Screen Play (18)

I hope each and every one of you had a decent weekend. Back at it, post 18 in this build thread with previous episodes archived to the right of the page.

Today I decided it was time to unleash the Bubinga. A wide plank of it has been serving duty as a shelf inside my living room for the past year, but a new duty now calls. It's heavy stuff, so it took a while to extricate it and get it out onto a couple of sawhorses out in the yard.

Measure twice and cut once:


Crosscutting, as Krenov noted, should be preceded by much careful consideration.

The plank I am working with is about 16.5" wide. I need to finish out with 7 pieces, in two different widths. The thickness of the plank is 0.94" at this point, and will be ripped into two slices, each of which will ultimately finish out with a thickness of 0.3250" ~ 0.3330". Fortunately the kerf on my bandsaw is around 1.6mm, which is pretty narrow for a re-saw, however I have very little room for error here.

Next I ripped the stock into two planks:


It was a good sign that during both cross-cutting and ripping the Bubinga didn't move much.

I then bundled the material into my truck and headed down the road to Leeds, where my bandsaw is stored.

The bandsaw wasn't quite ready to go, as it needed to be wired up. I had a 3-phase 230v. plug on hand, and after locating the correct circuit breaker in the 3-phase panel, I was able to wire it up fairly quickly. I'm pretty comfortable with wiring work.

Once the wiring was buttoned up, I threw the breaker and then it was the moment of truth as I switched the machine on:


All was looking good:


I pressed start to see how things looked- there was a 33% chance i had the power leads reversed which would cause the machine to run backward, however it ran forward so my task was done and it was time to re-saw. It was nice to see the Hitachi come to life again.

I screwed a piece of MDF to the fence to increase its height, then carefully positioned the fence. I had to cut the planks as close to dead center as possible so as to have the best chances of getting my finish dimensions out of the material.

Time to feed wood into the beast:


The wood moved slightly as I ripped, but I remained hopeful in terms of final results. After 15 minutes, I had eight pieces, each around 0.4" thick:


Then I talked to some other woodworkers in the building and they were kind enough to let me have the use of a jointer and a planer for a spell, and I ran the material through in several passes. At the end I have my pieces down to around 0.36" or so, and reasonably straight and clean. Now I'll let them sit for a few days and plan my next steps. I'll be gluing the boards into three units, two of 2 boards each, and one of 3 boards each.

Thanks for coming by today. Please have a look at post 19