Basswood - advice for cutting

The Rocketry Forum

Help Support The Rocketry Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

saunassa

Active Member
Joined
Mar 10, 2004
Messages
37
Reaction score
0
i have a large supply of basswood and am wondering how to cut it. i have 1x4 and 1x6 by the 1000's of board feet (inherited from my later father-in-law. it is in the barn cut into car siding (tongue and groove) and a large amount of trees in the south 40
is there an easy way to cut this into fin stock easily? could i use a band saw and sand it somehow to get the thinner. and how well does this cut for fins. questions and questions. i have used it to side my dogs house and think there must be a better use for it.
maybe when the wife is at work i should run out and cut down a tree and then cut it into usable legnths and use it for nose cones?
 
A nice table saw would do the trick...thats alot of wood!
 
Originally posted by saunassa
i have a large supply of basswood and am wondering how to cut it. i have 1x4 and 1x6 by the 1000's of board feet (inherited from my later father-in-law. it is in the barn cut into car siding (tongue and groove) and a large amount of trees in the south 40
is there an easy way to cut this into fin stock easily? could i use a band saw and sand it somehow to get the thinner. and how well does this cut for fins. questions and questions. i have used it to side my dogs house and think there must be a better use for it.
maybe when the wife is at work i should run out and cut down a tree and then cut it into usable legnths and use it for nose cones?

The 1 inch could be cut into 1x1 and turned into an enormous number of 24mm or smaller nose cones. I would much prefer basswood to balsa for nose cones.

For fin stock, I'd say find a local cabinet maker with the equipment and see what it'd cost to turn it into 1/4" through 1/16" slabs, and see how much you could sell it off to a retailer as.

Or just contact Balsa Machining Service. They may just take it all and cut it themselves.
 
Basswood has excellent tight grain. Perfect for carving. That's what you use to carve duck decoys.

Glue it up into 4x4 and 6x6 blocks for carving and nose cone turning,
 
hmm, for some reason i never thought of gluing them up to make larger pieces. i don't know why.
there is a cabinet & millwork shop in town. think i will go visit them this week and see what they can do.
thanks for the ideas.
 
Take the pieces to the cabinet shop and see if they will plane them for you. Tis will give a real nice "glueing surface".

Get some Titebond II wood glue and glue up your wood. Do you have enough clamps?

Like Norm Abrahms say, "You can never be too rich, too thin or have too many clamps."
 
Norm Abrams nows his woodworking, his show is very interesting
thats a lot of Basswood you got
 
The only good way to turn boards into thin sheets is to use a bandsaw and a technique called re-sawing.

You want to cut off sheets with the grain also called ripping, a table saw will do it but it wastes a lot of wood and only has a hight of a coupl of inches. Where as a 10" bandsaw will take nice thin slices and with a extension can slic around 8 inch blocks.

Check out this page for some of the basics.

https://www.woodshopdemos.com/bs-1.htm

Scott
 
Back
Top