Grain Orientation on Dining Table with Butterfly Leaf

[creativename5]

Gurus,

I'm in the process of designing a dining room table. I'm leaning towards a design like this one from hardwoodartisans.com but would like to incorporate a butterfly leaf a'la the FWW article in July/August 2011. My question is regarding the grain orientation of the top. I'd prefer for the grain to run longways, but most of the examples I've seen with butterfly leaves have the grain oriented from side to side. Would there be a big concern from a wood movement perspective if I oriented it longways? I had planned to just orient the slots in the slides (where the screws attached to the top) perpendicular to the grain to allow for movement, but would this tend to bind the slides? Also, would there be an issue with the leaf expanding at a different rate than the ends, resulting in poor alignment between the leaf and the rest of the top?

Any advice or alternate design ideas would be appreciated.

[wdwerker]

I like the appearance of the grain running sideways but as long as you are careful to allow for wood movement and all the grain runs in the same direction you should be fine.

[Brendon_t]

While designing,  be aware that the hardware for that leaf looks deep enough that the  apron will most likely not cover it as is an dropping it would  take away some of the lines that give that take such elegance