Paul’s method of milling with a bandsaw

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.