Cutting 3.75" cedar

[van Gaalen]

The job I have is to cut 100 pieces of 4x6 & 4x8 cedar 3.75" thick .
Each end is to be profiled as per the customers request. In total there is about 10,000 lineal inches cut at 0.5" depth.The dual edge up cut bit (.5"x6") lasted 2250 inches running at 14,000 rpm & @1.5"/sec .
The flut was extented from 3" to 3.65" to help the chip extraction.
Each .5" cut had to blown with air to prevent over heating.

I think the bit should last longer .

Does anyone have experience on feed & speed & cut depth on cedar ?

Some of the cedar was very wet (80% ). Does this dual the bit faster. ?

[Gary Campbell]

Ron...
Tho not exact, I did a very similar project a while back. We did 500 rafter tails for a large project from pressure treated 4 by 6's. Our first test cut produced results similar to your post. clogged kerf, hot steaming bit and overall turnaround time per part too long.

What we ended up doing was to make a template to mark the end cuts oversized, cut that very rough on the band saw and then stack them with the 4" face up, 13 wide on the table and cut them using an extruder file. This allowed 13 pcs to be cut in 18 minutes @ 8ips and 12K rpm using about .050 step per pass. We were able to cut around 150 per day. The bandsaw work was completed for a batch while the one before was on the Bot

Hope this helps

[knight_toolworks]

I am terrible at calculating. I usually figure how many hours I get per bit. like when I hollow out boxes with a 1/2" bit U get about 4 hours total cutting time from the bit. thats in normal and tropical hardwoods. you should be able to lower your rpms down to about 8k. 14k is pretty high for that cut speed. I know it is harder to band saw wet wood compared to dry.

[Gary Campbell]

Steve...
It was a pain. Used a 1/4" x 4t blade that worked OK. Here is a pic of the tails on the Bot running the extruder file