flattening them a few mill over thickness and then checking them with a straight edge every few days to see if they remain flat.
The advantages of Ramin are that it would really make the oak drawer fronts stand out by comparison, where as Oak drawer sides with Oak fronts would all look a bit "samey", however if the Ramin showed any signs of warping then I wouldn't hesitate to go with Oak as the plan B.
Good luck!
