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Guy at the lumber yard said he never checks grain direction on face frames, and I think he's dead wrong
Waited behind him at the Willamette yard in Portland and he was loading out 40 board feet of red oak with zero regard for figure. Maybe it's fine for paint grade, but if you're staining anything, mismatched grain on a face frame looks like a patch job from 10 feet away. Anyone here actually run their frames that loose, or am I overthinking a two minute layout step?
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vera_green6922h ago
Man, this one gets me going because I've seen exactly what you're talking about and it drives me nuts too. Like, the grain on a face frame is the first thing your eye goes to when you walk up to a cabinet, so why would you skip a step that takes maybe two minutes at the jointer? Here's my real question though, when you say mismatched grain, are you talking about the rails and stiles running perpendicular to each other, or are you talking about not book matching the stiles themselves so the figure flows across the whole frame? Because those are two different problems and I feel like people lump them together. If it's the perpendicular thing, that's just how frames go together and nobody can avoid it unless they're doing something weird. But if he's not even flipping boards to get cathedral grain pointing the same way on a stained oak kitchen, that's lazy and it'll show the second the stain hits it. Did you actually see the boards he pulled, or did you just clock that he wasn't sorting at all?
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