It has been at least 3 years since I purchased lumber to build for me and my wife wardrobe. And it has been sitting that long in my garage. Occasionally I nibbled out few wood shavings here and there, but never actually got to work on the wardrobe properly.
No wonder, as I've spent all my time on building the root cellar in my garden. For the past 3 years I was digging soil and stacking up bricks and really had no time for woodworking. You can follow my progress here:
http://www.youtube.com/@woodworkingmanufactory
I'm basically finished with the cellar, still waiting for few more bricks to do some more building before I jump onto building roof over our terrace.
So I'm using this time to do some work on the wardrobe.
Those 3 years ago, I purchased few huge oak slabs. To get from slab to a wardrobe, it of course needs a lot of steps, but as a first step, I need to break the slab down to sizes that I need for the build.
One of the step is resawing.
Aim of the resawing is to get thinner board out of thick one. In my case to actually get two boards out of one
Using frame saw makes the process much faster compare to my hand saw - the stroke is longer and tooth are bigger.
As a result I get two boards. One is closer to the final thickness, the other needs more work.
Now the cut surfaces need to be cleaned by hand planes.
Since the oak is quite a hard wood, I need to sharpen the plane blades frequently
These are the two main planes I'm using for surfacing the boards
Before starting planing, I check the boards for twist.
The point here is to have the edges of both sticks aligned - as soon as they are, the twist is out and I can set the reference surface.
Little snippet of me plaining:
When one side of the board is flat and straight, I can mark thickness that I require the board to be:
Depending on the remaining thickness, I can decide to either remove the rest by scrub plane, or as in this case to resaw again and remove any remaining waste with smoothing planes.
I start resawing with my hand saw.
my aim is to create only initial curf into which I will place the frame saw and continue cutting with it.
Then the process is same as before - a lot of pushing and pulling, trying to keep as close to the line as possible.
