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In this video, I'm going to show you an operation called resawing, which is taking thick wood like you see here and sawing it on edge to make smaller boards
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So in a sense, it's kind of like using your bandsaw as a sawmill. In a sense, you're not sawing logs, but you're sawing something like logs
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Some fairly big wood like this. Now resawing is only possible with at least a medium-sized bandsaw, if not a large powerful one
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Because as you could imagine, cutting all the way down through this much wood in one pass, that's going to take a lot of horsepower
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So that's why you need a large-ish bandsaw for that. You also need one fitted with a wide blade. Wide blades are for resawing
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So this is 5 eighths of an inch wide, and I think that's going to work just fine for us
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This is a fairly beefy piece of wood here. This is a chunk of ash
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It's got some cracks in it. That won't matter for what we're doing here, but I'm going to run this through and show you what resawing is all about
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In order for this to work, there has to be adjustments to the machine
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In other parts in the course, I explain how to adjust the bearings and the blade tension and things like that
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So I'm not going to get to that right now. But I do want to talk about one thing that's peculiar to resawing on the bandsaw
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And that has to do with the fact that the blade doesn't necessarily cut parallel to the edge of the table on a bandsaw
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And it can vary from blade to blade, because each blade has a few unique qualities about it
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But it's not exactly the same as the next blade, which means that sometimes the fence that you're following cannot be parallel to the blade
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Because the fence is guiding the wood in one direction, but the blade is actually cutting in a slightly different direction
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It might be cutting a little bit like this, or a little bit like this, in relation to the fence
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Now that's why bandsaw fences, good ones anyway, are kind of unique
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Let me show you here. This looks just kind of like a fence you'd see
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You can loosen it and move it, just as you'd expect a fence to guide the work as it slides along into the blade
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But this fence also has another feature to it. And that feature is the ability to change the angle of the fence a little bit relative to the blade
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Now, we don't really know the angle we want at this stage, because we haven't started to cut yet
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So I'm just going to line the fence up with this slot here, and I'm going to make the fence parallel to the blade
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Lock it in position like that. Now parallel to the blade, and parallel to the table
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And we'll see how that works. Sometimes it works well. You know that there's a discrepancy between the cut line of the blade and the location of the fence if the blade starts to wander
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So if we're guiding the workpiece this way, in this orientation, but the blade wants to, just for example, cut a little bit like that
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well then the blade is slowly going to wander away from the fence. It's going to try to cut wider than the fence allows, and that's going to be a problem
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Same with the other direction. The blade might start to wander if it's trying to cut in a different orientation than the fence
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So we're going to start like this, and see how this works, and make adjustments later if necessary
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So let me get my safety glasses on, we'll switch on, and we'll saw that big thick piece of wood into thinner pieces
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So this worked out really well. The blade was in sync with the fence, and we got a really good cut here, some nice smooth action
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I want to talk to you a bit more about a unique feature of this fence, and other fences like it, when it comes to resawing
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But before I do, I want to show you a little trick for determining exactly which direction a blade cuts in
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And it has to do with dealing with the fact that the blade of a bandsaw doesn't always cut parallel to the edge of the table, as I've explained
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But you can just go ahead and try a cut like I did, and it worked out fine, and it often does
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But there's another approach, and it involves a piece of scrap wood
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And essentially, you draw a line on it, and then you want to cut along that line
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Whatever it takes to go down the middle of the line, until you're about halfway through
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I'll show you this in a second, I just wanted to explain it first though. By then, because you've kept the blade on the line the whole time, the piece of wood will be cut in the direction that the blade wants to cut
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So it may be parallel to the table, it may be like this, it may be like this
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We're essentially letting the blade tell us what it wants to do
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And then when we're part way through the cut, whatever the angle of that wood is, we can then slide the fence over and make an adjustment
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So that the fence is parallel with the way that this blade wants to cut
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Not every blade, because as I said, it's going to vary from one blade to the other
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It's not like a table saw blade that cuts the same from one blade to the other
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There's going to be variation, and that's what this is all about. I'll just raise this up a little bit higher than I normally would, so you can kind of see what I'm doing
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And let's begin by making this initial cut to let the blade tell us the angle that it wants to cut at
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I've made my cut right along the line
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I've shut off the saw, I'm waiting for the blade to stop
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It has now stopped. And I can tell this isn't exactly parallel to the table
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In order to make use of this though, I need to raise this guide so it's higher than the fence
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But basically this is the way the blade wants to cut. Let's just see how that compares with the fence
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Okay, can you see the difference there? Tight here, gap here. So let's make use of the fence's adjustment capabilities
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Here we go. I'm locking it in position. And now the fence won't fight with the blade because the fence is now parallel to the cut line of that blade
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I already showed you how you can adjust the fence to match the cut of the particular blade
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But there's another feature too and it has to do with this device here
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So I'm going to unplug the saw and I'm going to show you how this fits in here
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So in a sense, a standard fence is designed to do two things
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It's designed to keep the wood a certain distance away from the blade
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And it's also designed to guide the wood in a certain direction
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And it's that certain direction business that can sometimes cause a problem
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If the blade wants to cut in one direction and the fence is directing the wood in a slightly different direction
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then you're going to have problems. We did not have that problem with the wood that I cut there
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And if you have a small amount of that problem, you can fix it using this method that I showed you
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where the actual angle of the fence can be adjusted within limits
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Now, there is this feature here, this device here, when bolted to the fence
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it does the first job of a fence, maintaining a certain distance between the blade
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But it has no effect whatsoever on the direction. It's only a distance thing
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It's not a direction thing. So if you have a blade that's cutting quite a bit differently than the fence
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and the fence can't be adjusted to accommodate that, then you can use this metal cylinder if your fence can take it
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Because now the fence is not imposing any direction on the travel of the wood
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It's only imposing a distance from the blade. So that's where this comes in
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Now, let me do one more resawing cut. Let's see how thin of a piece of wood we can cut
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Because one of the purposes, one of the reasons you'd want to resaw wood is to make your own veneer
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When you make your own veneer, it should definitely not be as thin as factory veneer
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which is not much thicker than a couple of pieces of paper, really
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So if you're making what I call real veneer, and there's all kinds of reasons you want to do that
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bookmatching the grain, extending the use of precious wood over a larger area
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all the usual reasons for making veneer. When you're making your own, you can afford to make it a little bit thicker
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So let's aim for, say, oh, I don't know, a heavy eighth
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A heavy eighth of thickness on this piece of veneer. We'll see how it cuts
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On this piece of veneer, we'll see how it cuts. So we got a decent slab of veneer-like wood
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It varies in thickness a little bit, but you get the idea
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The bandsaw can be quite a precise tool, even for fairly heavy cuts, like what we see here
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There you go. That's resawing in a nutshell
