Bandsaw Tips for Woodturners

hi i'm ashley harwood and i am a full-time professional woodturner and woodturning instructor in this video we're going to be going over some tips and tricks for the band saw now if you're looking for an all around how to set up your band saw how to put the blade on how to set up the guides that's not what we're covering in this video we're going to be talking about specifically the difficulties that woodturners face so if you're cutting wet wood if you're cutting a lot of wet wood and if you're trying to cut through a whole bunch of bowl blanks get through a production run so let's get started [Music] first of all let's talk about what kind of a bandsaw you're gonna want if you're wanting to be a production woodturner and in general i would say go for as much horsepower as you can afford this is a five horsepower saw and at the time that i bought it maybe i could afford it but i'm a person who ascribes to the belief that when you buy nice tools you only cry once some other things that you're going to want to look at when you're purchasing a bandsaw are what what are the height that you can cut at and what's the width that you can cut at now i'm not often going to maximize either the width or the height if i have a bowl blank that's that big honestly it's probably going to be a little too heavy for me to comfortably lift up here and cut and i'm probably going to be cutting it with the chainsaw anyway so my primary concern if i'm shopping for a bandsaw is going to be horsepower for the longest time i had a much smaller bandsaw which is a very nice bandsaw but definitely not good enough for cutting up the quantity of bowl blanks that i'm going to need for teaching a class so the next thing i want to talk about is what kind of a blade do we want to use i'm going to be cutting through a whole lot of bowl blank so every time i teach a class i'm cutting about 30 of them on this band saw i want a blade that's going to hold up to a whole lot of abuse and that's going to cut through a whole lot of wood so i go with the timberwolf one inch wide two tpi blade it's a very rugged blade now the other part about this and we'll go over that in a second is that i'm not trying to cut these pieces into a circle i don't really need my band saw to make these pieces of wood round that's what i have a lathe for so as you can see i've already been doing some cutting over here on my bandsaw today i've been cutting some wet bradford pear now when you're cutting a lot of that type of wood and it's wet and fresh it tends to gum up the blade you get all this sticky stuff stuck on the inside of the blade i have a really neat trick for cleaning it up that's more simple than you would imagine it would be i'm going to use my negative rake scraper one of my woodturning tools to clean that off first of all you want to make sure that your bandsaw is off for this you can even unplug it if you want to be extra safe and we're going to open up the top of the bandsaw here i'm going to set my negative rake scraper flat on the table and then i'm going to spin the wheel with my hand again make sure your bandsaw is off when you do this okay this next tip is going to help you get the absolute most out of your blade and i know y'all are with me on that one i'm going to share with you how i use my bench grinder with cbn wheels to sharpen my bandsaw blade we're going to start by taking the blade off of the bandsaw so now i just bring my blade over to my grinder and i'm going to use this side part of the wheel right over here this is my fine grit wheel it's about a 320 and i'm using this side portion here which i don't really use for anything else in my turning i'm not somebody that's doing a lot of hollowing and stuff like that so i'm going to use that portion to just sharpen the tops of each one of these blades so i know you might be looking at this blade and thinking ashley that's a long blade and that's going to take you forever to finish but it's faster than you might think so to prove my point here i'm going to set my timer on my phone and we'll see how long it takes me [Music] so i'm just going to put a little piece of tape on here that shows me where i started [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so there you go one last thing that's going to improve the performance of your band saw is making sure your table stays nice and clean so we want to clean any type of rust or corrosion off of it and of course as soon as we get done cutting we want to clean off all the wet shavings i'm going to use this brush here to clean the shavings off the table i'm going to go back later and i'm going to use my shop vac to get all the shavings out of all these little crevices [Music] [Music] the product i use for cleaning off this table is this sand flex block now they are not a sponsor i just really like this product it works well for cleaning off both band saw tables and lathe beds they come in coarse medium and fine i probably use the medium in the course most often i do want to wear a latex glove when i'm cleaning this off because it tends to leave a nasty residue on my hands [Music] these blocks really work like a magic eraser for your machines it's amazing so last thing i want to do here is just put a layer of renaissance wax on the table this is going to make sure that when i'm pushing my wood across the table of the bandsaw there's not going to be any resistance on the surface so corrosion on the surface of the table is going to create resistance resistance means that i'm going to be pushing harder to push the blade through the work and the harder you're pushing that increases the chances of having an accident which of course we don't want i need to be able to continue playing the piano [Music] love me some new blaze brand new 160 inch blades okay i know how to do it well is to throw it in the grass and the thing just like springs open so you might be thinking how is teeny tiny little ashley gonna fold up this 160 inch plate i'll show you it's easier than you think you just step on it and then you don't have to worry about trying to finagle it with both of your hands or anything and then you twist so hands away from me underneath like this stepping on it down here and i'm just going to twist it make sure you wear gloves for this part and we're going to twist it again and voila so i'm just gonna [Music] well that's all guys i hope that was helpful if you're interested in the timberwolf blades or the sand flex blocks we will have links down below the video for those thanks for watching i'll see y'all next time thank you so much for watching if you like what you saw i do hope that you'll hit subscribe and don't forget the little notifications bell so you don't miss any of our upcoming videos and please let us know what you think in the comments we love to hear back from you guys i would like to take a moment to give a big shout out to all of my patreon members thank you so much we really appreciate all of your support and especially in times like these it really helps us to continue to bring you high quality photos and video to all of the social media channels i would especially like to give a big shout out to my top tier patrons andrew nydal chris carrence dr david matheson erica vane jim tate chris jones leonard crowl mark glonek robert hunt and steve snyder thank you so much if you would like a behind the scenes look at what's going on here in charleston or if you would like to have a heads up before everybody else when i schedule my new classes and yes i will be scheduling new classes for early 2021 then head on over to the patreon page and check it out well thanks again guys until next time well this is definitely making a video

Channel: Ashley Harwood

Views: 148,965

Rating: 4.9247208 out of 5

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Id: kqhu7LJzJiM

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020