I just glued up a cutting board taking 16 strips from a flat sawn maple board and re-gluing it to be quarter sawn. I did this so the recipient wouldn't have an issue with warpage.
Usually I experience this on more rustic work but I wanted this to be clean. I have no problem getting fine planes to cut figured material or reversing grain but I do get deep tears or even chunks (construction lumber) that are deeper than the face planing and finish planing are likely to remove.
In this case I got these tears while planing across the grain with a heavily cambered jack, about 3/32" camber or slightly less in a #5. I can get a great glassy finish on the face planing with the grain but the marks from the roughing stay behind.
I am thinking a lighter cut will help but the cut gets pretty narrow. I can flatten out the camber to use a wider, shallower cut to lighten the force on the wood but I'm not sure. Does a cap iron do anything at the roughing stage with the heavy cuts?
I didn't want to type this on my phone so photos to follow.
We could use David Weaver here. What I’d try: switch to a plane with very mild camber (<1/32) + cap iron, and go diagonally from both sides rather than straight cross-grain. As soon as you get within reasonable distance, go lengthwise with a try plane equivalent.
Use a lightly cambered No. 6 or No. 7. Move the cap iron closer, sharpen up, and take a lighter cut. I've found that the extra mass seems to help. Others likely will disagree. Whatever. They aren't there with you planing the material. No two pieces of wood are alike. That's what makes all of this so much fun (sarcasm). Every species won't tolerate an aggressive hogging off. A jack-jointer-smoother progression doesn't always work on every species, as you've seen with your own eyes.
We usually would only plane across the grain in extreme cases. Moxon says to turn the board athwart the bench and plane across the grain if the board is wide and is badly warped. You can plane cross grain if the board is quite a bit thicker than what you want, but then change to planing with the grain when you get close to the line in order to avoid the problem you have seen.
On your cutting board, I would plane with a double iron jack and a double iron trying plane, both with the grain. In general, quartersawn stuff is a bit more vulnerable to tear out than flatsawn.
QS wood can be more difficult to plane than a lot of figured wood. Maple is also kind of touchy with heavy shavings, though it smooth planes nicely.
It is possible to minimize tearout with the chipbreaker on a jack plane, even taking a heavy cut. The chipbreaker might need to be set close enough that it hangs beyond the edges due to the camber. The setback of the CB edge (from the center of the camber) will be greater than it would on a smoother, due to the thicker shaving, but it has to be determined experimentally. It's usually a good sign when the chip shoots straight out with little or no curl, but without adding too much resistance to the cut.
At this point you want to take it down some more with a try plane, or some plane that functions as one. Modest camber, cut set for 5 thou or a little more, chipbreaker set fairly tight. Try planes are usually long but on a cutting board that isn't necessary. Keep working until you see continuous shavings without holes in them (the holes would be tearout not yet removed). If you think you are still creating tearout, reduce cut and/or set CB closer.
Hopefully after that you have a surface that only needs a couple of passes with a smoother to make glassy smooth.
For next time, you might want to think about if the cross-grain jack planing step is really necessary. I'd say it only is if your glueup was really wonky. Otherwise, you can get a lot done planing with the grain, with less cleanup work to do afterwards. You can take out twist and cup just fine going with the grain.
Planing across the grain or diagonally is usually for boards severely out of flat - it's just easier this way. In my opinion setting a light cut during this operation is kinda defeats the purpose. I would just stop with at least 1/8" of material before a mark (my worst tearout is around 1/16") and would switch to planing with the grain, going through progressively larger camber radius and lighter set.
The other part is maple, which is quite temperamental. I couldn't find a setting or a combination of settings that would deal with maple grain predictably. So it's always a fight and it seems I have to throw all tricks known to me: resharpening often, chip breaker setting, sprinkling alcohol or mineral spirits, scraping, sometimes even sanding. Yours doesn't look too bad, so leaving enough material while rough planing would probably have helped.
Somewhat digressing from the question....with luck the board will be used and in short time look like this one, enhanced by the display of a lovely Weaver made slicer out of high hardness O-1 steel. Manufacturing defects have been disguised by use.
For a time I made presentation grade cutting boards for gifts and found a year later the board on display rather than in use. A fancy board can make for an attractive kitchen decoration. But a fancy board probably will not meet a need for a place to cut whatever, for it will be judged "to nice" to cut carrots on it, as I was told. I now style boards to how I want them used as gifts.
I have machine planed acres of maple and the experience has some relevance. Maple varies greatly in how well it behaves when taking a shaving by any means. Some is simply brittle and prone to pick out and split deeply into the face. I convinced myself over the years that maple fresh out of the kiln, and hence low moisture content, was more prone to torn grain. Maybe? So, some of your problem could be the particular piece of maple as well as technique.
As Warren stated quarter grain can be more difficult than flat. One wonders if some of the aids machine planers employ have any merit, such as wetting the surface.
Finally, made from dry wood I have never had a board warp no matter how I assembled it or what grain orientation was used. they can of course warp from misuse.
That board is perfect. Do you put anything on it periodically? Sometimes I use mineral oil or Preserve, which is walnut oil depending on what I find first.
I agree about precious cutting boards. On the way back from Ikea last night I was commenting that paying $8 for a beech board and burning it when it was undesirable made more sense than spending $150 on a "professional" cutting board, whatever that is.
I had made cutting boards for limes last summer to prep gin and tonics. It's so much easier to deal with than a full size board. My daughter's warped most likely due to mistreatment so I figured this one should be as warp-proof as possible.
If all else fails, might veneer flattening solution, e.g., Pro-Glue Veneer Softener from Vac-U-Clamp, or a home-brew of glycerine, alcohol, water and glue, make it behave? Note that I haven't tried it, but it has all the right properties.
When it looks dry I slather it with any cooking oil that is at hand. If I am butchering on a wood board I wash it with hot water and soap after. This washing tends to dry the surface so reoiling is necessary, occasionally. But for working dough and the like there is enough oil in the material that it stays oiled.
I like to use cooking oil because it will somewhat cross link over time and stay in the board. In my hands mineral oil bleeds out annoyingly. As I recall corn oil has enough unsaturation that it will cure well enough to not bleed, but in fact I use what ever is at hand.
Thanks for the suggestions, they were helpful. I glued up a second board for my wife and did a better job of getting the strips aligned. The Qsawn material was still a bit fussy but I’m happy with it and as Bill pointed out, they get beat up in use.
I had planned on an arc but thought the recipient might prefer a parabola so I came up with this way of marking the curves.
You just dial it in until the midpoint and end offset line up.
Then I chamfered the curves to create grips and provide some visual interest.
I had sketched up the curve and chamfer intersection on my CAD system using an arc, which was around 64-1/2". I have trammels but it would have been a pain to clear the deck and rig something up to center the arcs on the boards. I recalled seeing someone using strings on battens to make fair curves and I had this thin stock in my ceiling for almost 30 years waiting to spring into action. I also bought some clamps this week and the Dubuques did the trick nicely. You can really dial in the curve to match your points.
One can experiment with different things like the length of the batten and attaching blocks to the ends to create more curvature at the ends. I needed something in a pinch and this was handy.
If I do it again I will make the 3 line segments of the seams in the middle equal length but I doubt the recipients will notice or care.
I had planned on an arc but thought the recipient might prefer a parabola
When an isotropic strip is stressed parallel to the length the shape assumed is not one of the common geometric shapes we are familiar with. This fact can be readily confirmed by making the arc on graph paper and then trying to fit the curve with common equations (something I discovered to my consternation when I thought I would cleverly plot the cure rather than form it with a bent strip (which will often be not quite symmetric).
Not only looks attractive but it solves the problem of picking it up.
Dial-a-curve......clever, I'll use that one myself.
Oiling: for presentation I leave off the oil. Slathering on the vegie oil which is the best way for maintenance will make the maple and not attractive to my eye. Maybe a light waxing would be best for the presentation with a note on maintenance.
It might be a catenary, or the modified catenary (whose name I don't recall) that you get on a suspension bridge cable after the cable is loaded with the bridge deck.
Ah! Another advantage of the great Aluminum bar clamps Bill Tindall has recommended.
I use the drawing bows sold by Lee Valley, 05N5501 and 05N5520, but found the straps and clamps they use for adjusting the arc to be inconvenient, almost useless. My work around has been to replace both with a piece of string. In one end of the string I tie a bowline (which should be obvious) and in the other a taut line hitch. It is much easier to adjust, but not as easy as your clamp method.
I had thought it would follow the curvature for a loaded beam but those are loaded along the length. This one is more of the deflection after buckling has occurred. I would have to ponder it a while to figure the deflection.
I'm thinking there are similarities with bows but the loading is a bit different.
Too late on the oil. It has a bit of color on the maple but the walnut is a lot nicer. Hopefully is soaks in deeper before it gets wrapped.
Since I work with musical instrument bows, I know a little bit about this topic, but not much!
A few years ago, a friend of mine who worked his entire career at Bell Labs, John Grabner, now deceased, mathematically modeled the graduations and curve shape of violin bows. He was able to get excellent agreement between his theory and practice. As John explained it it me, he used the Euler equations for compressibility of a column. Basically, if you have a column, and it is being pressed axially on at the ends, at some point, it will fail and bow sideways as the pressure increases. The musical instrument bow is a subset of this in that it is already bent and as the ribbon of hair is tightened, it straightens out because of the offset of the head and frog ends. But the same Euler equations govern this behavior.
So, I knew to search the Internet with the great German mathematician Euler and his column equations in mind. I found lots of good info, but very little describing the actual shape or curve of the resulting bent column. I did find this exchange: https://forum.cosmoquest.org/showthread.php?60711-Bending-a-plastic-ruler
where the same question was raised and another poster suggested it might be a catenary curve, but someone else responded and firmly said the curve was a sine curve, then another poster suggested it was a sine curve at least in the initial stages of deformation. He suggested looking at the basic equations. I've given a typical link below for any interested mathematicians in this group to analyze this for us...
So, the curve Steve produced might be a sine curve or a catenary curve. I'm betting on the former as catenary assumes a constant pull of gravity or another uniform force along the entirety of the bending member, which is not the case here.
My recollection of the Euler buckling analysis is to determine the initial conditions of buckling, which would constitute failure in itself. Once the beam is bent and in the elastic range the loading can be resolved using normal beam deflection calculations like those Bill mentioned and the slideshow linked do.
For some reason I can't insert links when I want to. You'll need to copy and paste.
On page 9 of the pdf you see a free body of a cantilevered beam and the curvature deflection v(x). The beam I showed being squeezed from the end is two of those joined at the center. The point load at the tip can be substituted by a end load for the equivalent loading in the clamp.
That shape is the polynomial shown on the left side of that page.
