I always buy my wood in plank form usually two inches or three inches thick I recently bought quite a lot of planked wood with a moisture content of between 12% and 16%.
This wood had been air dried inside an open sided building for about three years.
These planks of Ash Beech and Sycamore were about two foot six inches wide and three inches thick.
I have got close to one hundred blanks between twenty one inches and ten inches.
A while ago my brother Chris and I made a sliding table to fit on my Elektra Beckum BAS 500 WNB Bandsaw to make cutting blanks a lot quicker and more accurately.
I had looked at several U Tube vidios on cutting blanks and this was our interpretation it is not a copy of anybody elses but might well be very similar
This is a very good and powerful bandsaw with a cutting height of twelve inches.But one thing I have always been disappointed with was the blade guides they were metal blocks that were very hard to ajust.
I invested in a pair of roller bearing guides from Axminster Tools they were only about fifty five pounds and have made all the difference to the saw. They took about three hours to adapt the saw and set up but well worth the effort.
This is the top guide
This is the bottom guide.
I have a number of round disks of different sizes that I use to drill my pilot hole they are all marked with the diameter of the blank
I drill the hole through the disk and then remove the disk and the hole in the wood is located on the peg on the table
There is a row of holes drilled part way through the sliding table to locate the wood on prior to cutting.
All the holes are marked with the diameter of the blank.
The sliding table is made from Corian
This pic shows the sliding table on the bed of the saw
As you can see there is a slot from the edge of the table to just past the front of the blade.
When the wood is located on the table all you have to do is slide the table forward until the front of the blade is in line with the pilot holes and then turn the wood clockwise to make a perfect round blank
This shows the peg that the blank centres on and it can be moved to any of the size marked holes to determine the blank size
This is the sliding table underside as you can see there is a tongue that fits into the slot on the bandsaw bed and the wood and ply L shape locks the sliding table down to the bed of the saw.
