Resaw Jig

I’ve been dreading resawing these huge boards for three reasons:

1. Maneuvering a 90” long, 1 3/4” thick board through the bandsaw is not easy

2. Half of 1 3/4” is 7/8” inch, which is just 1/8” thicker than the finished size of the board (3/4”) and leaves little room for error (the bandsaw blade also creates a saw kerf that’s a little wider than 1/16” so that’s even less spare wood left over!)

3. Internal stresses in the board could lead to them warping quite a bit once they’re opened up

I found a resaw jig that should help with 1 and 2:

One side is a tall fence at 90°:

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and the other is just a big block that’s clamped to the table and makes sure the board has zero lateral movement when going through the blade:

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The front corner of the block is rounded off to make sure it feeds smoothly:

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I’ll do a few test cuts to be sure that the blade is cutting straight: bandsaws are famous for tending to drift left or right in the cut if the blade isn’t perfectly centered on the top wheel.

Number 3 is up to mother nature. I intend to run the boards over the jointer at least once to try and get them as flat as I can, but they are very long and ending up with only 1/8” deviation over almost 8 feet is nearly impossible. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the good thing about them being so long is that I can subtly bend them flat when assembling the table. It may end up that they’re so close to 3/4” off of the bandsaw that I only have enough left over to pass each face through the planer only once (taking off 1/32” each time) to at least get them smooth.

I’m going to run a couple of the offcuts from yesterday through first to try and get a gauge of how they’ll come out. Worst case scenario: I’ll resaw them off-center, enough to get a single 3/4” board from each (but with enough extra that I can really get them flat). I’ll end up with only 8 final boards instead of 16. But, then I can go to the hardwood store and pick up another batch to make up the other eight. It means my grain/color won’t match as well…but every project has some tradeoffs!

#wood #woodworking #gaming #boardgames #saw