Resawing wood and veneers #1: The Laguna Driftmaster Fence System

Well I went ahead and did it. A woodworking e-mail blog stated that Laguna Driftmaster fence system for cutting veneers and I went to their web site and viewed the video.

I’ve cut veneers and thin strips of wood before, but never with a lot of accuracy. The kitchen cabinets that I made in NJ was made with Ambrosia Maple that was sawed into 1/4” slices and sanded to 5.2MM. It was then installed into a metric plywood router bit set for stile and rails.

I wanted to do something with more accuracy. I purchased the Laguna Carbide resaw blade and I’ve very pleased with it.

So I ordered it. This is what arrived.

I cut the straps and found a box that had been opened and then resealed.

This is my bandsaw. A Reliant which is a Tiawan-ese bandsaw. It is like one that Grizzly sold for a while, I bought mine from Woodworkers Warehouse (now out of business). It is an 18” version that I replaced the issued motor with a 3 HP version that I bought at a junk yard for $10.00. It turned out the motor had been under water in a flood. I took it to a motor repair shop to have it reversed in direction and they put in new bearings and baked out all of the water.

That is a chunk of Oak Burl that I cut a piece off for Gary for his wood collection.

The fence that I had was made by a person in Canada. They were being sold at a woodworking show.

I removed the fence.

I opened the box and this is the fence. 31” long. The Aluminum looks like it’s about 1/4” thick. Very heavy.

This is the table mount for the fence system.

This is the hardware for mounting the fence, with the driftmaster parts. The wheel and the spindle cause the fence to swing left to right to account for the blade drift.

This is the underside for the table. There is a 1/2 nut that allows the fence to move with threads or freehand.

The package that arrived was missing some key parts. The fence was made for a Laguna bandsaw and they made a universal mount and their thought was to sell them as extras, but it was decided to include them with the driftmaster. My box didn’t have them.

This is what they look like. Very substantial.

I had to drill two 1/2” holes in my table.

I mounted them on my table.

And then screwed it into the rod.

I then put on the table surface.

I had to align the fence to be 90 deg with the table surface, and get it with a close contact with the table surface.

I picked up a piece of white pine and cut off a slice of wood. That got the piece of wood uniform in thickness.

I then cut two additional slices. These were cut with one revolution of the screw feed which is suppose to be about 70 thousands. The screws feed is metric.

So here is what I found.

My blade is around .049 Thousands and is a carbide toothed bandsaw blade and 1 revolution of the threads is .070 thousands. The blade takes .049 and it leaves .021 thousands of wood slice.

The bottom slice is
Upper left upper center upper right
Lower left lower center lower right
.013 .014 .017
.015 .015 .020

second slice
.025 .023 .021
.022 .021 .022

The thickness of the blank after the first slice
.258 .259 .260
.257 .259 .260

After the second slice
.187 .193 .186
.185 .183 .183

Now the first slice is thinner overall than the second slice because i didn’t remember where the handle was registered so i turned it further for the second slice.

The variation in the thicknesses might be caused by the pressure that I placed on the wood as it was going by the blade. I didn’t have a magnetic pressure block in front of the cut.

I’m very pleased with the cut and the ability to control the thickness.

Basicly if I want a 1/4” slice. I will need to add a .050 for the blade thickness. 4 revolutions of the threads will be .280, so I’ll need about 4 1/4 turns.

Each tick of the crank is .1MM and .004 thou. and a revolution is 1.7MM and .070 Thou.

-- Karson Southern Delaware karson_morrison@bigfoot.com