A Facebook post :  The poster needs to understand wood movement better, "expanded"?!   Hopefully he/she did not fasten the breadboard ends all the way across.

 

I made a dining room table with breadboard ends about 2 months ago. The ends were sanded flush with the rest of the table when I finished. Now they have expanded almost 1/8 of an inch. I let them acclimate to my shop for about 2 weeks before I started working with them. How do I stop this from happening? It's construction grade pine.

 

V

 

https://www.woodmagazine.com/woodworking-tips/techniques/joinery/breadboard

Plane them back, then they'll be even again.

19 minutes ago, Fred W. Hargis Jr said:

Plane them back, then they'll be even again.

For a while

well, the end board did NOT grow longer, the field boards grew narrower, across the grain.  very little movement in the direction of the grain.

Another recent post from a Popular Woodworking newsletter.  As I've said many times, "Understand wood movement.  Wood moves, you cannot control it, but you must allow for it.  Those that don't adhere to it will be at its peril."

 

 

"Somewhere, some designer decided that this grain pattern would look great, with zero concern for material properties or wood movement. And then several other people along the supply chain signed off on it as well. No amount of hubris can outrun wood movement, though. There was a whole rack of boards like this, in various states of disassembly, long before they even made it into a kitchen. Unfortunately, these will all end up in a dumpster, no one is going to learn, and I’ll be seeing another rack full of boards like this in six short months. The cycle of crap continues."  - Collin Knoff

 

The whole point in having bread board ends is to allow contraction and expansion of cross grain boards. This prevents buckling and warping. You will always see what you see in your photo. In this case your cross grain boards have contracted. This is expected with bread board ends. 

If you don't like seeing the slight overhang then make a top with only cross grain boards (as shown below) and mount to a frame where underneath it's pinned on center with a tight hole and obrounded on the ends to allow for the contraction and expansion. Hope I'm making sense. 

 

3 hours ago, MrRick said:

The whole point in having bread board ends is to allow contraction and expansion of cross grain boards. This prevents buckling and warping. You will always see what you see in your photo. In this case your cross grain boards have contracted. This is expected with bread board ends. 

If you don't like seeing the slight overhang then make a top with only cross grain boards (as shown below) and mount to a frame where underneath it's pinned on center with a tight hole and obrounded on the ends to allow for the contraction and expansion. Hope I'm making sense. 

 

Yes, I've had to explain to a few consumers that the fact that the breadboard end is longer or shorter  (depending on season) than the body is just the way it works.

 

In the original post, the "I made  a dining room table..." was quoting the fb author, not me.

Edited January 11Jan 11 by kmealy

Gotcha! 

A good article. https://www.woodmagazine.com/woodworking-how-to/wood-preparation/dealing-with-wood-movement?hid=b0b455ea13e71c23a3fc22b044c0be06fb838bd1&did=25329018-20260813&utm_campaign=wood-online_newsletter&utm_source=wood&utm_medium=email&utm_content=081326&lctg=b0b455ea13e71c23a3fc22b044c0be06fb838bd1&lr_input=054cc015b57d54e1680d1a6048482c50e9b71e5448ad337fc319f7f4f4e52672 I see wood movement problems a lot. The most memorable one was I was doing some "warantee" repair work at someone's house once. On a different piece, they said they heard a sound in the middle of the night that sounded like a gunshot. When they got up in the morning, there was a 1/4" crack all the way down their dining table. I'd also repaired lots of raised panels on Asian furniture with what I called 'suntan lines'.

My nephew was in the Marines in Japan for a number of years and he visited some (non-Japanese) furniture factories that he said were just open to the humid environment (and probably using very moist wood).

One thing worth remembering is wood in most species, expands twice as much tangentially (around the growth rings) as it does radially (from the center out). That explains why flat-sawn wood likes to warp, and quarter sawn wood gains more in thickness (that usually does not matter much on things like a table top) than it does in width. If you have a hard time remembering this, just think about a log that dries. It will almost always have a gap like a pie piece cut out of it. Since the circumference is proportional to the radius (c = 2*pi*r), it is shrinking more around the rings than across a radius.

You can get fatter or skinnier, but rarely taller or shorter. And usually twice as much out the front and back as out the side.

Edited 5 hours ago5 hr by kmealy