More Wood for the Leaves

The new shipment of sapele came in last week so I stopped by the hardwood store and got 4 boards of 12’ long sapele! These can be cut into thirds, and each part glued to a partner to make a single 12” wide leaf. So 4 boards will get me 6 leaves total.

Each board is around 10” wide, and I only need each half of a leaf to be 6”, so that gives me some leeway to cut out any edges where the grain gets wavy (like the top edge of that board in front), as well as potentially angle a cut to get the grain nice and straight in the resulting board. Each final piece will be 6” x 42” and then glued to a partner. Here’s the completed profile of the leaves from Sketchup:

The original plan calls for a groove along the bottom and then a piece of c-channel steel to be run along the length to help them prevent sagging. But after thinking about it for a while, and checking with The Sagulator, I’m going to try without the steel to start and see how well they resist sagging. The Sagulator says there will be 0.001” of sag per foot across the length, assuming no load on them. I don’t know it takes into account the effect of gravity, however. If I set the load to 10 lbs. it says only 0.005” of sag per foot. The seasonal wood movement will probably have more of an affect than that!