Making Veneers

Set to and made my first lot of real veneers today.

Started off with a piece of pine and practiced various aspects. It took very little time to get a couple of good lengths cut.  I am very pleased with the performance of my 65+ year old bandsaw.  The new blade and other bling is performing well

I am slicing of about 7mm at a time and then cleaning up in the thicknesser diwn to about 4.5mm. This is producing copious amounts of saw dust. 

I tried to make the slices a bit thinner but found that if I let the cut wander even slightly then I couldn't clean it up in the thicknesser

I am getting better at cutting on the bandsaw so I might try again for thinner slices as I would then likely be able to get 8 veneers from a 50mm thickness.

So I ended up with 14 x 3m x 4.5mm veneers, or about 42 metres worth.  Haven't figured out how much I need in total yet.

Nails & Screws, Bandsaws & veneers

I have had a pretty productive week or so.

I'm close to finishing putting all the nails and screws in.  Only about 80 screws to go.  Lost count of how many I have put in,  for nails it must be over a thousand and for screws something like 500.  Had a bit of trouble with them today, not sure why, but managed to strip the head of about 20.  Got really good at getting them out quickly using a ezy-out.

I have also bought a new blade for my band-saw.  I had a little oops as I was setting it up and the blade bit into the table, but it still seems to cut okay.  So I spent an hour practising cutting veneers.  My test pieces were only about 800mm long, and the real trick will be the 3m long pieces, but so far so good.

I then ran my practise pieces through the thicknesser and have ended up with some nice examples at about 4.2mm thick.

Tomorrow will be finishing screwing,  filling up a few holes that were "misses" and generally preparing for putting the seal coats on.

This means that next week I should be full steam into veneer manufacture.  I don't have a lot of timber for that at the moment, but enough to get me going.

Sanding and Nailing

I have been chipping away at getting all the excess glue sanded off and the bottom faired.  It went quite quickly, I think the attention to the previous layers as meant that this layer started off pretty good and has required comparatively little sanding to get finished.

I started nailing off today.  Must have drilled about 400 holes for nailing, broke two drill bits, which is what ultimately stopped me for the night, plus the neighbours were probably going to get annoyed with the hammering fairly soon had I not stopped.

I think I am probably going to need about two or 3 more weekends to finish sanding, nailing and sealing and then will be ready for the next big adventure, manufacturing veneers and applying them.

Finished last ply layer

With a sense if jubilation I finally finished the last ply layer last weekend.  Troubles with my last batch of ply have made this layer a but if a nightmare, but now it's done.

I have made a start on sanding, but there is lots left to do.  I am hoping to start in the veneer layer by the middle of August.