Converting a wood cutting bandsaw to a metal cutting bandsaw

in this video i am going to be turning this wood cutting band saw into a metal cutting band saw this is a delta milwaukee homecraft 10 inch bandsaw and i i don't wasn't looking for a metal cutting band so or really this project at all but uh i saw saw this band saw an auction and i think it was like 15 and it looked cool to me i like the round curved you know old school looking tools and i thought it might be fun to to try to turn this thing from a wood cutting bandsaw into a metal cutting band saw so you're just checking it out seeing if it if the motor worked if everything was turning and now i'm starting to get into the disassembly most of this comes apart super easy um i don't think this was ever this wasn't a tool that was babied but it wasn't beat up either so um nothing looked overly abused um the previous owner brought prior to the auction house they had taken and put put a uh a spacer below the upper i don't know what you call it the wheel with the wheel mounts to which does the tracking and the tension they put a spacer on and drilled a couple whole extra holes in the cover to clear clear the wheel but other than that it looked like everything was in pretty good shape so here i'm just taking the rest of that cast iron base off and then looking for how am i going to take this this motor off and this is a homemade uh pretty obviously a homemade stand which was working it was kind of wobbly i don't know if you could tell in the video when i turned that thing on um it actually wobbled quite a bit i turned it on here i was curious if it was the bearings in this motor maybe it was just a belt you know because belts except they sit for a while kind of takes the set they can add a vibration uh here i've taken off the uh the band saw wheels and pulley there was a nut on that shaft and i thought maybe it would just pop out and it doesn't so can't really see the set screws and things so i decided to take this table off and then i'd have a better look at the wheels and this was just on with i believe there's a woodruff key under that but there was just a set screw allen set screw holding that pulley on and there's like a stop collar between that pulley and that bearing hub so just loosen both those up and it was a little bit tighter than hand tied so i ended up getting a screwdriver and a little bit of pry bar and prying them off but they pry it off super easy and then just clean up that shaft so i can get the rest of that that stop collar off and then that whole shaft comes out i never did take it that shaft off that pulley you know once i got it that far um it seemed like what's the point then you know i cleaned it up just fine the way it is inside that bearing housing it just bronze bushings and there's an oiler to oil them and then now i'm vacuuming right now this is the top wheel here uh and there's two needle bearings inside that so which i i just using a socket in a a little extension maybe just a socket but popping that out with a socket if it's pretty pretty neatly in that hole the way that wheel was sitting on my my wood vise there wasn't very straight so i decided just get another socket would fit outside the od of that needle bearing and then i'm popping it through into that socket now just so you know because you got to have something holding up the wheel but not in the way of the bearings so saki sockets pretty handy for that uh so one of them's out here i'm popping out the other one now because like i said there's two in those needle bearings were a little bit gun gummed up but weren't too bad so instead of reusing that wood stand i built this metal stand which i didn't record but this i just built this out of an old bed frame maybe you can see those notches if you've ever taken a bed frame apart you could recognize that but that's all this is uh bed frame and i got a couple of pieces of mild steel angle iron and the reason i did that is bed frames are tougher than mild steel i i don't exactly know what they're made out of some sort of spring steel or something but they're tough to drill tough on tools so i cut all the pieces of the that stand with the grinder and then i added the mild steel so i can drill and uh and then you can see here i'm putting in some nutserts um which is like a rivet that's threaded um so you can put a bolt into it um and just a second ago you saw me pounding one of those nutserts in with a hammer which ended up being a mistake it deformed it and then i couldn't get the bolt in and then i ended up having to take that out and i'm pretty new to this whole nutsert thing so i'm not real sure on where i should set that and how much tension and so i'm kind of getting used to that with this project so here's that one that i beat in i'm trying to pry it out um then here i'm trying to tap it out this is not working at all so i ended up getting uh my slide hammers got a vice grip attachment for it so put a vice grip on a slide hammer and then it then it popped right out and then drilled a hole a little bit bigger and then it worked just fine um here i'm putting some casters on i got i'm putting two locking casters and two non-locking casters i was a little hesitant about this because i don't want my bandsaw rolling around when i'm cutting steel so i don't know if this is a good choice or not but i figured i could always go in and change those leveling feeds or add some some stops later if i needed to um this is what i have been using this milwaukee porta band before that i had a harbor freight for the band uh and it works good but you know it's it's not that big and sometimes the throat the angle of throat on that thing can be in the way um so what i'm doing is i have a gear reduction box that i'm mounting can amount to this thing and so just cut some pieces of all thread 3 8 all thread um and then grab a little chamfer on the ends of the all thread to make it thread easier and then there's that this is a 30 to 1 gear reduction box that i'm putting on here i got this uh it was a walk-in freezer door like a huge walk-in freezer door i don't i don't remember exactly the size but it was like 12 feet tall and uh probably 9 or 10 feet wide and there was this big door opener and that's what this was this used to have a a chain instead of that pulley on there that's a new pulley i just bought but that's what this motor and gear reduction box what i got what they were for when i got it inside that huge door was a small man door which i planned on converting one of my sheds to a walk-in cooler at some point so i still have some of that stuff and then here i just got a you know steel square tubing i was pounding that pulley on to get it more in alignment and then now for reassembly so you can see everything's painted and clean all i did was wire wheel all the dirty parts and i and i have uh an ultrasonic cleaner also so i took some degreaser and put an ultrasonic cleaner and all the little bits that would fit i cleaned it with that first and then i wire-wheeled them too and that turned out pretty nice and so now i just hear reassembly i got the tires for the bandsaw on amazon and they were a tiny bit wide so i had to cut them with a just a utility knife but they're urethane orange urethane tires for the bandsaw wheels uh here putting that tracking mechanism back to get tracking slash tensioning mechanism back together uh and then here's the lower one that's a that's that what you see me spray just a second ago was a white lithium grease anyway put this back together um and put the nuts back on and then the pulley you could see maybe if you noticed maybe you didn't but the one that was on there originally that's the one that the pulley that was off the motor uh i needed a smaller pulley to be the driven one because it's such a because of the gear reduction i had taken the speed and i don't recall now what it was before i took this all apart and then did the math with the gear reduction unit that i have because it's stamped on one of the tags on it what the reduction was and uh i knew the pulleys that i had weren't gonna work so i ordered another one and then the drive pulley from the wood band side turned into the driven pulley a little bit of you know did a little bit of math for that and this seemed to work just fine uh so here just putting on the table um that handle you know you just lift it up into that the other piece that's on there and even you can tighten it loose and so that's intentionally loose and then putting the belt back on and then i'm going to adjust it i you only see me doing this for a couple seconds here but i probably took me a few minutes to get this thing adjusted right and then i tried cutting a little bit of steel and it was still loose and so that i adjusted again the whole thing probably took me i don't know seven or ten minutes i wasn't wasn't timing the whole thing but uh and then here trying to put the band saw um the blade guides on and i thought it'd be easier put that on the table off so i took table back off uh so there's the blade guides there and then fitting that blade for the first time and the original tracking bolt was a like a wingnut style bolt and it was all bent so i just put a quarter twenty bolt in there planning on making a knob for that later on but i just wanted to get this done so i haven't done it yet anyway that all seemed to work pretty good and then i figured probably what made sense is to check speed on this thing so for this project i bought a tachometer that would also read test attack armors read rpms but this also reads um linear speeds so what i'm measuring it here is meters per minute i can get the camera focused right so there's just a little contact wheel and then there's a display i'll zoom down here in just a sec and you can see i'm kind of bouncing between like 90 and 92 meters per minute so um just did a little bit of math and 91 meters per minute is 298 299 feet per minute which you know i did some searching on the internet and that looks like it's a pretty good range for um for forgotten steel which is my attention here so a bunch of wire uh sticking out of there that's the knockout i just knocked out of that electrical box and then i'm putting in a plug where the old cord went through and then i like this style of um motor switch tool switch um i typically i'll just buy these on amazon um and they're cheap they're like four or five bucks for a switch so i this is just a blank plate for i think i got the box and played at lowe's and then this is a rotary tool flex tool five shaft tool um that particular one is made by a company called grow bay and i'm just cutting the hole out for the switch you don't need that you know the last few i've done with a dremel but you could probably do that with the you know a keyhole saw or something like that too but that's it pretty good so i'm gonna go put that switch on the bandsaw um so you can see the the single getting electrical box here which you can't see in between there is a piece of hard conduit it's essentially just a half inch nipple with some conduit nuts on it in between so there's a hard steel connection between those metal boxes this motor is designed to be run in two different directions because like i said it was for that door so and it can also be ran at i think 115 or 230 volts so there's some extra wires in there that i'm not using because i'm only using this in one direction and only in 115 volts so cleaning up some of the wiring and then see how loose that box is trying to tighten it down i finally get sick of messing with this and get some channel locks and actually get it tight um there's a ground lug in that box which is where i'm hooking the ground up and then these paddle switches gonna just interrupt the hot leg and then the neutral add wire wire nut together finally get that box tight and then here i'm wiring up the uh that switch get that wired up and then i can button up all the boxes and then the electrical is good to go [Applause] so the blades on plate guards are on uh here now just put the covers on and those are just held on by those those these knots you can see here those extra holes i was talking about the previous owner drilled in there to i'm assuming he had longer bands on blades uh anyway just putting the badge back on um this is the one that says delta milwaukee homecraft and a tiny bit bigger holes to rivet it back on um but that's all i'm doing here is riveting that bag back on and i think it's finished at this point so pretty happy with the the the colors and the way it turned out everything's looking sharp and nice and quiet and run smooth and then here just testing it out for the first time it seems like didn't have those wheels locked in but i don't think the wheels are going to be a proper casters so this got pretty nice and pretty crazy project anyway appreciate you sticking around for the whole video and if you haven't uh hit the subscribe button appreciate you doing that hit like if you liked the video thanks for watching you

Channel: JC Fabrications

Views: 7,185

Keywords: Bandsaw, Bandsaw conversion, Converting from wood to steel cutting, refinishing bandsaw, j c fabrications, j c fabrication, jc fabrications, jc fabrication, jcfabrications, jcfabrication

Id: T5zPZ4kShzE

Length: 19min 59sec (1199 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020