Replies

1. 
   john_c2 | Jul 21, 2020 07:34pm | #1

   Rip and flip?

2. 
   mikaol | Jul 21, 2020 08:04pm | #2

   I've never heard of it.

3. 
   _mj_ | Jul 21, 2020 08:06pm | #3

   So your starting stock is 7/8 thick flatsawn after jointing / planing?

4. 
   danvgs | Jul 21, 2020 08:11pm | #4

   A term I heard from Matt Kenney, where he rips narrow slices off a board turns them 90 degrees and glues up the narrow pieces to make a wider board. The edge or side of the board has a straighter grain pattern, once turned 90 degrees it gives a rift sawn appearance to the board. Ive seen him use it as a veneer or for the sides of Some of his pieces, usually smaller, not table top size as I want to do, hence my question.

5. 
   _mj_ | Jul 21, 2020 08:13pm | #5

   If he rips the flatsawn boards and the turns them on edge, in theory he gets nice straight grain lines like two sides of a square leg cut from flatsawn stock. If the boards don't have a lot of rising / falling grain through their thickness the effect can be pretty straight grain, but with a lot of gluelines. If he chooses riftsawn for the outside boards it could look nice all around.

6. 
   danvgs | Jul 21, 2020 08:13pm | #6

   No, it’s 1-1/4” thick by 7” wide. I should be able to get roughly 5 pieces from each board.

7. 
   geedubbee | Jul 21, 2020 09:53pm | #7

   It is a valid method to get a straight grained surface look. The lamination will add stability and allow you to get a thicker dimension than you might otherwise be able to get easily.

   You mention a planer but not a jointer. Milling your parts accurately will minimize your effort required post-glue-up. If you do not have a jointer, take a few hours and build a planer sled to prepare you material for planing. You will more than make up the time spent on the sled by saving your post-glue-up work not to mention the cost of wear and tear on your cutters milling glue.

   As an aside, I often come across names for things that I am unaware of while others use the terms easily. Rip-n-flip just happens to be one I have been familiar with for many years. The model number of your chisel mortiser, probably not so much ;-))

8. 
   lat_axe | Jul 22, 2020 02:46am | #8

   Be careful running the glued-up strip sections through your planer. Some glues are very hard when dry and can nick the planer knives, which will ever more show on anything else you plane with them (as raised track lines) until the knives are replaced or re-sharpened. Cascamite is the worst offender but other glues may do the same. Personally I now avoid putting glued up stuff through the planer, having spent too much time ridding surfaces of such track marks in the past.

   You can always spend time sanding or planing them off if you normally sand or hand-plane machine-planed surfaces. If your planer produces an otherwise good finish, a scraper is probably fastest at removing such track lines whilst leaving the rest of the good surface as-is. You can also reduce such track marks by shifting a planer blade sideways a tidgey bit so one knife removes the tracks left by the other.

   Depending on how much curvature the grain shows in your starter planks, you may need to discard some of the ripped-out pieces should the grain of the cut pieces not be oriented to produce a sufficiently quarter-sawn appearance. The bigger the tree trunk (the less the grain lines curve in the end grain of the plank) the better it will be. Tighter curves of smaller tree trunks might spoil your cunning plan, though!

   I once spent ages (and wasted a lot of wood) trying to do this sort of ripping-up to get the most show of medullary rays from a large billet of oak. In that case, the grain has to run at 90 degrees to the face or those medullary rays just don't appear. Trying to make slightly angled cuts for each slice to get them rays to show, then squaring up the rhomboid-shaped part produced ........ not advised. :-)

   Lataxe

9. 
   john_c2 | Jul 22, 2020 05:46am | #9

   It will work, but it's a lot of effort. In some woods, the straight grain will blend well. In others with a lot of ray pattern such as white oak, the rays will be cut and it will be very noticeable that the piece is glued up from very narrow boards.

   I'd just pick very nice quartersawn wood. It comes out of the tree looking exactly the way you want it to, but without a ton of ripping, glueing and planing. Buy it quartersawn.

10. 
    gulfstar | Jul 22, 2020 07:32am | #10

    Unless you have jointer you will be relying a lot on the fitness of your planer to get a good result. If you rip to 1 3/8 ´ you will not get 5 pieces from a 7 inch wide board, if you rip to 1 1/4, this will leave you with 1/8 ´ to plane it down clean to the finished thickness, that is only 1/16´´ per side. Probably need to recalculate more conservative to have plenty to plane down get the final thickness from this many glued pieces. After planing the 12 inches boards, the edges will need to be jointed to insure that the final glue up is perfectly flat, I do this by clamping the two meeting planks face to face and jointing them together. This way any out of squareness of the edge is cancelled and the glue up is flat.

11. 
    DRBWWing | Jul 22, 2020 12:46pm | #11

    One of my big things about panel glue ups is grain direction.

    So with ripnstrip, don't you have to be careful about a grain reversing issue, IOW strips with grain going opposite directions.

12. 
    geedubbee | Jul 22, 2020 02:05pm | #12

    @RobertEJr - IMHO the dimensions of the material in this scenario are small enough that I would not be concerned.

    I'll qualify this in that I am a hybrid woodworker . . .

    If the grain were really wonky I might be concerned about tearout when machine planing if I did not have an insert-cutter type head.

    I would certainly be concerned with grain direction, as always, if I were planning to hand plane the final surface.

13. 
    _mj_ | Jul 22, 2020 02:06pm | #13

    In theory you'll be planing what amounts to a quartersawn edge. In practice there will be rising and diving grain, as well as some riftsawn. Being careful is a good idea, but in a table like this there will be reverses to deal with. A helical jointer & planer will go a long way towards success.