Thinking about writing up some online tutorials as a warmup to teaching in-person lessons this summer, but outside hands-on training in a shop i'm pretty much completely out of touch on what's common knowledge/easily looked up by anyone who wants to know. So: is there anything you in particular you've wanted to know about turning dead trees into something useful?
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in reply to @secrets's post:
what goes into making a decision about working with green wood vs seasoned wood; just the type of species in question or other factors?
Oh man that's a big one I'll have to prep a writeup about; short version they're totally different processes you can make totally different things with. Green wood moves a lot and you can do some extremely cool tricks with that, but it doesn't play well with power tools or mass production. Any wood that can be processed dry can be done green, although some species will contract (and therefore check) more than others
Thank you! My question is motivated by when I stumble into a bit of wood that seems too nice to burn or mulch , and then keep it in the shed for ages until I eventually do something with it . And like I was worried that there might be some woods that would become too difficult to work after seasoning. I guess I'm only going to making the odd tool handle here and there so I'm not really trying to do anything that complicated with the wood.
Yeah I wouldn't worry about it. Dry wood is a little bit harder to carve but not very much so, and otoh you won't have to worry about the thing shrinking or splitting after you've already put work into it
Tangential? I need help coming up with a tool maintenance schedule and best practices for a small hobby shop with crappy climate control. Rust prevention and removal, tune up and all of those things. There are individual videos about some of those things, but nothing comprehensive.
Are you getting active rust/pitting or just the occasional dark spot? I wouldn't worry too much about keeping things Instagram-shiny, and going to town with CLP or whatever in an effort to fight it can really backfire as sawdust clogs up treated surfaces. I don't think I've been inside a working shop in the last couple years that had any climate control beyond maybe a dehumidifier somewhere (my own shop floods right now!), rust removal on working surfaces is typically a byproduct of regular use and sharpening and the constant effort to keep dust under control.
A tuning schedule is going to depend a lot on what you're doing - bandsaws require more or less constant futzing-with, you rarely have to really mess with a table saw or bench sander beyond blowing all the dust out of the bits the dust collector missed, chisels get sharpened when they get dull. I've written schedules for makerspaces but it's tough to give a general comprehensive program that applies to any shop.
The finer points resawing on the bandsaw. The basics are fairly straight forward, but getting leaves of a consistent thickness that don't require a lot of planing to get the faces parallel isn't. Or, more generally, learning to tell the difference when the bandsaw is being fussy and needs tuning, and when it's operator error.
You'll probably never get to where that that needs NO planing/sanding, but my main day-to-day use for my bandsaw is resawing lumber into 1/8" stock for the laser cutter, I can write something up that should get you very parallel cuts
Oh for sure, some clean-up is fine and expected as long as the faces are parallel. It's just at times when I run some boards through fine, the next set are all cattywompus without touching any of the settings, leaving me quite puzzled finding the source of the error. Looking forward to it.
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