How should I arrange the boards in a panel glue-up?

There are four things competing when you lay boards out, and no arrangement satisfies all of them. Getting the best result is a matter of knowing which one matters for the piece you are making, deciding that first, and compromising the others deliberately rather than by accident.

Step by step

1. Lay every board out on the bench, both faces up in turn.Look at each face, each way round, and each end for end. There are many more arrangements than people try, and the good one is usually not the first.
2. Match grain and colour across the joints first on a show surface.A joint where the figure carries across looks like one board. A joint between a pale straight-grained board and a dark cathedral-figured one always reads as a joint, however well it is cut.
3. Consider a book match or a slip match if the boards came from one plank.Book matching — opening two consecutive boards like a book — gives a symmetrical mirror. Slip matching — sliding them along without flipping — gives a repeating pattern. Both look deliberate, which is the point.
4. Check the planing direction of each board.Mark an arrow on each showing the direction the grain rises. If you can arrange all the arrows the same way, the whole panel can be planed in one direction without tear-out. On a show panel this often loses to appearance, and you accept some scraping.
5. Look at the end grain and decide on ring orientation.Alternating heart-up and heart-down limits how far any one board can cup, at the cost of a slightly washboard surface and, often, a poorer grain match. Keeping all the rings the same way gives one broader cup that a batten or a breadboard end can hold flat.
6. Put the best faces where they will be seen.Obvious but frequently forgotten once the boards have been shuffled six times. Mark the show face clearly.
7. Mark the panel with a large triangle across all the boards.The triangle records the order and the orientation in one mark. Any board out of position or flipped shows instantly. Number the joints too.
8. Keep the joints away from the middle of the panel if you can.On a narrow panel, an odd number of boards puts a joint off centre and reads better than a single joint down the middle of the surface.

Tips

• Photograph the layout once you are happy with it. Boards get moved, and reconstructing the arrangement from memory an hour later is miserable.
• For a table top, the grain should run the length of the table. It reads correctly, and it means the top's movement happens across the width where the fixings allow for it.
• Rip a wide board into narrower strips and rearrange them if it has strong colour variation. More joints, but a far more even panel.

Common mistakes

• Gluing up in the order the boards came off the pile — The odds of that being the best arrangement are poor, and it is a decision that cannot be revisited once the glue is on.
• Treating the alternating-ring rule as compulsory — It is a rule of thumb about limiting cup, not a law. On quarter-sawn stock it is irrelevant, and on a show panel it frequently costs a much better grain match for a benefit the design should be handling anyway.

Questions people ask