The process of making a wood slice ornament is a long one if you harvest the wood yourself.
Ideally, you want a tree that has fallen but not lying on the ground. You want it to be fairly dry, not punky and it shouldn’t have cracks. It should be about 4-5 inches in diameter. We cut tree sections with the chainsaw that are more easily carried.
Normally, at this point, we would use a chop saw to cut the wood slices. Recently, because the chop saw was not yet set up, we just cut slices with the chain saw. We cut a few slices from the wood in the pictures above but also some wood cookies from a tree that was about a foot in diameter.
In the past I struggled with holding a thin wood slice while trying to sand it with a palm or mouse sander. I even tried a belt sander but ended up sanding part of my thumb. In an effort to make this part of the process easier, we purchased a drum sander.
Much like a planer, the wood is fed through on one side and comes out the other. Instead of a blade inside there is a sand paper rolling belt. You control the height of where the sandpaper sits and the speed of the belt. Unlike the planer, the slices stay on the grippy belt and don’t go shooting out the other side. (Perhaps a new use for the planer, to send wood slices flying for the dog to fetch.)
I took one of the larger 12 inch cookies and after a number of passes it went from:
Other wood that had been previously cut with the chop saw took less passes to get nice and smooth.
Using this new sander will make my life so much easier. I used to dread when I had run out of wood slices and had to spend a few hours trying to sand them. It almost got to the point that I wanted to give up the harvesting wood part and just buy wood slices from someone else online.
I will also appreciate not having the numbing or vibrating sensation in my hands and arm from the other sanders that tended to last for hours after sanding.
Moving some of our stuff from Fort Mac last week, I came across these oval slices that had not yet been sanded. They would make beautiful small cutting boards or a nice wood burned plaque. I am super excited to run them through the drum sander but I have to get boxes unpacked first.
The dust extraction hose attached to the sander and the shop vac does help but things still get a fine layer of sawdust on them. A better dust filtration system is probably going to be one of our next purchases..
I haven’t tried to sand the pallet boards but I think that this would work just as well for cleaning them up.
Hopefully I will get the chance to play with my new toy again in the next couple weeks.
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