Left and right side of a board?
ProfessionalAmateur
| Posted in General Discussion on
Do boards have a left and right side? Should I be paying attention to this when I build a deck or a bed?
Replies
This should be fun.
Yes.
Perhaps we should develop woodworking equivalents of Port and Starboard?
I think we should be discussing right and wrong also.
No.
You can use them whichever way makes sense to you and looks best. Some boards will have flaws and gnarly grain best relegated to less visible parts of the project. Some will have grain direction that will look great and need to be featured.
Probably the only really difficult area is in boards that are glued together - having the grain going in the same direction will make planing easier. If you have some white oak, just try planing a scrap bit the wrong way and you will know at once what I mean. Personally I am lazy so I do what I think looks best and 'plane' with a belt or drum sander!
Once you have decided which way your boards are going to go, it is best to use the cabinetmaker's triangle so that you keep them all the same through all operations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWp2fCXzDXY
What really matters is having a true and flat FACE SIDE and a flat FACE EDGE that is at 90 degrees to the face side. These are traditionally marked with a squiggle and a V - wherever possible, all measurements should be taken from these two marked parts of the board. This is a little less important with machined parts, but is still good practice as especially with longer boards, small variations in the machining can result in errors that will not be evident until you try to mate parts up...
https://jeffgorman.uk/markingoutnotes/facesideandfaceedgemarks
Why not watch some of the videos on FWW? It's really worth the effort as you will learn loads from them, including all about board selection and marking up...
Thank you for the help.
I have *some* experience, having worked in construction and being a professional painter. My experience with carpentry, however, is painfully limited. I've built some decks, I've laid a couple of floors, I've built 2 or 3 decent cabinets, but nothing overly complicated or anything.
Given my limited knowledge and experience, I'm not surprised when someone introduces new terms or ideas to me, and if I find myself confused, I seek the guidance of professionals, well experienced hobbyists, and the like.
That's what this was about.
Thanks for the links, too! The "cabinet maker's triangle" will be a huge help in upcoming projects!
Some boards are cooperative with those they are joined to in a piece of furniture. They do not bend unduly or shrug off the other boards, so the furniture remains a cohesive and coherent whole. These would be the left boards.
Other boards twist, cup and otherwise follow their individual desires, no matter how unpleasant, so that they become ill-fitting in the furniture piece, distorting it and perhaps cracking or twisting other boards they are next to in the furniture. These would be the right boards.
Lataxe, being anthropomorphically simplistic about boards. :-)
I try to glue left sides to right sides. Never left to left.
Seriously.
Yes but no but yes but .....
If you turn one of the boards upside down then you can glue the left side to the left side (or even the right side to the right side) as long as you look at them in such a way that one eye sees one side of one board and the other eye sees the other side of the other board. (I think .... perhaps an experiment is needed).
Lataxe, wondering if the topology of relativity will help.
Slip matching Lataxe. Slip matching.
While it's not as witty as some of my fellow posters, I will add that if you are building a deck, always place the bark side down. In other words the smaller growth rings should be your finished surface. This is because when the boards cup, and they will, it cups to the bark side. If you put barkside down you won't have a lot of trip inducing lips on you deck.
Deck boards always cup upwards, no matter which side is up. But not those Azek boards.
Come to think about it, there are left and right planks, as well as front and back. Just this week I was making the first of tree 10ft tall shelving unit for the local cheese store, the 4 uprights are 2X4 resawn from air dried slabs of elm and as I pushed them through the table saw you could see the wood bending away in every direction as the stresses released, same happened when I cut the dados and removed the clamps. So to make a straight frame, I assembled them so the ends would point all in opposite directions. There are tree thick fixed shelves, top, middle and bottom that brought them together with 5 inches lag bolts and it ended up straight enough.
"Straight Enough"? LOL! As an Ex-GI [06/'59-06/'62]"Close enough for government work" leaps immediately to mind. (Not, though, when I worked on the Apollo Project at the North American Space & Information Division in, Downey, CA. in '63/'64.) Actually we used the opposing forces in the construction of guitar necks at Stars Guitars where we would cut the neck blank longitudinally from end to end and then lay those halves on their side, matching them so if one started to move in one direction its mirror image that matched on the other side would counter it equally in the opposite direction. It works that way even when there's another board in between them. [Easy way to visualize this is to put your hands together in the prayer position. Now, roll them apart palms up so your thumbs are on the outside, left and right, and your palm edges and little fingers are still touching. As you can imagine, a force that would warp the left hand of the neck one way or the other side to side would be equally opposed by it's mirrored image on the right. Truss rods do not counter warp from side to side, just counter the tension of the strings that pull up on the neck.]
I think we should be discussing right and wrong also.
There's nothing worse than morally ambiguous hardwoods.
Well ..... often right is wrong and sometimes left can be right - it all depends on the morality of the zeitgeist, which is a bit of a shapeshifter so hard to pin down (or at all).
Myself, I yam right-handed which can be wrong if the tool is for a lefty. It must be me as a tool cannot be wrong since none of them are capable of making moral judgements .... although a unisaw will soon punish a fool and reet quickly.
But what of the warping planks? My mam always told me to avoid bent coppers and many of them are right planks, let me tell you. I once handed in a purse I found and the officer who took it boasted without shame that he would keep any sixpences in it. What a plank!
My mam was always right apart from once voting conservative despite the buggers being our class enemies and a right load of snobs!
Lataxe, trying not to get left behind.
Not again...
My favorite is still the polar bear.
There you go...
Thanks, I feel better now.
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