Resawing Pear Wood

I got some small logs a while back when my parents cut down an old pear tree in their yard.  I have been meaning to try to resaw them into some usable lumber for a while, but I was afraid to do it with my old bandsaw.  But since I got the new one, I decided to try it out.

These had been sitting a while, so the bark was mostly loose enough to just pull off.  After that, I used an old broad hatchet to roughly flatten one side of these.  A broad hatchet only has a bevel on one side of the blade, which allows the flat side to ride along the surface of the wood to help maintain a flat cut.  This hatched was one of my salvage finds.

I used the word "roughly" for a reason - this was a learn as you go deal and my "flat" sides were only somewhat flat.

From here, I made a mark down the log with a chalk line and threw them up on the bandsaw.  I used a 1/2" wide 3 tpi blade in the bandsaw and just followed the line as best as I could.  I didn't get pictures from this part.  It was a full time job just manhandling the logs.

These really tested the resaw capacity of the saw, and what I came out with was pretty rough lumber.  I went ahead and cleaned up some of the pieces on the jointer and planer.

Now comes the hardest part - waiting for it to be dry enough to use!