Reply by Jack_Isidore

Hey Hazelton, I realize now my response sounded a little dismissive, but that wasn’t my intent at all. I was being an idiot (seriously, very stupid) and thought you were talking about electric guitars, in which case you can probably understand my confusion.

The reason I haven’t gone with veneers is because I tried but eventually gave up trying to find them in that thickness. .045” is pretty thick for veneers, especially exotics. That was my experience spending several hours/days looking for thicker veneers and speaking with a few companies. I would gladly just buy them at my desired thickness as I am currently doing with a few domestic species. Having said that, your link shows two-ply veneers, which I hadn’t found earlier, and are only 10 mil off of my desired thickness. That’s small enough I can probably just add a substrate to give myself the extra thickness.

Dusty, I didn’t mean to be dismissive of you either, and in retrospect I realize I left out that bit of crucial info that this is for a production application. I will look into the sand-flee, I haven’t heard of that. I realize there will simply be limitations due to the nature of the wood gumming up sand paper, I guess my hope is finding a resaw process that gets it close so I don’t have to remove too much material with a sander, and then using a sander that reduces how often I spend swapping out paper.

The pieces only need to be about 2.5” wide, what I am sourcing now happens to be wider, 4.5” to be exact. This extra width helps me sand the surface with a ROS before laser cutting the parts, although if I am sanding the material to thickness myself I can simply do the same with the finest grit I am using with the ROS.

I’ll look into the OSS (which I had never heard of) and resaws. I knew I would need a bandsaw that can accept a wide blade, but I wasn’t aware of bandsaws that were even more oriented to resawing.

Loren, the application is iPhone back panels. I posted a LJ project a few months ago of them http://lumberjocks.com/projects/57256 – The business has been doing very well, which is fortunate because I am soon to be laid off of my day job as a research engineer. I thought it would be much easier to offer exotic wood species, but having not found a local shop that can (or will) do this for me, I have had to limit myself to species I can source from a supplier. I will check again with them to verify they are unwilling or able to do special orders for exotics, but I have a vague recollection of a conversation with them months ago where they said they could not do this due to the same issues of loading up the drum sander that I had. (although they are using a wide belt sander I believe)