Wood Slicer Bandsaw Blade Report

[Farrell]

As requested, here is preliminary results of using Wood Slicer Bandsaw Blade to cut thin hard maple veneers of 1 mm.

The interest in cutting 1 mm veneers of quarter sawn hard maple stem from an interest in making horizontally laminated hard maple bridge caps with shallow angle intersecting annular rings.

Blade:   http://www.tools-for-woodworking.com/product.asp?0=294&1=295&3=1294

Laguna 16 HD saw:   http://www.lagunatools.com/lt16HD.htm

Blade guides:  http://www.lagunatools.com/LagunaGuides.htm

I set the fence to cut as close to a 1 mm slice as I could measure. I marked a 25 mm width on a 2-inch thick piece of soft maple and sliced away. I cut 14 pieces with the Wood Slicer blade, the last one having the blade bisect the 25 mm pencil mark. This would suggest that the kerf of the Wood Slicer blade is slightly less than 1 mm.

The blade I had on the saw previously was a giant blade for cutting 80-foot dia. logs, i.e. the teeth had 18 mm spacing and the blade was 1-1/4 inch wide. That blade produced easily visible ridges on the cut surface. No way could you glue veneers together with Titebond. Weighing a group of slices and an equal sized solid block of maple (slices compressed with clamps) gave a weight of 28.82 grams for the solid block and 26.38 grams for the slices. That means the rough surfaces of the slices caused 9% air space in the stack, or the sliced wood was 91% solid wood.

I weighed a 13.5 mm thick compressed (pretty tight by hand with F clamp) stack of slices cut with the Wood Slicer blade (14 pieces - so I guess they are slightly less than 1 mm thick each). The slices weighed 84.67 grams. An equal dimensioned solid block of maple weighed 84.79 grams. This suggests that a stack of clamped maple veneers cut with the Wood Slicer blade produces cut surfaces that mate together with only 0.1% air space, or the stack of slices is 99.9% solid maple.

No Wood Slicer pieces had visible saw marks. I took several slices of hard maple and sanded portions of them. At first a section sanded with 80 grit felt like the cut surface. Then I tried 120 grit. That yielded a smoother surface. I went back to the 80 grit surface and I could feel that the 80 grit surface was slightly smoother than the cut surface. I took a piece of 60 grit sandpaper and sanded away. The Wood Slicer blade cut surface is pretty darn close to a 60 grit sanded surface. The cut surface is very smooth, but not ready for finishing! I would call it close to 60 grit. But definitely NO saw marks at all, a very even 60-grit surface.

Now a 60-grit surface should be absolutely IDEAL for West System epoxy lay-up. Perhaps this is a bit rough for a yellow-glue lay-up?

For the Yahoo of it I just went out and sliced a 9-inch wide board of black cherry. Blade wandered a bit, but then I realized I had never adjusted blade tension. Tightened it a bit and it cut an pretty nice 2 to 3 mm veneer. Saw marks visible, not as bad as the other blade. I suspect that on a wide board like this I need to play with the blade tension to find some optimal value.

It cuts a 2-inch thick hard maple veneer with a 60-grit no saw mark surface. It will need some playing with to see what it can do with a wide board. Maybe my monster blade will be better suited for the wide stuff.

Anyway, bottom line is I like it! I feel very comfortable with this first test suggesting that with 1 mm laminations I can go straight from the bandsaw to epoxy glue-up. In fact, considering that epoxy requires some epoxy material remain between laminations, I would be concerned if the cut surfaces were any smoother. I should think epoxy glue-up of these surfaces will do best with minimal clamping pressure.

Terry Farrell