How to eliminate drift from your bandsaw

you buy a bandsaw and you can set it up in a variety of ways the way I prefer to do it is to take the blade string the blade and Center the blade on the center line of the upper wheel and by that I mean from the front of the tooth to the back of the blade that center line between the two should line up with the center line on the upper wheel you can pretty much actually ignore the the lower wheel the business end of this machine really is the is the upper wheel here now band saws are more useful much more useful if they have a fence you might be reciting cutting joints and so on and you want to have perfect control over a nice straight cut if you do not align the wheel on the center line here if you have tracked it too close to the front the piece of wood will automatically cut to the right alternately if you track it so it's a little too close to the back it's gonna cut to the cut to the left so by centering it here we can count on this machine making a dead dead straight cut now the next step is a fence and every bandsaw should have a fence the fence should be aligned with the miter slot right like so and this is a Craig fence here and they're all basically the same there'll be a couple of bolts right right in this location back back here you loosen those two bolts and bring the fence so that it's just a nice smooth surface along along here and this is important for a reason that you'll see in a in a second here now you might think well if my cut is veering in one direction or the other I can just adjust the fence to accommodate that and you can do that the wrinkle though to that that approach is that this miter slot now is no longer useful there's a number of jigs that we use repeatedly that work in this in this miter slot right right here so it's important that the Orient orientation of the saw be in line with that with that miter slot okay so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna make a cut here in a scrap of wood that's been jointed on one surface here and we're gonna make a cut now I have to point out that this was done when I bought the saw some some years ago and all the bandsaw is in this workshop eight in total we've gone through this process exactly once to get the table oriented to where it where it should be now in order for this demonstration I've taken the table and I've moved it out of position and that often happens when you buy the saw you have no idea the person that assembled it put it in the correct orientation and another kind of thing that happens with almost a regularity and that is people will move the bandsaw by the conveniently-placed handles and that is here in here they want to move the bandsaw from one side of their workshop to the other or swivel it around they'll grab these convenient handles and simply yank the saw well the wrinkle to that is that underneath here and most bandsaw either have four or six or some similar number of bolts holding the table to the trunnion now those bolts go through massive huge holes way bigger than the then the bolt and so if you can in fact yank the table and put it out of out of alignment and you can tell if that's been if that's happened by lining your fence to the miter slot here and then making a cut like so and if the table is been the ain't got a position in that direction like so no matter how hard you try you will not be able to keep this piece of wood tight to the tight to the fence alternately if it's been twisted in this direction as you attempt to make your cut resaw down the length of your of your piece of wood of course it's tight at the back here and what you're really doing is trying to make a wedge all right so neither one of those is what you're actually after what you really want is to have a space on either side of the the blade as you enter the end or the piece of wood and to do that we're simply going to reposition the table now there's six bolts on the underside of this one two of them are easily accessible there's four on the inside that are a little more awkward to reposition the table you're gonna do all undo all six you can shift the table in whichever direction you need to to avoid rubbing on either side of the either side of the blade and then the two bolts that are easily accessible just snug those in just with enough tightness and at that point try it again and it could very well be right bang on the money perhaps it's not then you take a look at which side it's rubbing and then move the table to avoid that rubbing that that's occurring okay so we've shifted the table out of whack here I'm going to turn the saw on [Music] [Applause] [Music] now you can see that as I advance my piece of wood into the blade it's pulling away from the fence here because it's rubbing on this side of the blade right right here now to fix that I'm gonna undo those two bolts and shift it again and if it's still pulling away from the fence then I'm going to shift it a little bit further remember there's that large hole that that bull can move around in quite quite easily so at that point we've got to make one more adjustment we've adjusted the table now just incrementally moved it so the blade is no longer rubbing on that back on that back corner so I'm going to try out and see what happened I'm gonna raise the guard here so it's a little easier to see what's going on and you can see we've got a little bit of space here and we've got a little bit of space here so now that we're certain that we've got space on either side we really want to drop our guide and our guard down into place and then we certainly remember we only were snugging up two bolts on the underside here but now that we're getting exactly what we're after you've got to remember to go back in and snug the rest of the bolts here we've got to tight at this point we need the other four tight on this saw for a total of six so at that point as long as you never grab the table to move the bandsaw you only have to do this once in your once at your lifetime the bandsaw that we use most frequently in the other room I did this in 1974 and that bandsaw is still tracking exactly parallel to the to the miter slot

Channel: FineWoodworking

Views: 474,669

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Id: vNdrkmx6ehI

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 21 2018