Originally Posted by
Patrick Kane
I did several huge acquisitions of "cheap" lumber like you, and each time i ask myself, "why did i do this!?!?". The labor involved with moving that much wood by hand is always awful. Like your experience, i ended up with 'free lumber' and some profit for my time. The one time was very much worth it, maybe 2,000 bdft of exotics--ipe, teak, cumaru, bubinga, wenge--with another 4-5,000 feet of domestics like QS oak, walnut etc. That was an incredible pain, but enough leftover to pay for my used Felder. My last time was a significant amount of labor and time to part out. I think that was my lesson not to buy large lumber lots again unless they are very valuable species. Trying to sell flat sawn 4/4 oak etc. is a waste of time.
I lean towards a higher quality used saw instead of raising your budget a lot, but realize that isnt for everybody. I also encouraged the longer slider, because 8-9' should cover your ripping needs 90% of the time. When you want to rip something longer than your sliding table, you usually cant do it clamped to the sliding table(there are some jigs to overcome this), and you typically need to remove the crosscut fence/outrigger to make the rip cut. This is if your offcut will be wider than 1/2"-1" depending on the saw. This isnt too too awful, but depending on the build quality of the saw, now you might be forced to re-calibrate the crosscut fence to your blade when you re-attach the outrigger and fence. If you have to do that for every project, then that is an enormous PITA, in my opinion. Finally, a longer capacity just makes it easier to do smaller jobs. For example, i found it easier/better to plane or joint an 11" board on a 12" jointer or planer, than a 12" wide board on a 12" wide machine. I dont have a 48-49" sliding table, but i imagine crosscutting a sheet of plywood is a little cramped. Not as much room for clamps or a FF jig. What you describe with breaking up the sheet into smaller pieces will get you to the same end result, but you will make many more cuts to get there. With a 9' stroke, you can true up one length of the sheet. After that is trued, you use that as your reference edge for crosscutting. What you describe with breaking the sheet into 4 smaller pieces before taking to your saw means each smaller piece will need to have one edge trued before crosscutting to length. Otherwise, you are trusting factory edges etc, which sorta defeats the purpose of owning a quality sliding saw.