Sandal Woods - Fine Woodworking & Cabinetry

I have been showing resawn panels and 1/8-inch veneers cut by resawing spalted maple boards. This prompted several questions about HOW I do it, to get consistent thickness. Unlike other woodworkers, I don’t have a power feeder for my band saw; as a result, I had to improvise, as I show below.

Edit, to add the following items on tuning / adjusting the bandsaw: I always recommend you tune your bandsaw, to get the best results possible. David Marks, of Woodworks fame, has a systematic procedure, found here. Things I have done to get good results when resawing a board (and one item to do after finishing) are based on David Marks’ procedure:

• Adjust the blade to track in the center of the wheels - it might require installing new wheel tires; they are available in more than one material, but it seems that the urethane tires are best.
• Use the best blade guide system you can get, and change it as needed - the better the blade is supported, the better resawing results you will get.
• For a new blade: Use a blade tuning stone to remove the hard edges from the back edges of the blade.
• Balance the wheels, as needed. Use small pieces of wire.
• Adjust the angle of the fence to correct for blade drift; with the 3/4-inch resaw blade I use (below), this correction is 2°.
• Always release the tension on the blade when finished using the bandsaw.

My band saw is a 17-inch G0513 Grizzly (it is available through The Sandal Woods Store - buying here is one way to help support this blog):

Grizzly G0513 17″ Bandsaw - 2 HP

One other choice that is said to perform very well, but is not available in my Store, is the 14-inch Rikon band saw. It may not save you much over the Grizzly I have, but it might be worth looking at it, too. I will stick with the Grizzly, though.

The blade I use is a 3/4-inch, 3 TPI (teeth per inch) Timber Wolf blade. I use the “flutter” method to adjust the blade tension, which works well for me. When I received it, this band saw had Euro-style disc blade guides. These performed well for normal band saw use; but I was not totally happy with them when I used the saw for resawing operations. After a while I swapped the Euro guides for the Carter Guides, and have not looked back. Today I feel I made the right decision, as the Carter guides (also available at The Sandal Woods Store) give me much better performance in resawing operations; they provide better blade support, while allowing the blade to run cool. In the photos below I show the following (left-to-right, and top-to-bottom for the photos below):

1. Photo (1): The original Euro-style disc guides.
2. Photo (2): Rear photo of the upper Carter guide, highlighting the groove in the bearing; the bottom guide, below the table, is identical in configuration. Notice I had to cut the blade guard, to allow the new guide to fit properly.
3. Photo (3): Photo of the upper Carter guide, head-on.
4. Photo (4): My resawing setup, with the home-made resaw fence and the upper guide retracted to allow resawing a 10-inch board.
5. Photo (5): This shows the rear of the fence; The vertical ribs are a must, to hold the fence at a true 90°, and to keep it from deflecting as pressure is applied on the front of the fence during resawing.

I recommend the use of the screw clamps to hold the huge “featherboard” in place. I don’t even bother cutting fingers on this board, as I prefer to have full support from the 5-inch wide red oak board against the fence. This helps to get nice, even-thickness resawn panels and veneers.

Let me know if you need additional information. Thanks for your questions - keep them coming!

This post is a continuation of the previous post, to answer Neil’s question in its entirety. In the previous post I used new, resawn veneers, not the original panels I showed in “wing” book match that Neil requested me show in slip match arrangement.

I decided to follow up with this post, because I failed to mention, and to show, that it is possible to obtain more than one book match for every set of panels. This photo illustrates what I mean; for the alternate “wing” book match I simply swapped the position of the boards, as I tried to suggest with the arrow (this is a large image-please give it a few seconds to open):

I hope you can notice the differences in color for the two panels shown on the left-hand side of the photo above. These reflect the color/brightness differences I see in the shop. The photo on the right shows the outer surfaces of the board; these surfaces show dramatically different spalting patterns, and much of the symmetry is lost; this is the main reason that slip matching will not work very well for these two boards, as shown in the photo below:

I hope this exercise helps in the visualization of panel or veneer matching. In this instance it helped me to decide that the slip match for these resawn panels will not work very well; this was due to the differences in the spalting patterns of the front and back surfaces of the original board.

When resawing veneers, which are much thinner than these resawn panels, it should be quite easier to achieve slip matched patterns that are pleasing to the eye.