A bit of resawing

For the wood show, I wanted to demonstrate what having a good resaw fence can do for your bandsaw.

Single Roller MagFence

Using the single roller MagFence, set less than 1mm from the blade (a lot closer than you see in the photo, and I also used a different blade to the one shown), I tried cutting a veneer from Tasmanian Blackwood.

Cutting a veneer

Think I got a pretty good result.  The match is included just for a sense of scale.  I used to do it by eye only, and getting a 3-4mm thick veneer I felt was a pretty impressive result.  Being able to easily resaw a veneer as thin as the one seen here is pretty startling!  And it was simple to maintain the cut width because of the fence.  It is not just veneers that can be cut either – splitting boards in half to have bookmatched panels is as easy.

The single roller is particularly useful because of the bandsaw’s tendency to track, so the operator needs to guide and steer the workpiece to compensate.  Having a fence controlling the width of cut makes this significantly easier.  The other secret is to ensure your blade has good tension.  Running the blades too loose is a very common fault, and results in a poor cut, wandering, and bowing of the blade causing a curved cut.