About Resawing

When it comes to sawing lumber there are three distinct processes.  Crosscutting is the most common to most woodworkers, wherein a longer board is made into a shorter board.  Ripping is when a wider board is cut into two or more narrower boards (one of which may be purely waste material) and is the function for which the table saw was primarily created.  Resawing, by which a thicker board is cut into two thinner boards, is generally the least employed of the three sawing methods.  And if it is done, it is mostly reserved for table saw or bandsaw work.

Because of my own peculiar interests and projects, I find resawing to be a regular function in my studio as I routinely saw my own veneers, both by hand and by bandsaw.  Recently in my preparations for my presentation at the upcoming SAPFM Annual Mid-Year, as I was working on some luan plywood panels to create the set of sample boards reflecting my presentation content, namely the options available to rural colonial craftsmen, I was dissatisfied with the aesthetics of the outcomes.  I decided to make some honest-to-goodness furniture lumber sample boards.  The most readily available material I had was true mahogany of 8-9 inches in width and 1 to 1-1/4″ thick.  In other words just a smidge wider than I could resaw with my upstairs bandsaw.  My downstairs bandsaw with the riser block and beefier motor was out of commission for some maintenance.  So, I decided to resaw the mahogany boards by hand.  [N.B. I would have preferred to use walnut as that would reflect 18th C rural life in the mid-Atlantic region better than imported mahogany, but the lumber for that was at the bottom of a very big pile of lumber.  Nuts to that.]

I used my 3/8″ kerfing saw on all four sides of the boards and got to work (the saw cuts a 1/16″ kerf 3/8″ from the edge of the board, not a 3/8″ kerf).

Back in the day when the Woodworking in America shindigs were a thing one of my favorite presenters was Ron Herman of Antiquity Builders of Columbus, Ohio, who would show up with a half-dozen boxes of carpenter’s saws of almost every iteration known to man, and talk about all things saws and sawing.  I learned  tremendous amount from Ron as he waxed eloquently of things he had been taught and subsequently learned from his many years of restoring and preserving historic buildings.  One thing he said which remains embedded in my brain was, “Make sure the saw fits the job.”  He would then walk the audience through the process of selecting from among the scores of saws he had for a specific task at hand.

Ron’s words were ringing through my ears as I undertook the slicing of my mahogany boards.  The mahogany was dense, and some boards were denser than others.  This required fine-tuning my tool selection to make sure the saw I was using was the best fit for the board itself, and given that the three boards I resawed were different densities, I wound up using three different saws (and tried several others) to get the job done.  Such a conundrum is not present when I am resawing, for example, cypress when the grain is so uniform and the density so creamy I can go at it with my most aggressive saw.  Or, when I am resawing hard cherry or maple.  But when, as in this case, the boards are not uniform in density or even when different sections of the same board differ in character I was switching back and forth between saws.

At this point in my studio trajectory my default starting point for resawing is the Bad Axe one man Roubo saw, which works wonderfully well and did so in this case.  For the densest of the mahogany boards this saw and its 4 t.p.i. configuration was the tool of choice for much of the work.

This time, inspired by this Salko Safic video I decided to try one of my c.1800 frame saws.  With its 2 t.p.i. configuration it cut like a beast on fire but I had a bit of wander on the outfeed side.  Perhaps with a bit more practice…  Or, I could give Mark Harrell a call to ask for some advice on getting the saw to cut dead true.  I had not tried using a four-foot saw by myself much before this, so perhaps all I need is more time in the saddle.  It could also be that Salko is simply a better man than I.

I have two brand new saw plates for four-foot frame saws so maybe a new tool project is coming over the horizon.

The most Ron Herman-ish episode of the excursion was tuning my saw selection to the individual piece of wood.  For the denser board my usual re-saw tool, the vintage 3-1/2 t.p.i.  Disston “skated” over the wood a bit much, even after I gave it a quick tune-up with a file (about five minutes’ worth of work; it took longer to set up my saw sharpening rig than to actually do the touch up).  Switching to the equally vintage 4-1/2 t.p.i. Disston, set up with the exact same specs did the trick.  Both saws were what I call “skin prick sharp” (the teeth are so sharp they grab my skin when I gently press my finger against them) so really the only difference was the tooth spacing.  The 3-1/2 t.p.i. saw worked like a charm on the less dense board.

I might not need Ron’s eight dozen saws in my inventory, but maybe a few more than my dozen-and-a-half could be called for.  I’m always scouting for good vintage saws cheap at flea markets.   All I want is an original depth plate and no kinks.

One final note: I make a point of keeping my saw plates well waxed, stopping to apply a thin swipe of paste wax whenever I feel things “grabbing.”  It makes all the difference.  Normally I use a paste wax made from my 31 Blend but that would have required walking to the other end of the studio to retrieve it.  This tin was right there.

I find resawing to be an immensely rewarding exercise, and I do mean exercise.  It takes a good while and a fair number of calories but the result is exhilarating when done well.  To paraphrase Toshio Odate, “If I find a task pleasurable, why would I want it to be over quickly?”

He is a wise man.