Sunday, March 4, 2012

Resawing Boards

For a doll bed I am making I need to resaw some 1 inch thick boards in half so I can make the bottom. These should finish to about 3/8 or just a hair thicker if my sawing is good.

To resaw the boards first I mark the center of the board all the way around so I have a mark to follow.  I use a marking gauge and then go over my line with pencil so its easier to see.  

I then clamped them in my leg vise and angled them so that I am sawing on the diagonal.  Here is the first board starting to be sawn.



The next step would be to flip the board around and saw at the other side to form a triangle, and continue in this way until you need to flip the board over and start on the bottom side.

I apply so wax to the saw periodically to keep it running smooth.  However, sometimes the board will cause the saw to bind a little in the kerf when you have the full saw plate buried in the board, in that case I add a wedge in the kerf.


I had to resaw 3 boards about the size of this one maybe 8" x 24".  And here is the finished product.


The saw marks won't be too bad to clean up on these with a fore plane.

When resawing boards with a hand saw you must take care to follow your lines on both sides of the board, this many times means stop sawing and check your progress frequently.  When you get off a small amount is fixable and a large amount could ruin the piece.  The other part that requires extra care is getting your saw kerfs to meet when you are flipping the board to saw the different corners.  When these kerfs don't meet up it is tough to fix without losing some thickness from the finished pieces.  Getting the kerfs to meet up every time takes some practice.  As you can see above mine weren't perfect, but this is good enough.

All in all it took about 15 minutes from beginning to end, this include measuring/marking the center and stopping to take a few photos.

No comments:

Post a Comment