Woodslicer Bandsaw Blade from Highland Hardware.
Give yourself a break and use this great bandsaw blade.
If you decide to get serious about guitar building as a hobby or as a profession, at some point in time you will want to explore merits of resawing your own wood blanks. Now I’m not talking about logging here, but the purchase of lumber from qualified sources and sawing up the rough lumber yourself, using your shop equipment (i.e. bandsaw).
By buying the lumber in 1″ or 2″ widths, you can save a considerable sum of money. You just have to be aware of what your are buying and does it measure up to the wood you can buy pre-cut from luthier supply houses. That is a great question and a question that keeps most small scale luthiers going back for pre-cut sets.
Be sure you know what you are in for when making this plunge.
Often the luthier supply houses really know their stuff. They know about grain pattern, run-out, aged wood sources and dimensional requirements. If you purchase the lumber yourself, you will have to know all of this information and dig for it as the lumber yard is likely not to give you much help. You can learn a great deal from books and talking to other luthiers to learn all there is to know about what is good and what is bad about a certain flitch of wood. That being said, there are some other issues you will need to deal with:
You need the proper equipment on-hand and preferably within your own shop, where you have control of atmosphere and storage conditions. You will need a rather large bandsaw and a new or newly sharpened bandsaw blade. Personally I have a 20″ Jet bandsaw that will cut as deep as any guitar that I would make. It has all of the proper guides, guide adjustments, blade tension adjustments and most of all, the power that is required to cut through a 8 or 9″ piece of wood, consistently and evenly.
As mentioned, the blade needs to be new or newly sharpened. I have found that the Wood Slicer Blades available from Highland Hardware are some of the greatest blades out there. I can slice off a piece of veneer from an 9″ wide piece of wood with deadly accuracy. After these blades get dull, you can choose whether to sharpen them – have a professional do this though as if they are not sharpened evenly along their length, and that is a lot of teeth, you will have to deal with blade drift – the bane of woodworkers with bandsaws.
Equally important is the setup of your bandsaw. You have to make sure you have proper tension on the blade that matches your blade size. You have to set the blade guides is such a manner that there is no play in the blade between guides and you need to set the back-stop of the blade so is does not push the blade back as soon as you apply forward pressure to the blade, as you do in resawing wood.
Setup of your fence is important as well. I use an adapter on my fence that is a cylinderial metal guide that pushes the wood away from the fence and allows me room to adjust for any blade drift.
Always cut a test piece on a scrap piece of wood.
Above all else, do not try to hog the wood through the saw. This will only result in a burned blade, distorted guide setup and a dull blade, and at worst you could snap a blade. Just go slow and easy and apply only very little forward pressure. Let the saw do it’s work and keep the wood tight against the fence setup.
How Much Can I Save? That depends of a lot of things, but as a general statement you will be able to cut your own wood for between 50% and 25% of the cost of pre-cut wood.
Tags: guitar making tools, luthier tools, resawing guitar tonewood
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