After a week, checked the carved, resawn, planed scraps of walnut.
No warping, no twisting, no cupping. I’m okay with calling that a success. The thing for me about making boxes is that without a large bandsaw to do proper resawing, the only way to thickness pieces involves planing away the excess and that excess wouldn’t be waste ideally, it’d be the other half of a new set of thinner boards. The bandsaw I do have can manage up to 75mm of material but beyond that doesn’t work because it can’t physically fit under the top bearing. I can resaw more than that by hand but it’s a pain in the fundament and you waste a lot more material – a 30mm board doesn’t resaw to 2x15mm boards anyway, you lose material to saw kerf to start with and if the cut wanders even a little, you lose more material planing to clean up afterwards. With a bandsaw, 30mm should come out at 2x12mm relatively readily, but with a handsaw or frame saw, that requires rather more skill than I have.
Some doodling and noodling required I think.
Meanwhile, I have a dust extractor hood mod to finish…
I just need to finish drilling and bolting the hardware there. And when that’s done…
Saw vice mounting time so I can finally try to sharpen my western handsaws without spending a half-hour bent double. It’ll get clamped to the bench and raise everything up a few feet so I can see what I’m doing.
But before all of that… out with the #080 and I scraped the worst of the gunk and stuff off the bench surface and checked it for flat with the edge of the #08 plane. Still flat to within a half-mm across the full width, even after a few years. Nice.
Then I plugged up the bench dog holes and poured some BLO over everything to give it what has to be coat #20 by this point.
Once it’s dry, on with more small shop jobs and then some fun projects…
