Milling feather edge boarding Lumbermate 2000

[Tom at Heartwood]

I have a Lumbermate 2000 that I use to mill a fair amount of waney and square edged larch cladding.  I occasionally have enquiries about cutting feather edged boards but have not done any as the mill is not set up for it.

 

Does anyone have any experience or suggestions for how to cost-effectively set up a jig for feather edge boarding please?   I guess we would need to cut 12 foot boards to make it worthwhile.

 

Thanks.

 

Tom.

[wills-mill]

There are 2 standard ways to do it. I'm not a massive fan (have never had any issues with plain boards), but ended up building my own gadget to start with, then bought a Wood Mizer shingle/ lap sider.

The first standard way is to cut normal boards (eg 6 x 1 1/4) and split them with a resaw attachment. If you have a power feed for a spindle moulder and a basic plywood trough, you could do that without too much grief. The minor downside is lots of individual board handling, but the upside is you get good recovery from a log.

The second way is to use the gadgets that tip a log slightly sideways for every other cut. They can be very productive, but there's lots of faffing about to prepare the beams that are taken off the mill and stacked before they can be placed on the gadget.
 Downsides are that you can't use the side boards that you remove to make your blocks, and there's always a wee bit of waste where you clamp. Otherwise it's pretty quick.

We've had no issues with anyone being massively picky about lengths like 12ft, it's nice if you can do it, but certainly on the hardwoods, any log defects will scupper plans to do mega lengths.

 

 

Edited September 3, 2019 by wills-mill
splling

[wills-mill]

This is the resaw method, I've no idea why they are running so slowly though!

I don't recall the old WM resaw attachment having the posh rubber track, and I think it was a 12v motor that ran from crocodile clips on the battery.
 

 

[wills-mill]

Here's a simple tilting jig..
 

 

[Tom at Heartwood]

Thank you for your replies. Tom.