I have been thinking about building a set of dado blades to cut a whole board in one pass. The idea is to get several sets of slot blades that are used to make tennons for cabinets and furniture mount them on a single shaft with spacings and place in a fixture ran by a five hp. motor then run the boards thru in stacks. Like its done at production company's. Should not be that hard to make.
John
Many years ago I had a Fine Woodworking Magazine issue that described exactly that and showed how to make it. It is called a gang saw. My recollection is that you pushed on some kind of foot pedal to move the table down over the blades.I suspect that FWW has an index somewhere that you could look up the issue. I looked
http://www.finewoodworking.com/pages/fw_articleindex.asp but did not see any reference to gang saw. Maybe it had another name. It was not rocket science, as they say, but quite as you describe. The big thing would be to tame the noise, and awesome tearout, by making sure that the blades were running true, ie no runout.
I have a blade truing disc I bought from Lee Valley years ago. They do not list it anymore, but it is very simple for a handy person to make if you have metalworking skills.
It is a 120 CM disc, 1 cm thick with 8 small set screws (maybe 5.5 MM) close to the the perimeter (centred 6 MM in from rim). The blade side is relieved 1 or 2 mm, outside of the arbour face out to 1 cm from the rim.
You just mount it on the arbour with the blade and then measure the runout. Then you just adjust the setscrews to take out the runout. The setscrews push against the blade to flatten it.
Then after the runout is taken out, you run the blade under no load for a bit and it sets and you can remove the truing device. If you leave the truing device on it restricts the depth of cut, as you cannot raise the blade.
The blade runs a lot quieter, smoother, faster, and it gives you a perfect cut with no scratches and tearout and it wears smoothly and thus stays sharp longer.