cross grain thin wood movement

[JohnnyR]

I'm making an chaos end grain cutting board with end-grain mahogany boarder for my daughter to give as a wedding gift. Not my first rodeo but ended up with more waste (i.e. more cutting board on the floor than in the board) than planned and an 11"x19" isn't appealing or as useful. So to make it wider we decided to cut off the border and add another interior boarder to make it about 13" x 19" which is about what mine is and I think is about perfect. The "interior" boarder will be 15/16" end grain purple heart, sliced in half (so about 3/4+) to sandwich 1/16 maple. I first tried a router plane for inlay but with end grain the blade deflected, even after scoring it so inlay is out. Question is- - - I have some 1/16" scrap maple I'd like to use but it's long grain. Can I laminate it on both sides with end grain purple heart with out worrying about wood movement. (Always wondered about the amount of movement in an end grain cutting board).

 

[NYTransplant]

I it were me, I'd cut the 1/16 material and glue the pieces around the board in an end grain pattern to make the border.

If you're curious about wood movement, you can look at the movement of the end grain for different species using the shrinkage calculator at WoodWeb. It won't break out the tangential vs radial movement (T/R Ratio), but you can probably find those ratios by species elsewhere. Generally, T/R will be somewhere between 1 and 3.

Take a 19" maple end grain board changing moisture content from 12% to 10%. It will shrink between 0.075"-0.100" (depending how consistently you alternate tangential and radial directions) while the longitudinal movement for the thin border is negligible. No matter how thin the border is, it won't stretch or shrink with the end grain and the joint will probably fail over time. If someone were to soak the board in water overnight... yikes!

 

[creasman]

I do this with cock beading around drawer fronts. That's sometimes as thick as 1/8" and I haven't had any issues with it shrinking or coming apart. Widest drawer I recall doing is about 8". A cutting board might be different because it may be used in a higher moisture environment.