Jaager

For the Holly, you would need to factor in the kerf if you cut your own from a sheet, but you would be able to match the width to that of each vessel. Being a bit compulsive, I would order twice the amount I calculate as needed. For the Pear, with a sheet, you may be able to get more efficient use of the wood since you should be spilling the plank shapes. You may be able to use the curve from a previous plank as the edge of the current one. Spilling = cut a piece of 3x5 or 4x6 index card to the shape that will fill the plank opening without any lateral bends - so that it lays in naturally. Not often will it be a true rectangle. More likely sort of parallel shallow curves, but the width tends to taper a bit. Use the card board pattern to cut the planks for each side. One hopes that bilateral symmetry is occuring, but adjustments as you go should correct a digression while it is minor. If you calculate (say) six stakes between a pair of ribbands, rather than cutting all six, measure 1/6 th for the first, lay it in, measure 1/5 th for the next, etc.

I was thinking about the canvas screens - would it work to use Egyptian ballooner sail cloth or 1000 ct cotton and dope it with shellac - varnish - or even diluted TiteBond as the actual material?

Pro: Debarking will speed drying. You will discover any boring insects or remove any eggs if they have not hatched yet. Con: It is possible that it may dry too quickly and unevenly and check or split - I suspect this is mostly a problem with thick pieces of wood in log form.

For resawing, it is not the number of teeth that counts. 3 teeth per inch will do. The Wood Slicer is thinner, has stronger steel and the teeth have almost no set. The key is the tooth shape - it is technical. A fine tooth blade will probably have too much set and not be efficient in wood removal thru thick stock. The gullet will fill with sawdust before it get thru the wood and stop cutting. The set will leave a rough surface. Look for a blade designed for resawing.

A table saw is not necessarily your best tool. Your bandsaw is better. But you probably also will want a thickness sander. Your wood is essentially seasoned. You need to get it into flat from the round. 1) If you band saw is large enough, you will not be sorry for using this blade: http://www.highlandwoodworking.com/woodslicer12resawbandsawblades705to137.aspx?utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Wood%20News&utm_content=THW+5 - but only use it for resawing - which is what you will be doing. 2) You need to fix the log to a carrier board to keep it from rolling. The board needs to be flat and have one straight edge - to ride against the fence. An easy way to fix the log - use right angle 2x4 braces from a big box building supply place and wood screws - one on each end of the log and at least one on the back side. Having room for this pretty much tells you how large the carrier board has to be. You can use short screws to attach the braces to the board, so 1/2 inch ply might do, but 3/4 inch is probably better. 3) The size you produce - it depends. If you have an immediate need, that is your thickness. Otherwise - decide on a raw stock size to slice your your final planks from. I like 1 to1.5 inch thick - as wide as I can get. The Wood Slicer blade cuts a thinner kerf than most table saw blades and the finish is almost as smooth as what a hollow ground table saw produces. You are also less likely to get unwanted digit amputation with a band saw. A thickness sander is also safer way to get thickness precision. It is probably a toss up between a Byrnes saw and the band saw for cutting the final width of deck planks. For hull planks - if you do them correctly - the final width will come from your table sander - since there is spilling involved. We are not building a house, most everything is curved. Now that you have a band saw, look at this for turning it into a stable jig saw. http://www.carterproducts.com/band-saw-products/band-saw-stabilizer

I think of sanding sealer as being a thick product. Useful on open pore wood like Black Walnut, Oak, and A finish plywood to fill the pores and give a smooth even finish. Intended more for full size furiture. Shellac is an excellent traditional finish. It can be as thick or thin as you wish. It is not good for applications where it can come in contact with water. It hydrates and turns white. It can be easily repaired, but do not use it to finish a coffee table. A shellac finish can be removed with alcohol. The material can be preextracted and purified and comes as Orange (probably straight from the beetle) to Super Blonde - almost water clear. The solvent is alcohol (methyl, ethyl, 2-propanol, probably propanol if you can find it). You can buy it in flakes and make up your own solution as needed. The more purified are the flakes, the lower the maximium concentration you can make. The impurities increase solubilitiy in alcohol. The more volatile is the alcohol (Me>Ethyl>Prop) the less working time if you are using a cloth for application. Dilute shellac is a good first coat for most any other finish. It is very compatible with other finishes. French polish seems to be multiple layers of shellac applied with a cloth that has a bit of Linseed oil in the cloth. I would guess that Tung oil or Walnut oil might work as well.

For me it does scroll cutting better than a scroll saw. No vibration. With 3-4 tpi the finish is rough, so leave it proud and finish to the line with sanding. Now for some out of left field stuff. Sanding: For a fast job of it a disc or belt sander is the more common tool, but neither are good for inside curves and both sand perpendicular to the grain. A sanding drum will sand with the grain, sand at a tangent - better control - and with a small enough drum do most inside curves. There is at least one post here about using a drill press to mount drums overhead. There are spindle sanders, but I don't know if 1) the up/down movement can be turned off. 2) if they will mount different sized drums. I made my own spindle sanding table and can use different diameter drums - 3/4" to 3". I have a 1/4" ply table top with a cutout diameter to match the drum diameter. My drums use normal 8 x 11 sandpaper as stock. I do not see that these drums are still being sold. The motor came from Grainger. The box is 3/4" ply (because I over engineer everything). The motor mounting is an Erector Set sort of rig using steel bracing for 2x4's and such for home construction. Sound dampening using free samples of Armstrong kitchen flooring. The hard part was matching the motor shaft to the drum mounts. My Unimat lathe - using pieces from a cold rolled steel rod - bore for female - turn for male - drill and tap for set screws. If you have access to a full sized wood lathe, a hard wood like Rock Mable can be glued to a central shaft and turned to any desired diameter. The shaft matching your motor shaft so that there is a uniformity in the mount. The turned Maple drum would be true and not be out of round - like some rubber drums that use a squeezing action the hold a sanding sleeve. The sandpaper can be attached using contact cement - cloth backed sanding medium lasts longer. It is a hassle to remove. Naptha will undo Weldbond contact cement, but it still needs scraping off. I have not found an absolute solvent for it.

The common size for benchtop bandsaws seems to be 9 inch. There are many models available. You may not be happy with one smaller than this. Check your big box hardware outlets and on line for this size. With a strong enough motor, you should be able to resaw from 2 inch stock. If you are going to use it to cut out patterns, you can cut tight turns with a 1/8" blade. I was disappointed when the 1/16" blades were discontinued. If scroll cutting is to be your main purpose, you might wish to look at Carter Products -Band Saw Stabilizer® Guide System for Scroll Cutting. If it looks like something you would use, buy a 9 inch bandsaw that will match one of the available stabilizer models. Over here, 59 1/2" is the common blade size for a 9 inch saw. It is probably wise to pick a model that uses a readily availble blade size. Since a bandsaw cuts in a constant downward direction, there is no vibration or chatter of a work piece as with a scroll saw or jigsaw. Some models may be noisy, but most probably are not. The issue is probably moot, since you would not hear it over the noise from the shopvac collecting the wood dust anyway.

If this is one of the versions of a 9 inch bench top bandsaw (59 1/2 inch blade length) there is a very useful addition to help it in cutting tight curves ( 1/8 inch blade ). The Carter products Blade Stablizer is fairly expensive, but is worth the cost. I bought a 9 inch bandsaw from MicroMark when it was on sale - they no longer vend it. The mount did not match any Carter model, but it does use a rod and fortunately, a larger rod, so I could use K&S telescoping brass tubing as bushings for an exact fit. http://www.carterproducts.com/band-saw-products/band-saw-stabilizer/standard-model-2-std2

8 x 12 - if you are desperate, and don't mind the waste - almost never a two dimensional plane produced - a froe or something like it - split the log in half. You will probably get something that rocks (as in rocking horse - not music). Still, a bandsaw is better Through a club or something, find a bandsaw owner, buy him a blade and get it into 1 1/4 or 1 1/2 inch thick billets. I say that because raw lumber from a saw mill often comes 4 x4 which means that there is extra thickness to be scraficed to a planer blade at a finishing mill. At your stage, a standard quality ripping bandsaw blade would be adequate for rough billeting if the bandsaw is not yours. At any rate, paint the end cuts now unless it is already dry.

Rock/Sugar Maple this is certainly the case, and fortunately this is the species usually sold by lumber dealers. Well worth using. Water/Soft Maple is another thing altogether. Not nearly as hard and can be brittle. No data here on what other species of Maple are like.

Try a brown or red brown artists pencil for the caulking. Then scrape the deck with a single edge razor blade ( hold the blade near vertical to surface). As a last step, this leaves to pores of the wood open to the finish - instead of filled with wood flour. Make sure all traces of steel wool are removed. Bits left behind can react with some finishes and rust stain the wood. Tung oil 1st coat - cut to 50% with mineral spirits. Consider an old product - shellac - a thinned coat of super blonde may be worth a look.

I don't know why anyone invented it, but I used a push stick that I inherited from my father that was Aluminum - plastic grip - inch scale engraving. It came in contact with the blade and removed a carbide tooth. What was a smooth running expensive Freud rip blade was then out of balance. I had the tooth repaired, but I suggest using Fir or Pine from a scrap 2 x 4 or furring strip to make a push stick. Use one for each hand. Ripping (resawing) is best done with a band saw. You can use short pieces of wood, no kickback and the kerf is significantly less.

Care needs to be taken with the name Poplar. The accolades for the wood are most likely for - Liriodendron tuuipfera - Yellow poplar, Tulip poplar,Tuliptree, Canoe wood. This is an excellent wood, especially if you like working wood with a hardness similar to Basswood. Poplar is also the name for a different family of trees - probably closer to tall growing weeds - some of these Populus nigra - Lombardy Poplar | alba - White Poplar | deltoides - Cottonwood | tremuloides - Quaking Aspen | x canadensis - Carolina Poplar. These tend to be "dirty" trees. Rapid growing, weak-wooded, fragile in wind storms, and drop a lot of junk. I think the wood is soft and subject to splitting. I am not sure which was the actual species, but I grew a row of "Siberian Poplar" - I think advertised on the back of Parade Magazine (never a good omen). It did grow fast, was dirty, brittle, and did not even make good fire wood - burned too fast with little heat. Might as well use cardboard as that wood.

With a proper band saw and a thickness sander, you should be able to provide yourself with all of your timber needs from normal stock lumber or what you can harvest in the wild. The wood from the supplier in your link seems to be really expensive. Is there a hardwood supplier near you who sells to furniture makers? Or better, a wholesaler? The bowl blanks will not help you. Of the self select, only the cherry (Prunus serotina), maple (if sugar/rock Acer saccharum), sycamore (if English -not our Buttonwood/Planetree Platanus occidentalis) and steamed pear. The steamed pear would rate as Swiss pear and is the only one that I think would be worth anything like those prices. You want clear, straight grained, no pore, as little contrast in grain as possible. These are not characteristics of interest to wood turners and exotic furniture makers. Find a supplier of banal looking wood. Think about using wood dyes (not stains) on light colored wood for contrast rather than exotic tropicals which often have contrasting grain and open pores. If you are going to pay prices like those, you need a good quality band saw blade. http://www.highlandwoodworking.com/woodslicer12resawbandsawblades705to137.aspx?utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Wood%20News&utm_content=THW+5 This blade is excellent steel, thinner than most with not much set, so the kerf is less and the finish is close to planner smooth. Only use it for resawing. I have it in my mind that this product is made from material made in France. I cannot verify that, but you may find it in a local product and not have to import it.

If you can find someone with a large enough and powerful enough band saw. No matter what, a 10 inch x 18 inch log of green Apple is going to be heavy and ackward to handle. Thinking about getting the log out of the round, if your band saw has enough cutting height ( with the 6 inch extension a 14" Grizzly can do 12" ) and you have a table extension, the log can be cut with most of it outside of the blade. A leaf would be added and attached to extend the carrier board to the fence (on the inside). The leaf would be cut along with the section of log. I would take off as much as practical on the first cut. Now there is a flat plane to ride on the carrier, but you probably still need to make at least one perpendular cut with the log on the outside. After this you can probably move the fence to the outside and remove the table extension. The Grizzly has a 13 inch throat so the log could probably be cut from there without a table extension. There would be no room for the fence on the inside, so you would still need the sacrifice carrier board extension to ride against the fence. You should still do 1-2 inch thick billets while the wood is green. As it dries, there may be twist and bowing. You may have to do some planer work on the dry stock.

I varied between 200 and 300 W. The temp did not get above 120 F and was mostly 90-100 F. I mounted the box inside a shelf in my unheated garage. The temp in the box was something like 20-30 degrees higher than the temp in the garage. The foam sheets were not a tight fit, the air leakage was needed, and the foam only 1 inch thick. This is nothing like as aggressive as a commercial kiln, but it does produce an effective movement of water out of the wood that was a lot faster than air drying. I think it is not so much the temp as the relative humidity that counts. I was drying Holly so it was a race with the blue mold. I also wanted a temp that was higher than the mold liked. It worked. The exhaust fan - being a computer fan is DC - needed an AC power adapter - it seems that an adapter that is equal to or greater than the fan rating is OK. One with a lower output will burn out the fan.

6 foot is a bit much to stand on end and make a vertical slice. Ideally, you want the bisecting cut to follow the plane of the pith. Securing a log to do a free hand longitudinal chainsaw cut is still difficult for me to see how to do. You want to see where it is going and not move and not bite into the dirt. 2 x 4 's and large nails ? You probably should use a chalk line as a guide. Ripping with a chainsaw is probably a bit more dangerous than crosscutting. If you don't use one for a living, you may wish to get help from someone who does. An accident with one of those things..... I know it looks simple enough to do, but free hand is much more dangerous than using a mill rig. It is probably going to want to kickback the whole time. It scared me enough that I used coorse toothed hand saws If you can get the cuts done - here is a repeat of my advice on how to handle the wood. (With the simple kiln, you should get something usable in a month or two. But a 300 W light bulb on 24 hrs/day for a month - it will increase your electric bill a bit.)

Aromatic Cedar (Juniperus virginiana) (Red Cedar, Eastern Red Cedar, Juniper) does not seem to have suitable properties for our use. Alaska Yellow Cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis) on the other hand looks to be an excellent choice for our uses.

Brian, Willow would not be my choice, unless you intend to fill, seal and paint it. Like Ash, Hickory, Oak, Walnut, Elm, Sassafras the grain does not scale well. Most of these species have open pores, which in scale, may resemble soup bowls in the timber.

Unless you intend to use it for 1:1 scale furniture, 16 -18 inches should be long enough. That is about 70 feet at 1:48. Section out the straight areas. That is a heavy log to handle even at 18 x 10 inches. That thick can be difficult to manage on a non-industrial band saw - keeping it from rolling during a pass. Even using a chainsaw to cut it down the middle might be worth the loss to kerf if the sawyer can get you a flat plane down the middle. This way you should lose the pith, which you don't want anyway. Splitting is likely going to produce a torqued plane and leave the pith, which you would then want to box out. With a half log, you may be able to get a billet that is 7-8 x 1-2 x 18 from each side, but 7-8 inches is a lot of work on a saw motor. A Wood Slicer Resaw band saw blade will make it easier on the saw, produce a nice surface, have about as narrow a kerf as you can get, and be very resistant to breaking. But as you diagram out your billets, consider just how wide you really need the billets to be.

I find Apple to be an excellent wood for just about any use for our purposes. It feels a waste to see it burned. It is probably a bit too dark to use as deck planking. Although not nearly as vulnerable as Holly, getting it into 1-2 inch billets as soon as possible for drying is probably wise. It is subject to invasion by fungus while wet. I would debark as soon as possible. It smells good to us and it probably smells good to beatles. The color varies from tree to tree, but it makes for attractive keels, frames, hull planking, beams and other internal structures, rails, deck structures. It should turn well. You should get as much as you can, a go to wood for just about anything.

A crevise tool attached to a shopvac - mounted on top of the table at the back will get pretty much all the the wood dust. It is just noisy. A useful mounting method is to remove the lamp shade from an inexpensive swing lamp and attach the crevise tool and some hose to the distant arm of the lamp swing mechanism. You can put the end of the tool where you want it and get it out of the way easily. I got a series of sanding drums with a slit and core hole for friction clamping, that allowed for the use of sheet sandpaper on the drum. Neither Peachtree nor WoodCraft seem to be vending them anymore. Norton Premium sand paper seems to hold up much better than anything else I have tried.

Rather than risk Physics and time working to reverse your efforts , spilling and scarphing would be a more harmonious way to contour a plank curve in the thick dimension. How about using a rice / vegetable steamer to heat a plank? There are some relatively inexpensive ones and they have dual use. I think a while ago, experiments showed that water alone was as effective as household ammonia in wetting wood for bending. It is less deletorious to the wood also. Household Ammonia was only ever suggested because it was confused with the industrial anhydrious ammonia process. They are not similar methods.

If the proper choice of wood species and quality has been made, there is another option: wood dyes. A stain is sort of a semitransparent paint. A dye is totally transparent.