Keeping up with the theme from yesterday, I realized that I haven’t written about the riser block kit for my bandsaw. I got the Grizzly bandsaw 1.5 years ago and have really enjoyed it. It gets used most often for curvy cuts and resawing thick stock.
I never really felt like I had the hang of resawing thick boards. I always got a lot of blade drift and I’d just try to free hand it to compensate for the drift. It sort of work, but I wasted a lot of material with wavy cuts.
For Christmas, Dad and Mom got me a riser block kit for the saw. The stock configuration gives you about a 5 3/4″ capacity but the riser block kit doubles that. I don’t usually work with 11″ boards, but I do regularly have 6 and 7″ boards so this is very handy. Getting the kit also meant that I had to get rid of my old blades and buy longer ones. I had learned a little more about blades by this point so I bought some nicer Timber Wolf blades. I have one for resawing and one for cutting smaller curves. I don’t know whether I have it all tweaked better this time or if the blade made all the difference, but wow, resawing with this thing is incredible! I can just set the fence to the thickness I want and watch the saw plow through. It has no problems going through 8″ of hard maple and when I’m done, I have a pretty smooth and straight cut. It means I no longer fret too much if I have to resaw a 1″ board into two 3/8″ boards. I know I can nail the cut right on the money.
P.S. If you follow my woodworking account on Instagram, you’d have already seen this picture. @martenswoodworks