Veneer slicer

[alex grams]

Has anyone had any experience with taking a nice piece of wood to a professional shop and having actual veneers made out of it. I can use my bandsaw and get good 3/32-1/16th inch slices from wood, but with a professional veneer slicer, i would be able to get probably 10 times the amount of veneer out of a piece of expensive lumber.

Has anyone ever gone down this road? Any idea on costs, or what kind of shops i should look for to see who can do it?

I am in the Houston area if anyone has any experiences with doing so here.

Thanks in advance.

[Jamie Buxton]

Commercial production of sliced veneers is a more elaborate thing than you imagine. They start with full-sized logs, often weighing several tons. They're green, and the process often adds water by boiling the logs. The slicer is a huge piece of tool steel -- like 15 feet by 3 inches by 12 inches -- sharpened to a razor edge. They sharpen the cutting edge every shift. There's an additional part of the apparatus which applies pressure to the log just ahead of the slicer, like the mouth on your handplane. There's also a big mechanism which holds the log, and advances it one veneer-thickness each time a slice is taken off. After that, there's a big line which dries the slices in a matter of minutes. Altogether is a giant industrial process, not a small-shop process or even a medium process.