In the “look what santa brought” thread, I mentioned cutting paulownia veneers with my new christmas pressie to myself,
a Hitachi circular saw.
So here’s the follow on thread, with some results.
A couple of months ago I bought almost half a tree trunk of paulownia.
Bark and everything!
About 8 feet long, a foot wide, and 4 inches deep.
I got another chunk sent to a joiners shop, and asked them to cut it into 3 mm (almost 1/8") planks.
They came back beautiful, 6 inches wide and 8 feet long.
But the price!!! for NZ$60 worth of wood, there was a NZ$100 bill for the labour!
Made a couple of boards with that.
So I set to figuring out how to cut my own.
My uncle has a decrepid old table saw, made shortly after the birth of christ.
It has a 3 inch max cutting depth, so I tried cutting 6 inch planks, by doing a cut from each side.
This was pretty dismal, getting the cuts lined up was every bit as hard as i’d expected.
I’ve had a fair bit of carpentry experience, so i knew that was coming!
I settled for cutting 3 inch wide planks, from one pass with the table saw, and made a nice board out of those.
But wide planks cut down the amount of work needed to fit them together - fewer joins, less time, less to worry about…
I’ve beed wanting a new saw for a while, just been getting by with my 18V cordless.
Bought a sexy 8 1/4" saw, so stoked, i’m a tool fiend.
We don’t have the rear motor worm-drive Skil 77 saws in New Zealand, all you can get are sidewinders.
I loved the 77’s in california!
I figured with the right jig, I could cut better than a table saw.
Table saws only work easily when you have a dead straight piece of timber, or are prepared to cut off a lot to make it straight.
And even then the cut pieces can twist themselves when the grain is severed.
Walking a large bowed piece of lumber round the fence on a table saw leads to inconsistent results.
Next post details what I came up with, but first some photos: