I have four long, wide boards of African Rosewood (from 36" to 72" long and 10-14 inches wide, 1 7/16" thick) with beautiful live edges that I want to use for the shelves of a bookcase. I don't have enough to make a solid wood bookcase so I want to make the shelves out of veneer. I propose to cut off the live edges about 2 inches back on the table saw and then resaw 1/8" slices off each board leaving 7/8" boards for the case construction. After veneering the top of the flitch as the show side to MDF, I would domino and edge glue the live edge back on to the veneered board so that I will have boards that look like they are live edge boards on one side. I have a Laguna 13-12 bandsaw with a 3/4" blade, but I'm a novice to resawing long boards and have only used commercial veneers in the past.

I've been trying to figure out what is going to go wrong with this. I'm guessing the live edge piece might bow once it's released from the board and be hard to glue back on flat, but if that happens I guess I'll have to abandon the idea of live edge. What am I forgetting or not seeing in this and can you suggest a better approach?

Second, I've tested my bandsaw on a piece of spruce, and it cuts a nice piece of veneer, but I don't know how smooth it should be. It look pretty good to me but you can see little ridges--bandsaw blade marks on it. I've attached a picture, though I'm not sure it's good enough to show you if it is smooth enough. I can run the board through the planer after each cut so I have one really flat glue side but maybe it would easier to put it through the drum sander. If so to what grit?

Spruce Veneer.jpg