I’m planing on cross-cutting a single narrow maple board into multiple pieces and glue them side by side to make a wider piece and I plan on using a handplane to to a final smoothing. After my maple workbench flattening I’d really like to learn what not to do in terms of alternating grain pattern !
Here is a poorly drawn picture of what I'm seeing in terms of grain pattern.
board1.jpg
If I look at the edge of the board the grain looks like what I've drawn, diagonal lines, you'll see this sometimes when you have cathedral patterns on the face but in this case I have none.
If I were handplaning this I'd want to plane in the direction I drew the arrow. Is that correct?
Now if I were to like one face over another and I flipped the board over face down and had the other face up and glued them edgewise the pattern would now be different. Diagonal lines going different directions on each piece. Does that mean alternating grain patterns = bad for handplane?
I've read it's good to flip every 2nd pice over to help against cupping - isn't this a bad idea for grain direction?