3- Suppplement you stock with more maple. I purchased "brown maple".
It's
maple, but with some heartwood. Same stuff, not as pretty, half the
price.

I asked the exotic woods dealer, he said he's never tried to get it and
never
heard of it, seems a shot futile.

It's not so much *that wood* as see what your local hardwood market has
cheap. It's a very regional thing. In particular I'm concerned about gluing
together maple and a softwood.

But there is a lot of wood in the table so a
little extra 5/4 maple wouldn't be too bad or too much, if needed.

If there is table to spare, great.

4 - Keep all the wood going left to right. If you do want bread-board
ends
(going front to back) you can only lock the end at one point and let the
rest of the joint move with the seasons.

I'll have to learn about that joint thing, I'll buy that book.

Cheers,
Steve


Then it would all have to be butcher-blocked, end to end. I wouldn't know
how to
arrange that unless I used an even-odd pattern like brick laying. That is
because of
sizes of the pieces of wood in the table, I can't do an "all-like" gluing
pattern that
will show weakness and be weaker like all the leaf pieces aligned up in
the middle.

I think splices are fine so long as the joints are staggered. Just make sure
that the pies in the same row are identical thickness.


As far as strong seasonal differences in my town, hardly anything. The
front door
gets a touch harder to close in rainy weather without any real water
touching it
besides that which is in the air. Which is probably your very strong point
of course...
duh!

Chages in the weather *will* cause wood to move. You might as well just plan
for it.

But the trestle will have to DF (previously, yes I had meant douglas fir,
our
only local framing wood).


A softwood tressle is fine. I would, however upsize the height of the
crossmembers. They are your protection from racking (the sort of streess
that hand planing will put on a bench). The tendency of wood fibers to
compress (making the joint wiggly) would me mitigated by a tall crossmember.
(That is a 2x8 is a better design than a 4x4).

But perhaps that's just my personal overkill.

-s