Ripsaw vs Jointer

[Paul_H]

I ran some more 1x6 flooring last week but I had to cull out some boards with crook in them.I remember Horselogger has a Diehl straight line ripsaw to straighten the boards before running them,and there were a couple of other members that joint the edge instead.

so I have a couple of questions....

How does a ripsaw work? What holds the boards as they pass through? Some of the boards have up to 3/8 crook in  8' and I'm guessing that I would have to pick a  common width before starting (6" down to 5 1/2) ?

Will a jointer work well for boards up to 14' long?

What are the problems that may arise from straightening out the boards this way?

They are too nice to throw away :-/

[shopteacher]

Paul, a rip saw has a wide (3") flat chain with a pointed or checkered surface that grabs the board and feed it rapidly through the blade. As both sides of the board are curves I believe you rip oneside to straighten it, then you can use a fence to get an edge parallel  to it.  The older machines are quite large (8000 lb) but the newer imports sold by a lot of companies ( woodmizer, Oliver, Extrema, Sunhill, & others) appears to be much smaller and lighter.
http://www.woodmizer.com/secondary/ripsaw.html
http://sunhillmachinery.com/Rip%20Saw%20SRS%20305.htm
http://olivermachinery.net/Products/4925-RipSaw.html

[Paul_H]

Thanks for the great links,Teach.

I didn't know that WM built a ripsaw.

[HORSELOGGER]

Hi Paul... Old rips like my Diehl have 2 of the chains like Shopteacher mentioned, one on each side of the blade, and a series of pressure rolls above the chains, so when you line up a board and give it to the machine, it "squeezes" the board between the rolls and the cains and pulls it past the blade on a straight line trajectory. The key is lineing up the edge of the board with the blade, so that you are removing the least amount needed to clean up the edge, then move it over and make the next cut  using the fence, set to whatever size you need your blanks.I have a small laser in my rafters, that is lined up with the rip blade, so I know where to let it go, but after many zillion boards, I can be about as accurate with out it.I have never run a jointer to straighten my lumber for flooring, but it seems like it would be slow. My 11 year old son and I ripped 4000 bdft of red oak lumber into flooring blanks in one day last week..... Oh yeah, the Woodmizer rip is a re-badged Diehl.