Question
What type of machines or brands would I be able to say take a 5/4 x 6" or 8" x 12' board and rip it in half? I mean as far as in thickness-wise so I get two boards that are thin. Or what are people doing when they are making moulding and need some casing or base mouldings around or under 1/2" thickness? Is it better to buy it thinner and then make the moulding or to get a machine to make it that thickness to make the thinner profiles? I am sure it comes down to cost of doing one vs. the other.
Forum Responses
(Solid Wood Machining Forum)
From contributor C:
You can re-saw a couple of ways, with a dedicated re-saw which is a large bandsaw, either vertical or horizontal, in the 30-36" wheel size, or with a traditional bandsaw and re-saw fence. Production re-saws are big and pricey, and small shop bandsaws, say 14-16", don't have the FPM to effectively re-saw production quality material, that is they're slow. I have a 20" Rockwell with a re-saw feeder on it for cutting door skins; it works much better than the Laguna and Delta smaller saw's I used previously, but I wouldn't think about using it for a moulder run worth of material.
Besides the inefficiency of a small re-saw set-up, in my experience, re-sawn material is not a quality material to use in a moulding application. When dried, the material is stable to itself, but the core and shell may be different MC, slight if done properly, but still there. When you saw it in half, the new face is not equalized to the other, and the material may cup. Careful selection when you run to make sure your relief cut is on the new face can help minimize this and keep it flat, but again my experience is that it still wants to move.
For base boards and wainscoting, if I am processing the material, I have the sawmill (landlord) cut it to 3/4. If I have to bring in material, I still use 4/4 and turn the excess into chips, via a couple extra passes through the planer before the moulder, and make the base a little heavier than "traditional".
I try to use this as a selling point to differentiate myself from the big box stores/traditional lumber yard's, by making casings a little heavier, say 13/16-7/8", and base 5/8-11/16", a little meatier than ranch and colonial.
My average run is in the 2500' range, 5-7 runs a week. I suspect that you all do that before lunch on Monday. Do you think the additional cost for a real re-saw is warranted at this production level? I think I can "waste" a lot of material before warranting the cost of decent used re-saw, but I would like to hear other opinion's as well.
