: I noticed alot of talk about ripping boards striaght and with an
: even thickness. Has anyone else used a gang saw blade
: arangement? I put three blades together with the desired
: thickness and cut three boards at one time. At least one is
: perfict everytime and if done right the others are good also.
: Usually I run them threw the planer to be sure. Joe

A few people do this as well. But not a lot.

It is a good idea if you are going to need a lot of strips, and have a couple of extra blades around. Cedar is soft. If your table saw motor is up to ripping a cedar 2x6, then it can certainly rip two strips from a 1x6, and probably you would have no problem with three blades--particularly if you were using some thin kerf blade,as they need less energy to cut.

If you have a dado set for your table saw then you already have two matched blades, and you might be tempted to use them. It works, but it is not a great coice. Dado blades are wide. They are meant to take a wide kerf. You'll turn more wood into sawdust.

The better option is to use Three, or even four, 7 1/4" sawblades on your tablesaw. You can find thinner-kerf blades in this size, rather than 10" blades. The larger diameter blades are thicker. So a "normal" kerf on a 7 1/4" blade would be thinner than a "normal" kerf on a 10" blade. If you get a thin-kerf 7 1/4" blade it will give an even smaller kerf. The less wood chopped out of the kerf the easier it is on the moter.

If you use 4 blades the stack will be slightly wider than 3/4" if cutting 1/4" strips. If you set your spacing so that you are cutting 3/16" strips the stack will be thinner. Ether way, the stack should still fit on the saw's arbor. You would use the table insert meant for use with a dado set. Or, use a home made zero-clearance insert, which would give much better support to the strips as they are being cut.

For a single boat the setup time is not worth it. If you were running a production environment, then you would probably have a gang-sawing setup dedicated to ripping strips.

My "dream" setup would have 4 blades and 4 "spacers" which were actually molding cutters. That way I could cut the strips and the cove (or bead) in them all at the same time. That would leave me the task of rounding over the other edge to form a matching bead. I could do that with a handplane, or a roundover or beading bit in a router, shaper, etc. Alternately, the edge of the spacers could cut the more durable. That would leave the fragile cove cut for the shaper. The stack would start with a "spacer" on the outside to shape the bottom edge of the outside strip. that would be followed by blade-spacer-blade-spacer-blade-spacer-blade. If anyone should ever make something like this I imagine they'll need to deal with getting out all the sawdust generated by those cutter/spacers. I think it would build up between the blades if not blown out with a blast of compressed air, or sucked out with an aggressive dust collection setup.

There are simpler ways to do things, of course !

PGJ

is smaller diameter (meant for use on hand-held circular saws) for less money