9 mistakes beginners make at the bandsaw. What to do instead.

if you've noticed I've been doing a lot of bandsaw videos lately on my reels on my Instagram on my Facebook reels and on my YouTube shorts and I've been getting a lot of questions I'm making this video to show you five to seven things that people get wrong about the bandsaw when they're beginning their bandsaw Journey I've been on the band so since I'm about six or seven years old and I'm 56 now so that's about 50 years I've been using the bandsaw and when I was in high school I cut out letters at a sign shop for many years and I did that quite a bit I learned a few things along the way and I'm going to show you some of those mistakes that people make in the beginning and several tips on how to correct those mistakes [Music] so the biggest mistake that most people make I get calls from people all the time and they're saying my saw is drifting it's not cutting well it's burning it's smoking and then I'll ask them a simple question when did you change the blade last and they'll say I don't know I bought this so I'll use the blade was on it it sounds ridiculous but I've gotten that answer more than you would imagine when you keep old blades they're simply just in case you need to cut metal or something else but when the blades get dull throw them away when you buy a used saw first thing you do is get rid of the blade don't ever use a stamped blade when I was a kid my dad used to buy Sears stamped blades they were horrible they would go dull immediately and then immediately start drifting the only thing that would be good for cutting is maybe foam rubber or foam insulation but for cutting wood they were horrible when I was about 17 18 years old we began to buy blades from Suffolk Machinery which is now Timber Wolf Timberwolf blades I have no end forced agreement with them at all but I've just been buying their blades since about 35 years now and so Timberwolf blades are the best blades that I personally like to use I get them in quarter inch and eighth inch which is what's on this saw right now this is an eighth inch 14 tooth per inch and I get a quarter inch 14 tooth per inch and sometimes I get a 3 8 blade 14 tooth per inch for cutting the material that I like to cut it's the best we cut MDF sometimes brass and aluminum and not only is it a good cut believe it or not for cutting your hands which you don't want to do but it is a safer blade to get injured on if you're using a 14 tooth per inch for resaw that is a dangerous blade that blade will pull you in it'll suck your hand in general purpose cutting I would get a 14 tooth per inch [Music] one common mistake I see most often is people cutting round objects on a bandsaw whether it's a round Peg or a hockey puck or baseball or a golf ball I see people sticking them into the bandsaw blades and then they go banana because this is a conveyor belt the minute you stick this against it it just goes crazy it spins in every direction you need to fixture this you need to grab it with a clamp you need to hot glue it or screw it to something another dangerous thing to try and stick into a saw is like a natural shape like a tree branch everything needs to be fixtured down especially if you're not confident and if you don't have the experience and you don't know what's going to happen fixture it down to the table you don't want it to spin put it in a cradle grab it with a with a screw clamp just anticipate that will get sucked out of your hands it is scary and you let the piece go flying always fixture something round especially a ball or a rod or or a pipe or something like that let's see what happens when I stick this in here that's what happens and if you're not ready for it it's very scary make sure your clamp is flat against the table so it's not going to rock and that's how you cut a round object on the bandsaw you can also hold a baseball with one of these I know because I've done it foreign so this is another common mistake I see people do they want to cut the corners off of something Square and they might approach it like that I call this High siding like on a motorcycle you don't want a high side so the high side here is going to pull that down onto the table the safer choice would be to flip it over and go like that because you have all this leverage to keep that from pulling this way when you're here it's just physics it wants to pull down against the table you'll bend the blade you'll break your piece of wood and you'll poop in your pants so whenever you're going to cut the corner off of something if you're going to sculpt like I do on the bandsaw be careful you don't high side always make sure that the bottom of your cut you either have the leverage of the material or you have the support of something underneath and I'll show you a couple of examples of that [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign if you did want to make a high side cut like this I'll show you a safe way to do it you could also adjust the table but if you don't want to adjust the table you need to make a temporary simple cut you could raise up your blade support and I'll show you with a piece of scrap what I would do and that's a way to support a high side cut or you could just cut it that way but if you can't because the object or the shape of the wood and you do something like that [Music] foreign [Music] that removes so that you could change the blade these are very important most bandsaw manufacturers to them this is an afterthought they give you a plastic insert when I see a saw in somebody else's shop that has a plastic insert I immediately put a piece of material over it cut into the blade as my new table support any little piece of debris that comes off of your cut is going to get stuck in those little holes a bandsaw manufacturing company makes the band so dangerous with the bad insert this is an insert I made out of brass it's pretty beat up it's probably about 15 years old but sometimes when I need a perfect zero clearance I will just take a piece of material in there and then I have a zero [Applause] I can make little tiny small cuts and not have to worry about it getting stuck in the insert plate so I just grabbed a piece of scrap that's been sitting here but you can get a nice piece of acrylic saw it into put some double-sided tape and then you have a zero clearance plate occasionally you go to a high school shop and the plate is totally missing because nobody cares nobody takes care of the tools this is too dangerous you shouldn't go near this because your blade could pull the piece of material into it especially if it's something small if this is your circumstance and you're in a public shop or a shared shop put a piece of material over this just a full piece of Clean Cut plywood and then you're good to go and if you need to change the blade you take the plywood off you change the blade you put the zero cut plate back in so people always want to know how I set my guide blocks there's all types of this guide block that guy block there's all types of math this is the guide block that's been on this saw since I was a little kid I got this particular saw this exact machine not this model this exact machine I've had since I was about seven years old six years old my dad bought it from the family of a fireman who passed away when he was a fireman when I was a little kid and this bandsaw has been the one bandsaw I've used nearly at least once a week for the last 49 years and the bearing is the same the guide blocks are the same I haven't changed them you just make sure that the teeth are sticking out past the guide block and that the bearing is spinning on the bottom and the top the bottom guide blocks are the same if we looked at them the teeth would be sticking out just past the guide blocks and the bearing just pushes right on the back of the blade and I always make sure that the crown at the top the blade is right either in the middle or just past the crown when you back out when you're making a cut and you're backing out and the blade wants to follow your cut and come off of the wheels that's because your crown is the blade the wheel's not tilted back enough keeping that blade back there or your guide blocks or pushing the blade too far forward and any little instigation will pull the blade off that shouldn't be it should always be leaning back a little bit against the guide blocks it's always worked for me I've never had to buy new guide blocks or change them when it gets worn out right here I just pull them out and flip them over I'll put them on the grinder and flatten them out so it's kissing the flat back part of the blade the teeth stick out just in front of it it's not complicated and the reason I like this particular model this is a 1960s 1940s Delta Rockwell Delta Milwaukee 14 inch you can adjust all the guides by hand you just need Allen key to push the guide blocks in and out which isn't an adjustment you make a lot all these are done by hand all the guide blocks at the bottom are all done by hand you don't need to break out an allen key or anything that's the reason why I like this saw all the new modern saws have Allen Keys everywhere drives me bananas which is keeping me from buying a brand new saw because they all have Allen keys to adjust all this stuff I want to just loosen this turn this in and out lock it I'm good to go I don't want to have an allen key in my pocket while I'm trying to be creative this is another thing that drives me crazy and I know this is something that most high school shop teachers teach it is useless it is pointless don't do this because it just makes your curve cuts bad if you want to make a curve there's a curve I don't know why certain teachers teach you to do this they make you cut relief cuts the only thing a relief cut is going to do is give you a facet on your curve do you want this curve to be faceted and have a start and stop point right there you want one clean curve you don't want stops and starts and stops and starts the only time you might need a relief cut is if you're cutting a large piece and you want to lighten your piece then cut that off and cut that off and then give yourself a nice clean cut on the curve there's no reason to put relief cuts on anything again if it's just a matter of lightening up your load just cut some of the scrap off and then make one clean curve using your whole upper body to make the turns don't cut from your shoulders because you'll get a staggered cut one clean cut I didn't have to stop and get rid of the scrap and then start and then get rid of the scrap again and start again don't do this it's not necessary [Music] can you see that there's an outside curve here that I'm going to cut I'm going to get rid of that material and then over here we're going to get rid of this material I want to show you just a tip on cutting with a thick blade that doesn't seem like it could stand the turn and it can't but I'm going to show you how you could use this blade to make these tight turns what you don't want to do is force it when you hear the blade burning and slowing down you're going to destroy the blade you won't hurt the saw but you'll destroy the blade and if the blade costs you in this case this Blade's like 200 bucks you don't want to destroy the blade but in the smallest saws with the 93.5 inch blade those blades could be 20 a piece so you don't want to force them especially if you have a resaw blade on them you don't want to force the turn but there are tricks and I'll show you some examples if you watch up close foreign the cut which is obvious but if you couldn't see what I was doing I was backing out and making more relief for the thickness of the blade so I would cut I'd back up and make some more relief back up make some more relief and each time going a little bit deeper on the cut I should show you that one more time I'm going to do it on a I'm going to do it on a second piece of wood just to be more explicit maybe we could slow it down and that's how I cut that six inch radius with a one inch deep bandsaw blade you need to make those relief Cuts as you go and if you were doing the same thing you do the same thing on the inside no relief cuts off of it just in your path [Music] I'm very daring on the band saw I take a lot of risks it's only because I have a lot of experience I have cut my fingers several times over the years pretty bad in some cases never cut anything off on the band saw particularly but I've cut into my fingers a lot and over the years I developed the habit of using a fat pencil with a thick eraser to flick away especially when I'm doing small parts like letters and scroll work [Music] your fingers away from there because you don't want to get blood on your work a little piece of an eraser is not going to bleed and it helps get the little Parts out like that and you don't get your fingers sucked down in there so use a fat pencil with a rubber eraser as you a bandsaw push stick push thick also works for turning the camera on and off [Music] here's a quick tip to remind you how to keep your table Square to your blade if that's important to you you can use a t-square but if you want to double check when you're about to cut just cut into your material and then flip it around and if it fits into the blade in the same exact way then you're 90 degrees your Square your Square [Music] we turn it off pull it out and we fit into their square square to the table and that's how you know your blade is square here's a mistake I see often take place in a shared shop or a maker space people get that saw blade all the way deep inside some scroll work and pull the blade off the bandsaw trying to back out of it I'll show you a foolproof way to get out of any predicament with your benzo blade watch just turn it off and back your way out of the cut in some cases you can't back out cut your way all the way through it cut off into the scrap you see I cut my shape I just cut my shape and then I just cut my way out of the scrap instead of trying to back all the way out always look for your way out or just turn the saw off and back your blade out but don't pull the blade off I hope I was able to answer some questions and I hope these tips will help get you started in a safe way if you want to get creative with the bandsaw just be careful baby steps as you develop your confidence so if you want to get creative stick with the blade the higher tooth count that's uh I use an 8 inch 14 TPI for doing all my creative bandsaw work because you can make tight turns you can kind of use the saw blade like the way a chainsaw artist uses a chainsaw there's lots of videos on practical resawing I'm giving you more of the creative bandsaw tips that that I learned over over my lifetime if you have any tips or tricks put them in the comments below let me know if you like this type of video I'll do more of them suggest a couple of things in the comments and I'll be reading them thank you very much love and respect be careful band sawing [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Applause]

Channel: jimmydiresta

Views: 577,807

Keywords: diresta bandsaw, I make, diresta diy, bandsaw, don't do this, dos and donts, 1/8, 14tpi

Id: WaTC1sNTHuE

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 08 2023