Most sawmills today are bandsaws. Bandsaw teeth have three parts, the back, the front, and the gullet. To adequately sharpen a blade, all three surfaces must be ground.
Sawmill blades generally have a pitch of something close to 1.75"
As you can see in the above demo, most good bandsaw sharpeners operate by advancing the blade one tooth, while the cutting tool moves vertically. The timing between these vertical and horizontal movements dictates the shape of the tooth.
BTW, a good sharpener limited to one kind of blade profile is about $2500. A fast sawmill might dull four blades per day.
Each type of wood benefits from a slightly different tooth profile.
When your only tool is a hammer, all your problems tend to look like nails, right?
My hammer of choice lately is stepper motors.
I've been thinking that a good way to build a sharpener which is customizable for the best tooth profile would be to CNC it. Axis X advances the tooth one tooth pitch while Axis Z determines the height of the cutting tool based on gcode input. Axis Y would reset the blade advancing pawl, and the cycle would repeat.
Does anyone have any examples of any analogous simple 2-axis cnc devices?
I think what I'm really describing is lathe motion with a return to zero after each subroutine, repeated (x) times. EMC does a good job of subroutine interpretation.
I need to read up on the standalone indexer table, and the Rep Rap because the pic-based setup might be just the ticket, if it can handle 2 axes.
Blade sharpener idea kick
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