| Blog series by Gary Fixler | updated 1371 days ago | 6 parts | 25306 reads | 86 comments total |
Part 1: At last, a resawing jig!
I got 2 1” Timberwolf blades from Suffolk Machinery Corp. – 2TPI and 3TI – several months ago, and have been dying to try them out ever since. In that time I had several more projects, mom’s 10-day long yearly visit, my best friends’ wedding, a project I built for that (that I should post one of these days), and so much else. I didn’t want to use them until I had a resawing jig ready to go, so realizing that time was now, I jumped on it yesterday, later in ...
Part 2: first test of the new jig!
I routed in grooves on the fence of my new resawing jig for screwing logs to it, and with that, it was ready for action: Here’s a video – shot on yesterday’s lunch break, edited together last night, with the jig I made on Sunday – of my very first resawing work. The Timberwolf blade works very well, with no resistance and a clean cut. The Craftsman 18” wood/metal bandsaw is a slightly different story. It’s wobbly, which is just a ‘feature&#...
Part 3: some samples straight off the new jig
I promise not to start posting every log I resaw (lest my blog becoming nothing but!), but I think folks interested in resawing, or copying the jig I just made might like to see some more samples. First, I forgot I got some shots of this (before giving it away as a gift to a coworker girl who wants to paint on it like a canvas), but here’s some of that first log of Ficus microcarpa, resawn to veneer-like thinness: It’s about 1/16”-3/32” thick on one end, ...
Part 4: European olive (Olea europaea) turning blanks
I never posted it, but the day after I got those paperbark branches I went back to the same location to pick up the logs of the tree they were cutting down fully, so the building there could put up a security camera. I had stopped for the paperbark, and they asked if I wanted to come back for a whole tree the next day. Score! Here’s the tree as it stood between the cut-back paperbarks. I honestly never even looked at it, busy with paperbark at the time, so I was glad I had this one blur...
Part 5: Utility pole crossbar resawing, and another small tragedy
Because time is flying, it’s already 3 months ago that a car ran into a telephone pole (and street light) outside my office building, knocking it (them) down. I ran out and got some streetside safety gear, and my little electric chainsaw. Here I am, making all of that look too tiny: With no accessible outlet anywhere nearby (and no truck yet with bed-outlet), I had to settle for my Irwin carpenter saw. The pole was all hollow inside from rot and bugs when I sn...
Part 6: slabbing a huge Eucalyptus log
While looking through old Flickr sets, I realized I never made public one in which I slabbed one of the huge Eucalyptus logs I wrestled home from a craigslist ad. The largest of them is over 230lbs. I chose the smallest – probably around 80-100lbs, because I was desperate to see what lurked inside. I have at least a dozen of these things, so I could sacrifice one enormous beast to curiosity, though that said, I did immediately seal up the ends with a few inches worth of Anchorseal, and ...
