Paul’s method of milling with a bandsaw
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Sean Taylor.
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8 July 2024 at 2:01 am #843756
Hi all! I’ve been a member of this site for while, but haven’t used the forum before. I was recently able to (finally) purchase a bandsaw for my workshop. I’ve been trying to use it to help with milling in the way that Paul describes. However, I’m unsure of the actual procedure for doing this. At first I tried (a) using my planes to get a reference face and reference edge, (b) ripping to approximate width then planing to exact width, and finally (c) resawing to approximate thickness then cleaning it up with my planes. However, it seems like this introduces a good deal of movement in the wood of after resawing. Then I found where Paul said that he resaws first to approximate thickness before the first step. However, later, while watching his Q&A on wood preparation, he made mention that he uses the bandsaw to get it with 1/32 ” of its final dimension before using the plane to basically take out the rough surface left by the machine. Has anyone had any success with using the bandsaw in this approach to hybrid milling? If so, what did you find the most successful? Thicknessing by hand is definitely the thing that takes me longest if I want to be really precise. Thanks in advance for any help!
8 July 2024 at 4:52 pm #843817Your approach as mentioned is how I do it. True one face and edge and then resaw to thickness.
That said, you may/will have issues depending on the severity of the resawing you need. If you’re cutting 8/4 stock down to 3/4 final thickness you are inviting a ton of movement due to released tensions. In that case I’d recommend getting one face and edge “true enough” and then resawing well oversize. Then let the pieces sit for a day or so before proceeding to final dimensioning.
Good stock selection will also impact your results.
Hi Sean, I am hardly an expert, but I have had my share of naughty wood that moves in inconvenient ways after dimensioning. Movement can be the result of tensions in the wood that are released when the wood is cut in various ways. That movement often happens very fast. But movement that appears after cutting the wood to thickness is often the result of exposing less dry internal wood — wood does not like it if one side is less dry than the other. It can move whether you cut it to thickness by resawing using a bandsaw (or by hand!) or you plane it to thickness, whether by hand or with an electric planer.
Here is the little I know. 1. It helps if wood is well dried to start with. 2. But a trick I use is to take wood off of both sides equally so you do not have one relatively dry and one relatively wet side. 3. Only thickness (whether by machine or by hand) to a rough width and then let the wood sit for a few days to further dry and to see how much it moves: hopefully you left enough so you can do a final thicknessing (or redesign your project to whatever thickness you end up with) . 4. Alternatively, thickness the wood to size and get it right into whatever you are making before it has a chance to move, hoping the joinery will deep it from moving. 5. Straight grained quarter sawn wood is less likely to move than plain (flat) sawn wood. Flat sawn has a terrible tendency to cup. 6. The thinner the wood, the more likely it is to cup or twist after thicknessing. I remember taking a very straight, I thought well-dried, piece of wood and cutting a series of thin slices of less than a quarter inch only to watch each one warp right before my eyes as it came off the band saw. If it is a very thin piece of wood, you can sometimes just bend it back using joinery to hold it, or even moisten the concave side — there is that old trick of straightening sheets of plywood that have warped by leaving them on the grass in the sun. The up side dries from the sun and the down side moistens from the grass. I have had versions of that trick work a few times with thin pieces of solid wood.
9 July 2024 at 1:46 pm #843901Thank you both so much! Those replies help make sense of a lot to me. Now I just need to sit down and think through things with even more sensitivity, as Paul says.
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