This article is going to be about one of the most maligned machines in woodworking, the bandsaw. A lot of people mistakenly regard the bandsaw as a machine that is okay for ripping rough boards of timber, and okay for the occasional roughing out of curved work, but it's not a machine of finesse, and it's not a machine of great accuracy; this is a widely held view that is nevertheless quite wrong.

What prompted this article and accompanying series of photographs was a large conference table that we were making for one of the Oxford Colleges. The job consisted of several pedestal tables with solid brown oak tops, and hung between these tables, a series of leaves. These are removable leaves which enable the Provost to hold conferences for up to forty delegates, or arrange the tables for an intimate dinner party of eight. The technical problem one has in a situation like this, is the leaves being unsupported by a table frame should not be made from solid wood, or they would be liable to twist or cup; they should really be made from man—made board, such as MDF or plywood lipped in solid wood and veneered in 1/2mm commercial veneer. This would have been fine, and is in fact what we quoted for, however, when we came to make the tables we did it in a slightly different way. Rather than commercial thin veneers, we used workshop cut, thick bandsawn veneers.

It would be a great mistake to think that veneered furniture is in any way inferior to solid wood furniture. Veneers have been used throughout the history of furniture to provide decorative surfaces in exotic timbers.

Veneering is a way of using fine wood effectively, economically and most decoratively. To dispense with many of the technical problems associated with solid wood, veneered furniture, when done correctly, is no way inferior to solid wood; on the contrary it is usually more expensive and more decorative and in many ways, more exciting.

So, in this case we used veneers, but workshop made thick veneers. We did this because the rest of the tables were in solid brown oak, and it was important that the veneered leaves had the same visual qualities as the solid wood table tops. Now brown oak is a very tricky timber; because of the fungal staining that makes brown oak so distinctive, each log has a slightly different look and feel, so my solution to this problem was to cut the veneers we were using on the leaves from the same log that we were using for the solid table tops.

The illustrations to this article show Damian Carroll, one of my craftsman, cutting a board of brown oak, which looks about 9" wide by 4' or 5' long. From that board, he would probably get four veneers, each about an 1/8' thick. Each of those veneers would be of perfectly consistent thickness throughout their length, and watching Damo do it, gives one the illusion that the whole thing is very easy; in fact this operation is very demanding upon both the bandsaw and the bandsaw operator. Let's begin with the handsaw. The photographs show a big, old Robinson YT Bandsaw in operation. This is a super machine, she weighs over a ton, and is probably over 30 years old by now, but with a little bit of tender loving care, she still produces the most superbly accurate work. Dave Gardner the Wood Machining Officer for the

Rural Development Commission describes her as the best bandsaw in Devon, but it's not necessary to have the best bandsaw in Devon to cut workshop veneers. When I had a workshop in London, we managed the same job on a little Startrite 352; what you do need however, is a properly Set up handsaw of whatever size, with a supply of brand new, sharp handsaw blades.

Setting up a bandsaw is all about care and method. The handsaw is essentially a very simple piece of equipment, two wheels, one above another, with a thin blade running between them. There is not a lot that can go wrong with a handsaw, so if your saw isn't cutting right it's generally your fault because you set it up wrong. To set up a bandsaw properly, it's necessary to do it in two distinct stages. The first stage involves setting the blade on to the bandsaw wheels, and the second stage involves fitting the blade guides around the blade. So, firstly, set the blade guides well out of the way, (we don't want those to influence how the blade runs on the handsaw wheels), then set the blade on the wheels and give it a whirl, you can at this stage adjust the tension of the handsaw. For this kind of operation, you should set the tension slightly above what you would normally use. There is probably some blade tensioning guide on your machine that tells you what tension to set for each size of that saw blade. The next operation is to adjust the way the band is running on the wheels. Bandsaw wheels usually have a rubber or a cork tyre, this would be slightly domed in cross section, and the blade should run on the centre of that dome; get this wrong, and one of two things will happen; set it too far forward and the blade is in danger of coming off the wheels, set it too far back, and the set on the blade will start to chop up the cork or rubber tyres. To make this adjustment of what is technically called"the tracking" you will have to turn the tracking adjustment knob on your handsaw, this will alter the attitude of the top handsaw wheel to the bottom handsaw wheel. This adjustment is done whilst the blade is moving. Don't turn the handsaw on, just give it a spin by hand. You should now have a blade which is properly tensioned and properly positioned on the handsaw wheels, now we can fiddle around with the bandsaw guides.

Bandsaw guides come in many types and forms. There should be two sets of bandsaw guides on your machine — I say should be, because I've seen handsaws with only one set. The first set will be on a movable pillar above the handsaw table which is moved up and down to locate the guide just above your job. The second group of handsaw guides would be in a fixed position beneath your handsaw table. This is a group of handsaw guides which occasionally are missing. Guides perform two functions; firstly there will be a backstop, and secondly there will be guides to either side of the handsaw. The important thing is to set the guides so they are close enough to the blade to provide sport without touching the blade. If a guide is constantly touching the blade, it will create unnecessary friction and wear. Quite often a piece of paper is slipped between the handsaw guides and the blade to provide the necessary clearance. This is a fiddly operation which should be done with care. The important thing you should bear in mind is that you are creating support on either side of the handsaw blade, not creating an obstacle course through which your handsaw must pass. The gullet of the teeth should he just clear of the guides, and the wheel adjusted so it just touches the back of the blade when running.

Next you have to consider the blade. The single most common mistake people make with a handsaw is to use it with a worn out blade. For most roughing out jobs this is okay, but for any accurate work it is essential that the band is sharp. To attempt a difficult and demanding operation like re—sawing thick veneers, it would be foolish to attempt it without band new handsaw blades. Indeed, if you've got any amount of veneer cutting to do, it would be wise to lay in a stock of new blades. One of the main advantages of large heavy duty bandsaws like the Robinson, is that the band is a very long one. This enables us to keep the band on the machine for longer between changes. If your machine is a tiddler, then you have to change the band even more frequently. You will know when the band is getting dull, because it will stop giving you a good result; it will start to wander from the straight line, and instead of cutting a veneer with an even thickness, you will start to get problems. I remember cutting thick rosewood veneers some time ago, and we had to change the handsaw blade after every nine feet of cut, this was a particularly severe test, and the blades were then usable for less demanding tasks, but the principle is the same — always have a few spare blades to fall back on, and always change the blade before it gets dull.

The handsaw blades that we use for this operation are no different from our general purpose handsaw blades. Most of our handsaw blades are 1/2" in width, with three teeth to every inch of handsaw lengths. After a lot of fooling around with different types of blades, we have settled on long life, or hardened handsaw blades. You can generally recognise these because the teeth will have a blue colour and the rear of the blade will be a lighter steel colour. This indicates that the teeth have gone through a hardening process in

their manufacture. This gives the band a considerably longer life than one would normally expect from unhardened handsaw blades. The disadvantage about hard point handsaw blades is that they can only be re—sharpened once or twice. This is because the teeth themselves are very brittle and although they can be re—sharpened, they cannot be reset, so after two or three trips to the saw doctor, they lose their set, and consequently cut too fine a kerf. Generally, handsaw blades are only hardened on the cutting edge, because if the entire band were hardened, it would become too brittle for general use.

The next important thing to consider about handsaw blades is the gullet. The gullet is the area immediately behind the tooth in which all of the sawdust collects. It's important that handsaw blades have good deep gullets, because in an operation like this, where the blade will be buried in 9" or 10" of timber, the gullet is the only place for that sawdust to go. Think about this for a minute; if those gullets fill up with sawdust, and you push too hard and feed the timber in too fast, where is that sawdust going to go — I'll tell you where it's going to go, it's going to creep down the side of the handsaw blade, forcing it off—line and making a complete mess of your beautiful, thick veneers. Think about this, you've got to feed the timber into your handsaw at a speed at which the saw can comfortably cut it; I'll repeat that so there is no danger of you missing it — feed the timber into the saw only at the rate the handsaw can cut it, push it any harder and it'll get indigestion and start throwing a wobbly.

This leads us nicely on to the actual cutting of the thick veneers. First you have to set up a high fence. We have got a wooden fence that I made many

years ago, and this is attached to the front and rear of the handsaw table with ‘G' clamps (see illustration). Next, set the top handsaw guide so it's just above your work. Bandsaw blades tend not to cut in a line parallel to the blade because of the way they have been sharpened, so feeding a piece of scrap through freehand, following a line you have drawn, will give a guide to the angle the fence should be set at. Next, set the high fence to about 3mm from the blade, this will mean that all your thick veneers are the same thickness, it also means that the waste wood is safely protecting your hand from getting into the handsaw blade. Don't be too ambitious when you first try this, a 3" depth of cut would be quite enough. When you know what you are doing, you can go up to 6" or even 8" or 9", more than this is I think asking for trouble. Remember always that making thick veneers is a slow and boring operation, don't push too hard, you'll find the saw will be happy to eat the timber at a certain speed, don't try to cut any faster than this, or the band will go off line.

As the thick veneers are produced, carefully stack them in the order they were taken off the saw. It's best to keep them in a pack and prevent too much air from getting to them, than to leave one side exposed to the air and the other face down on the bench. You will find that after a few days they will have acclimatised to the workshop humidity and will be usable in exactly the same way as conventional thin veneer. One thing to bear in mind is that your thick veneers shouldn't be too thick, or they will continue to expand and contract in exactly the same way as solid wood. We tend to saw our veneers at about 2 — 2 1/2mm and sand down to about 1 — 1 1/2mm. Always put the same thickness of veneer on the back of the panel as on the front, and make sure

your edge lipping match in colour and grain. It's possible with this type of technique to take your edge lippings from the same board as your veneers. This is theory should give you a perfect colour match.

The beauty of this technique is it enables you to have the benefits of veneered construction, combined with some of the advantages of solid wood. Thick veneers can be hand planed like solid wood, it can be oil polished like solid wood and last but not least it has the capacity to survive abuse like solid wood. I know neither you nor I are going to rough up that new piece of furniture with a table fork, but sods law dictates that before too long, some clever so and so is going to do just that.