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Oct 152006
 

Woodturner's Bandsaw BladeCreating bowl blanks from green wood on the bandsaw can be taxing for standard blades. Many of our customers, happy with our Wood Slicer® Resawing Blade when cutting kiln-dried lumber, have asked us for a worthy blade to handle the difficulties bandsawing green wood.

Our 3/8″ wide WoodTurner’s Bandsaw Blade, with its 3 TPI, alternate set w/raker tooth pattern & stout band thickness of .032″, is just the blade for the task. The significant tooth set of this blade provides ample room to keep the blade zipping along through dripping wet, kerf-closing, growth-tensioned logs. The deep, rounded, hook-toothed gullets allow chips to be easily removed from the kerf enabling quick, aggressive cuts. The hardened teeth (RC64-65) stand up to dulling bark & log grime (we recommend removing as much grit as possible from your stock before cutting with any blade). The 3/8″ wide band allows a cutting radius as small as 1-1/2″.

Visit Highland Woodworking for more information.

Oct 012006
 

To begin at the beginning: resawing is cutting a sawn plank into thinner planks. Thus the cut runs through the plank’s width, which distinguishes resawing from ordinary rip cuts where the blade runs through the stock’s thickness. It’s all ripping in any case, and the techniques we’ll review here apply just as well to ripping 8/4 stock as to sawing 10″ veneers or 5″ drawer sides. The band saw is the ideal tool for this job. It’s far safer than a circular saw, because it doesn’t cause kickback. Its narrow kerf and vertical blade movement make it extremely efficient, wasting minimal wood and cutting relatively easily and quickly even with a low-power saw. Resawing is easy; all you have to do is cut straight lines (very straight indeed). This requires nothing more complicated than appropriate blade selection, adequate tension, effective stock control, and practice.

Blade Selection: No Contest

As you saw through very thick stock, each saw tooth shaves out an enormous amount of waste. In order to maintain a reasonably productive feed rate, there has to be somewhere for that waste to be stashed out of the way until the teeth emerge from the cut. Otherwise the gullets between the teeth fill up and stall further advance until they’ve cleared the stock. Blades with about 3 teeth per inch (tpi) have large gullets which can accommodate as much waste as you’ll generate by sawing through thick stock, and they’ll handle anything less substantial with no trouble at all. You’ve made the best choice of all with our Wood Slicer, whose thin-kerf, variable pitch 3-4 tpi design makes it the smoothest and quietest resaw blade on the market.

In principle, the wider the blade, the higher its beam strength and the better it can maintain straightness. Wider, however, isn’t necessarily better. Almost all US woodcutting bandsaw blades over 1/2″ wide are .035″ thick, thicker than the Wood Slicer’s total kerf width. 3/4″ blades are set far more coarsely as well, so the doubled load on your saw and their rough cuts make wider blades a distinct step backward.

High Tension: No Worries

Tension may be the least important factor in successful resaw setup, but it’s significant nonetheless. Adequate blade tension helps keep stock centered even if your control isn’t flawless, and it reduces the blade’s tendency to flutter under thrust. It’s easy to set a satisfactory amount of tension. Install the Wood Slicer on your saw, with lateral guides and thrust bearings opened up and backed off both above and below the table so they do not contact the blade. Crank on some tension, and then give the blade a sharp sideways poke about halfway between the upper and lower wheels. The blade will deflect a short distance and then seem to hit a wall; if you push a lot harder it will bend farther, but there’s a fairly distinct point where it quits deflecting easily. Add tension until this sideways movement is just 1/4″ to 5/16″ on saws with 6″ depth of cut, or about 3/8″ on saws with 12″ depth. By the way, don’t look at the saw’s built-in tension gauge until you’re finished; there’s no need to confuse yourself with arbitrary numbers. After you’ve gotten the hang of tensioning by feel, check the gauge and use its reading as a setup guide.

Once the blade is tensinoned and tracked properly, there’s one last bit of tuning you can do that can make a real difference in performance. Before you bring the lateral guides and thrust bearings up close to the blade, close the wheel covers and turn the saw on. If vibration blurs the blade, try increasing or decreasing the tension very slightly until the blade runs smoothly in a straight, quiet line from wheel to wheel. Cuts will be smoother when you eliminate this source of fluttering in the kerf, and the saw will run quieter and more efficiently as well.

Stock Control: A Leading Question

Cutting straight lines is easy: find out how the saw wants to do it, and do it that way. That might sound facetious, but it’s actually a fair description of what works. Every bandsaw blade, unless there’s something seriously wrong, can cut straight lines, but each will do so in its own way; each blade has its own “lead angle”. If you’re resawing just one or two pieces, it will be easiest to use a point block fence, a curved fence tall enough to hold your stock upright while leaving feed direction up to you. Mark the cut line full length on the stock (leaving a generous margin for error:, set the point block to your target width and freehand the cut, adjusting feed direction as you go. It’s an imperfect technique; you’ll waste more wood and spend more time at the thickness planer than ideal, but overall you’ll get the job done quickly. When you need to resaw more than a couple of pieces, however, it will probably be more productive to set up a straight fence and make the cuts with predictable, repeatable accuracy, minimizing waste and finishing time.

Here’s where most of us go wrong, so pay attention: When determining the proper feed direction for cutting straight lines with any particular blade, it’s what cuts that counts, and nothing else. Your miter slot doesn’t cut wood, so it doesn’t help to set your rip fence parallel to it. The front edge of your table doesn’t either, so don’t bother reaching for your square. If your fence can’t be skewed right or left at least 1/2″ out of parallel to the miter slot you won’t be able to use it, so make your own or get one of our Kreg bandsaw fences instead, which we provide with instructions for making it fully adjustable. Outfit your fence with an auxiliary face high enough to hold your resaw stock securely vertical—5″ or 6″ should do.

Take a piece of 8/4 scrap wood two or three feet long, joint an edge straight, and mark a line parallel to that edge. Rip freehand along the line, adjusting your feed direction until you’re cutting consistently straight down the line. When you’ve split the line for 4 or 5 inches, stop. Hold the stock still on the table and shut off the saw. Mark a pencil line (which can be erased later) on the saw table along the straight edge of the test piece, then set your rip fence parallel to the pencil line. This is a first approximation; now you’re ready for fine tuning.

Wood Slicer Bandsaw Band Saw BladeMake a short resaw cut, either in the work at hand or scrap of similar hardness and roughly similar width. With the cut completed, stand a straightedge against the resawn face of the board. Unless you’re just plain lucky, you’ll see that the blade bowed left or right within the stock. The way the blade bowed tells you how to fine tune your fence for very precise resawing. You know that the solid body of a blade can’t simply move sideways through solid wood. To create a bowed cut, the teeth must lead to one side or another within the wood (where they’re free of the lateral guides’ constraint), twisting the blade and making it saw its way out of vertical.Wood Slicer Bandsaw Band Saw BladeTo keep the cut vertical, adjust your fence to match the way the blade twisted. If the blade bowed to the left, adjust the rear of your fence slightly to the right; if the blade bowed right, reset fence angle slightly left at the rear. Make another test cut and check the face of the wood again. It may take three or four tests to get the fence set for flawless sawing, but once that’s done you can resaw piece after identical piece, with cuts so straight that one pass through the planer is all it takes to produce clean, flat wood at your target thickness.

Slicing Wood: Just Do It

Once youve done all of the above successfully, you can’t go wrong–unless you feed too fast or too slow, or let the blade get good and dirty. Feeing too slowly will cut the wood okay, but it will wear out the blade a lot faster than need be. You’re feeding too fast when the completed cut shows pronounced bands of wide diagonal tooth marks. Practice feeding at a moderate, consistent pace, just slow enough to leave a smooth surface.

Several species of timber can cause rapid buildup of debris on the blade, and any wood eventually will bake on a load of trash. Material crusted around the teeth can make it as hard for them to cut as if they were dead dull, and it can affect the blade’s lead angle, too. The longer you wait to clean a blade the harder it will be, so clean it often. If a quick scrub with a Scotch-Brite pad laced with mineral spirits doesn’t do the trick, take the blade off the saw and hose it down with our Blade and Bit Cleaner, wait a few minutes and then wipe clean. If you saw resinous wood regularly, Dri-Cote blade treatment will help retard accumulation of resins and junk.

There’s one last detail to cover: keeping your fingers attached. The bandsaw may be the least hazardous resawing tool in the shop, but please remember that anything that turns hard wood into sawdust can do much worse to you. As you resaw, you’ll often find yourself pushing the stock with one hand while holding it against the high face of your rip fence with the other. It’s tempting to let your pressure hand slide along toward the neighborhood of the blade, but that’s not cool; imagine the blade bowing within the wood and unexpectedly sawing its way out through the face your hand is pressed against. It can also be temping to push the wood right up to the last half inch and then pull it through the final bit of the cut. Once again, imagine the worst case where an unseen crack allows the last two or three inches of the plank to split apart suddenly, just as you’re pushing firmly toward the blade. Use a bit of scrap as push block instead.

There’s plenty more to know about resawing, of course, but this should be enough to get you started successfully, after which doing it will teach you anything else you wish to know. So go do it!

Visit Highland Woodworking for more information.

Oct 012006
 

Highland Woodworking

Don’t Miss Our In-Store Fall Tool Sale!

Saturday, October 14
9:00am to 5:00pm

One-day specials throughout the store!
Free Refreshments!
Prize Drawings

Frank BowersFree Demos
(Approximately 1 hour long – space limited, so come early!)

  • 9:30am – Turning Relaxed
  • 10:00am – Raised Panels on the Tablesaw
  • 10:30am – Skew Chisel Techniques
  • 11:00am – Creating a Colonial Finish with Milk Paint
  • 11:30am – Making a Baseball Bat on the Lathe
  • 12:00pm – Finishing Myths Dispelled
  • 1:00pm – Build Two Essential Tablesaw Jigs
  • 2:00pm – Hand Tool Joinery Techniques

Chris BlackWe invite you to spend a festive day at Highland Woodworking as we host our semi-annual Tool Sale. We will have sale pricing, free refreshments, free demonstrations & door prizes. The wealth of restaurants & shops in Virginia Highlands wil keep the whole family fed and entertained, so pack everybody in the car & come on down! We won’t have a tent, so we’ll have parking available in our lot.

We’re easy to find, about 3 miles from the heart of downtown Atlanta, Georgia and only a couple of miles from the three interstates in the area.

Directions To Highland Woodworking

Oct 012006
 

ScrapeRite BladesPlastic razor blades scrape grime, glue and other shop scum without collateral damage to your tools and projects. They make excellent small putty knives and epoxy squeegees. Although safer than steel razors, they’re sharp enough to remove dried paint from windowpanes and glue dribble from woodwork. (We recommend waiting until the glue is semi-hard to avoid additional squeeze-out.) The general-purpose blades flex somewhat to conform to curved surfaces like windshields and tool handles. They are ideal for use on softwoods like pine.

Visit Highland Woodworking for more information on this and on the ScrapeRite Rigid Blades.

Sep 152006
 

Metal Bench Plane

by Chris Black

It’s an unfortunate reality that most metal bench planes don’t work to their full potential right out of the box, and that a certain amount of tuning needs to be done by the end user. With apologies to all engineer/machinist woodworkers, I will endeavor to explain how to tune a metal bench plane without involving a machine shop or taking up vast amounts of your valuable woodworking time or money. I’ll leave out the small stuff like after market blades and accessories. This is by no means the final word on this subject, but maybe you can pick up a thing or two from my many years of making a living with these wonderful tools. If you find my methods rudimentary or crude, let me paraphrase Jim Krenov who said at some point the engineer and artisan must part ways.

Visit Highland Woodworking for the full article.

Sep 152006
 

Scratch Awl Turning Contest Winners

We are pleased to announce the winners of the Highland Woodworking Scratch Awl Turning Contest. We had such a tough time judging the last contest that this time we let YOU join in the fun and pick the winners this week via an online voting form.

Due to the slim margin between the two contestants receiving the most votes, we decided to award prizes to both of the top two entries. You picked:

  • 1st Place (with 28% of votes): Brian Watson, Dawsonville, GA – $50 Gift Certificate
  • 2nd Place (with 23% of votes): Kathleen Kruse, Covina, CA – $35 Gift Certificate

Thanks to all who participated!

See all the entries in Highland Woodworking’s Turning Contest Gallery

Sep 152006
 

JoolTool Sharpening SystemThe JoolTool is a versatile freehand grinder, sharpener and polisher. Since your work piece is applied underneath the spinning abrasive, the process is in your direct line of sight. Abrasives are attached to perforated backer discs so you can see the workpiece while the discs are spinning.

Think about the complex geometry of a carving/turning gouge. Just paint the bevel edge with a black marker, bring the gouge under the JoolTool’s abrasive disc and grind until the mark disappears. You won’t have to remove the tool from the machine to check your progress. It’s surprisingly intuitive to use even though your hands are the only jig.

A variable speed motor adjusts to your comfort level from 500 to 5000 RPMs. The unique shape of the abrasive’s back pad creates enough wind current to sufficiently cool your tool’s surface as you grind. The JoolTool’s housing tilts forward 17° for ease of use. Its spark shield has a 1-7/8″ OD – 1-1/2″ ID vacuum port, but we recommend using it only for nonsparking materials.

Included with the JoolTool Special:

  1. The JoolTool
  2. Informational/instructional DVD (the instructional part is quite good)
  3. 1 Ninja back pad
  4. 3″ Ninja buff/polish felt wheel
  5. Small block of green honing compound
  6. 1 each 3M Purple Ceramic 80, 120 and 200 grit
  7. 1 each 3M Triact 35, 20, 10 and 5 micron
  8. Tapered spindle for attaching accessories

We recommend getting some additional back pads so you won’t have to remove the paper each time you want to switch grits.

Visit Highland Woodworking for more information.