After a bit of revision of ‘how to safely use a bandsaw without dying’ I spent a few hours today over at our friend’s house making the bits of wood I’d cut into large chunks of wood into smaller chunks of wood.
I both cut things into roughly the right shapes and also spent some time making them roughly the right thickness*. Now I need to start making templates so I can do the magic of pattern-cutting using the router.
One thing that’s interesting is that the wood has the blue-streaking from having sat unharvested once cut.
Apparently that’s a common problem with maple. I’d heard of it before, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in person in raw wood. I’d seen it once before in some furniture where they’d chosen to make a feature of it. I debated whether to hack it off, but I’m unlikely to manage to get even close to all of it, so instead have decided it’s a feature, not a bug.
So where I could I’ve left it in. However, the dirty great water stain I trimmed off.
Anyhow, so things are progressing and my ornamental firewood is at least an interesting shape:
* One piece ended up unintentionally excitingly close to the right thickness. I was aiming to be almost 1/4 inch thicker than final thickness, but mid cutting one chunk of wood I realized I could split in half (more or less) and get two out of the same bit of wood. I passed it through the bandsaw without doing the careful measuring I’d done with all the other bits – because I was already resawing to the right thickness. Only for whatever reason, the second one ended up being actually about one mm thicker the required thickness (curiously, the other bit is the thickness I was aiming for).
