So....

I've got some pieces of red oak that I'm planning to build a spice rack
out of. It's reclaimed barn lumber, originally rough-sawn to about an
inch thick or a little more. I don't have very much of it, because the
barn is in Virginia, and I'm in California, and I couldn't get all that
much in my airplane luggage!

So the design for the spice rack is based off one my brother built,
which used half-inch by three-inch boards to make a box 16" wide by 30"
tall, with shelves every six inches.

My dilemma is this: making half-inch boards out of one-inch boards with
the planer seems like a waste of good lumber. And, also, if I don't do
any resawing, I've got just enough lumber to make the shelf; no
leftovers to practice on and see how the wood behaves. So it's very
tempting to take the three thickest shelf boards (which measure out at
about 9/8ths), and figure taking an eighth-inch off each side to get rid
of the weathered part, and then resaw them down the middle, taking out
another eighth-inch of kerf and leaving me with two 3/8" boards, and
then adapt the plan to use 3/8" boards instead of 1/2" ones.

The trick to this, of course, is that I've not done any resawing before,
so I don't know if I can get a good enough cut with the shop's bandsaw
to only end up taking 1/8" out of the middle once it's all been planed
smooth. And, as I said, if the resawing doesn't work out, that means
that I need all the wood I've got, so I can't plan to practice on one
board and discard it if it doesn't work.

So, is trying to do resawing like this a reasonable idea, or am I being
silly to think it will work? What's the usual amount of wastage along
the saw-line that's expected from resawing?

(For what it's worth, these boards are pretty solid; they were under a
metal-and-tarpaper roof, and crosscuts on the ends show only a very thin
layer of discoloration. They're not like the piece of 1"x14" that I got
from the side of the barn, which had beautiful straight grain,
absolutely no warpage -- and weathering so deep that there was no more
than 1/4" of solid wood left.)

Thanks for any advice!
- Brooks



--
The "bmoses-nospam" address is valid; no unmunging needed.