Ideal rough sawn lumber thickness for two 1/2" resawn pieces?

[Michael Yadfar]

I'm building a jewelry box, and I plan to use the uniform thickness of 1/2" for the whole box using walnut and oak. The minimum thickness board at my lumber yard is 4/4, and I typically lose 1/4" when finishing the board, so I would be wasting 1/4" if I bought that, so I think resawing makes sense. I took 4 years of woodworking class back in high school where I did quite a bit of resawing, but I don't remember what the loss is on a resawn board. I was thinking 6/4 would be the ideal thickness to get two 1/2 pieces out of, allowing 1/4 of loss on each piece, but I just want to check up because hardwoods a bit expensive to experiment with

[Jim Finn]

I loose 1/16" on my band saw and another 1/16" on each resawn cedar board in the planer. So about 3/16" loss there. Then there is the loss in the planer to initially smooth out the whole rough board. About another 1/16" I can only get 3/8" thicknesses from a 1 1/8" rough board so this is the thickness I use to make all my boxes. (3/8") I would experiment to find out how this works out on your equipment.

[Matt Day]

As usual, it depends.

Some wood will react pretty violently when resawn and can cup badly. So that type of wood will need to be jointed and planed again resulting in material loss.

Stable wood will have much less loss.

I'd go with 6/4 which should be on the safe side.

[Jim Matthews]

I'd go with 6/4 which should be on the safe side.

Beat me to it.

[Art Mann]

My experience parallels Jim Finn's very closely.

[John Lanciani]

Ideal = 5/4
safe = 6/4

If the wood was tame to begin with and it was cut and dried with care 5/4 is perfect, but the reality is that the small amount of extra waste generated from using 6/4 is below the threshold of concern.

[Prashun Patel]

In fact, you may find that 6/4 is more expensive than separate 4/4 boards, or even milled 3/4 - especially if you can take shorts.

Nice thing about going 4/4 or 3/4 is that you can plane evenly both sides to minimize movement.

[Keith Hankins]

If it's good stable wood, then 5/4 will do. To be on safe side 6/4.

[Kent A Bathurst]

FWIW - I resaw 5/4 maple for drawer sides and bottoms. I try to get the best candidate stock from the pile, but then I got with whatever the results were. Alsays rough-cut parts to somewhat oversized, but that means I am not resawing long sticks.

If the sides come out under-sized, that means slight adjustments to dimensions of the bottoms - adjusted on-the-fly by trim-to-size during final fitting. It it means the bottoms are undersized, that does not affect the drawer dimensions.

I realize you are trying to make the box with consistently-sized parts. And - I am not really much of a box maker. But - I would still go with 5/4 and make dimensional adjustments as needed based on yield. After all - 7/16" v. 8/16" will not really affect the visual impact or structural integrity, and 15/32" v. 16/32" even less so.

ALso - to be fair - it is much MUCH more likely that I have 5/4 available in the stacks than 6/4. I sometimes grab a 6/4 stick at the lumber store "just to have", but can't always count on that - "hope is not a strategy".

[Mark Carlson]

The other benefit of re-sawing (a nice touch for jewelry boxes), is you can get a four corner grain match on the corners.