dnw64
Veteran Member
Wow! I've made a lot of sawdust in my time...even made a few finger joints and tapered table legs, but that's off the charts!
NOTE: I did say "seen", not "made", although I've made a few rabbets and dados in my time too, probably at about the same ratio.
My company specializes in making picture frames, +/- 99.99% have rabbets (believe it or not, the majority of the balance have no rabbets, and a minuscule portion have a dado). We currently make in the neighborhood of a half million feet a year, and I've been at it over 38 years. Do the math...
As far as making sawdust, our waste gets blown into a 48-53' trailer which gets replaced about every 1.5 weeks or so on average. The pellet company provides the trailers, picks them up and pays us $22/ton. A typical trailer is 12-14 tons. SURE beats the old days, when we used a half a 275-gallon oil barrel turned into a bucket for our forklift to load a farm truck, or - better yet! 30 gallon trash cans, manhandled one at a time!! That was when I learned the trick of, after doing such, to take off my (already soaking wet, but from body temp SWEAT) t-shirt, rinse it under ground temp water (about 55° around here) and put it back on. Almost as good as jumping in the river.