4" x 6" Horizontal Bandsaw Tune Up

[Music] hello and thanks for joining me well today we're going to go over the setup of this 4x6 horizontal bandsaw this is an imported saw sold by several different suppliers under different names it's a decent saw it's not high quality so with enough little uh tweaks here and there you can get it to do pretty good anyway let's get started okay i'm gonna go over some basics here the horizontal band saw has got two wheels blade runs between and it's holding the blade at a 45 degree angle and then it's got two blade guides that hold the blade vertical so you can cut square let's take a closer look at the blade guides the blade guides are both about the same they consist of two side rollers to hold the blade vertical and hold the twist in the blade and then they got a roller in the back that supports the back of the blade during the cut so the blade won't deflect these rollers are adjustable in and out so you can adjust the tension on the side of the blade and the whole entire assembly is adjustable in and out and up and down we're going to go go into how to adjust that okay i'm going to take these blade guides off i can do it one of two ways i can take the whole sliding assembly off or i can just take this head off i think it's easier just to take the whole sliding assembly off okay with the blade guides off and i got tension on the blade it's a good time to check to see how true the band saw is running you can run it like that and if you hear that noise it's not a necessarily a bad thing let me show you what's causing that okay these wheels have a square ledge on the back and all that does is stop the blade from falling off the backside that's that's what's making the noise that blade is riding against that ledge and to some degree that's okay but ideally you need the blade slightly away from that ledge i'm going to leave that for now but we may fine tune that later okay on the back side here this is the upper wheel axle bolt right here and this is an adjustment to deflect the wheel to adjust the tracking between those two bolts you can adjust the angle of that wheel to affect the blade tracking right now it's pretty close but it's rubbing the back legs of the wheel so let's see if we can't adjust this tracking yeah that did it pretty crude adjustment i took some tension off the blade when i adjusted that if i had to make a big move it's lifting the wheel a little bit and i didn't want to have to be tight again tightening against the tension kind of a trial and error there is a science to it that's good enough it's just barely touching the back now i may go over that blade tracking a little more later on but let's move on now okay the purpose of the blade guys is to twist the blade and support the back of the blade in a cut what you want is those blade guides set so that the path between the two wheels is as straight as possible in other words if these crescent wrenches were my blade guides basically all you want to do is twist that blade so that you're vertical in the cut and hold it there and then adjust the wheels behind the blade so they just touch the blade let's take a closer look at these blade guides that's how it would be in the saw the blade would be going through here and there's a wheel to support the back of the blade they're actually bearings uh it's got a a lock here and it slides up and down on a a guide very crude guide you can adjust it in and out this way and twist it a little bit this way and that should be all the adjustment you need these wheels here these pins on the top they have a lock nut and i've loosened one of them and after you loosen them you can can you see that that's controlling that gap right there they're both adjustable so to some degree you can affect the position of the blade this way but most of mostly it's just to adjust the tension against that blade okay i'm going to put these back in here okay i got both blade guides back in there bottom one's on a bolt is usually left in one position this one is adjustable depending on the width of your stock but for now we want it in the retracted position okay adjusting these blade guides is where the compromises come in you'll notice that bottom guide is being pulled away from the wheel that's not ideal also if i get the camera right it's also been being pushed this way so here's what what you got to do okay we need to start out with these side guides the side roller guides snug against the blade they don't need to be tight you can feel it when it hits the blade like that i'm there's some resistance there adjust it like that and then go back about an eighth of a turn at least that's a good starting point you should be able to turn these rollers by hand it'll be hard to do but you should be able to turn them if you get them adjusted too tight and start the bandsaw you'll know it the splice will come around and you'll hear it if you hear that you can back it off some so we got those set tight i've already done the upper one okay like i said before the guide should just twist the blade it shouldn't deflect the blade but i can't get that over toward the wheel far enough to stop it from deflecting it this slot right here limits how far i can go but so does the bolt and in this case that bolt was the limiting factor the slot would allow me to go a little further but the slot was stopping it a slot for the bolt so i filed that right there a little bit and that moved it in another sixteenth of an inch which is really i close to ideal it still could go in just a hair more it was way better than what it was okay so you want that blade as close as you can to vertical and you want this back wheel just barely touching the back of the blade now right now it's kind of deflecting the blade but it's it's to a limit i can't go any further okay i've done the same thing to the top wheel uh the idler side so let's move on to the next step the next step is to align these guides vertically well that's kind of hard to do just by eye but if you take a ruler just like that a little steel ruler you can kind of see whether it's vertical or not and i can see that i need to twist this way a little bit you can loosen this a little bit and grab the whole bracket with the channel lock and turn it like that okay this next step is where i really ran into problems and it's due to a design flaw or some quality control issues and not being able to put the blade guides where they need to be the wheel position was a little bit off etc what i ran into when i run these blade guides high enough to where it's not overly deflecting the blade i can't go low enough in the in this gap here in other words right now i am you see it deflects that paper so i'm cutting through the stock but what i ran into is to get it there's an adjustment right here to stop that from going down what i ran into over here the casting right here was hitting this right there still real close but it was hitting it what i'd had to do and whether the guard was also hitting right here so what i had to do first of all i got to leave the guard off it the second i ground this out right here i'll show you i just took a disc grinder and grind some of that casting off and that allows the bandsaw to come down far enough to both trip the switch of course this is adjustable here but more importantly it allowed that blade to go into the slot right there far enough to cut through the steel okay before i go any further remember i said you'll know if these are too tight watch that blade see it deflecting a little bit that's where these rollers are too tight that's hitting the weld you can adjust either one of these so probably a good way to adjust it when you hear it hitting the weld you back up a little bit that weld is oversized it really should be the same thickness as the blade okay remember earlier i said uh we probably have to go back and adjust the blade tracking again you'll notice on this upper wheel the blade's hanging off just a little bit i don't know if you can see that right there or not zoom in on it yeah now the bottom wheel is it's about in the right location so i'm going to adjust that tracking [Applause] so you go back in now you don't want it back far enough where it's hitting that ledge but that's about where it needs to be you may have noticed i had a add-on steel plate here and the only reason i did that is because it better supports the workout next to the blade where you can clamp shorter stock pretty handy but i've milled this square right here it's also handy for squaring the blade up and it looks like this to to square it up after you've done everything else you move this one way or the other i believe i'm going to leave it alone because it looks looks very square i highly recommend this it could be quarter inch the reason i made it 3 8 is because i wanted to thread into it but you could put countersink on this side and put the nut on this side whatever you do this is pretty thin casting right there put some big washers behind that to support it so you don't break your casting you may have also noticed the wood stand that wood stand was just so it would slide underneath my workbench there's no particular advantage other than that something to watch out for that plate right there if it touches the blade it'll dull the teeth on one side i had to shorten that plate because i didn't think it would matter but it dulled the blade really really fast and if you wear the teeth off of one side of the blade it won't cut straight anyway uh let's try a piece of i've got this square oh after you get this square uh put a scribe line on that that way if you want to change the angle of your cut you can go right back to square uh here's another nice thing to do i put a t-handle underneath here so that i could change the angle of my stop that or my fence without having to put a wrench under the bottom there that's really hard to get to on the original design so i just made a t-handle that threads onto that bolt something i didn't cover is blade tension you don't need to put a pliers on it or anything but it needs to be fairly snug to some degree that will affect your tracking it shouldn't but things kind of deflect it needs to be fairly tight okay i got an aluminum block in here just to check squareness i've got it vertical i want to make sure i'm square this way i could have laid it down horizontal too i have used 4x4 tubing and that works pretty good this aluminum will cut fairly fast i can tell this is going to be fairly square we won't we probably won't have to make any adjustments but if you're out of square this way you would twist your blade guides accordingly if you're out of square this way you just have backstop but it's going to be going to be very square okay let's see if it shuts off on it's on its own cuts all the way through hmm might have been better if it went down a little a little bit lower i might be able to adjust it down just a hair more yeah i got some clearance there good deal i'll just adjust this stop right here well now i'm going to have to figure out some kind of blade guard i can't use the original because it was hitting right here and limiting the travel and i got to have that extra travel to make it shut off because i moved these blade guides in a more appropriate position now if you've if if you're running into the same problem on your saw you got a choice you can either move these guides back down to make to make it uh shut off so you can raise that back up or you can do what i'm i'm doing now unfortunately there's no way to put these guides in the right place at least on this particular saw there's no way to put them in the right place and have it still shut off so i'm going to build a new guard it's going to be i don't need to cover this down here i never put my hands down there what i would do is possibly grab it right here and catch my hand on that blade right there so i'm going to make sure and cover cover this end and maybe down to about here and that'd be the most likely places to get cut okay i haven't got much in the way of sheet metal tools let's see what we can do here cut that out of there first okay these are 8 32 screws i just used the i drilled that with 3 16 and i remember this is 9 30 seconds i think but this is a tap size drill i just use the 3 16th as a pilot to transfer the hole position not a whole lot of casting there i probably should have put a tab and put a screw on the outside this is easier cleaning this off with mek well if you go to the trouble to rebuild your guard put a little tabs on there and screw from the outside i it's really close to the edge right here right here i had to drill another hole because i went through the side of the casting there oh yeah that way i won't get my hands caught in it well that about wraps it up but i got one more trick up my sleeve here and i saw this on uh i don't know if i saw it on youtube or facebook or someplace like that somebody modified or somebody made this here somebody came up with this idea i got a piece of pipe here it looks like four inch i guess four and a half on the outside anyway doesn't really matter on the size too much i'm going to cut it in half like that [Applause] okay probably asking what the heck's he gonna do with that check this out i want to hold that little piece there i need to adjust my switch some more it's pretty slick huh i just ground grounded a little bevel on that so clamped on the very tip first well that about wraps up the 4x6 horizontal bandsaw tune-up you don't have to do all those things you can move those blade guides down so you don't have to modify it and put a new guard on it this is ideally the way it should work but it worked perfectly good before it was just harder on the blades i'd say i increased the blade life considerably anyway thanks for joining me and be sure and [Music] subscribe [Music]

Channel: Winky's Workshop

Views: 25,703

Rating: 4.9606743 out of 5

Keywords: Harbor Frieght, Jet, saw, Grizzly, Central Machinery, best, cluasing, creative, cut off, diy, easy, fun, grizzly, lathe, machining, metal, milling, sawing, shop, simple, skilled, south bend, wood, work

Id: SzjqDqpWRCA

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021