Our home, when we moved here was planked with 1 X 12 Redwood siding. Due to the irregular nature of the wood we believe it was probably milled on site from trees cut down to build the house in 1976. When we began to remodel we carefully removed and saved all of this Redwood siding for future re-application. Most of the Redwood used in the whole house is reclaimed out of respect for our environment.

My original intent was to hand hew the siding with an Adz, a primitive tool used by pioneers to square timber. I like the rough look it imparts. Weeeell, this lasted a couple of weeks before I realized that Adz work is both boring and dangerous. one wrong move swinging a 3 inch wide razor blade between your feet and you've got a real serious problem!

So, I turned to my favorite medium, CAD / CAM.

A piece of siding for over the top of the door, epoxied to plywood for stability on the ShopBot table ready for machining.

Here you can see the overall pattern and the area above the door shown on the table above.

I like to do things with CAD / CAM that would be difficult or impossible to do any other way.
Note the flat to the right of the door for the door knocker machined as a contiguous part of the panel. Same with the flat for a porch light on the left

People assume that if you are using a computer to dothe work that it is somehow just a matter of pushing a button. This is far from reality. This probably took longer to do in the computer than it would of with the Adz...
but the end result is cooler, and chopping my feet off is not a problem.

Even with a 0.030 step over on the CNC router cutting with a 1 inch ball end mill there are dozens of hours of sanding involved to remove the "corduroy". My daughters help too.
Kathy and I get very strong fingers after a few weeks of this!

If you look closely you can see a line where I had to stop the program when it got too late to machine one night. I don't want to disturb the neighbors...
Sanding these lines out adds many hours of time.

Fresh stain. I like Superdeck. I break all the "Important" rules on the can... because they are just flat wrong!

Do it the correct "Important" way and you will be doing it again next year too. I wipe it down with one coat of "Heart Redwood" for the color and follow with at least 3 coats of clear without allowing it to dry until the wood just will not absorb any more oil and I'm good for 5 years.