How To's - Set up and fine tune your bandsaw

[Music] hi welcome to Axminster tools and machinery today we're looking at the setup and tuning of bansal's so as a company that's been dealing and selling band saws bandsaw blades for for over 46 years and a common thing that we the customers get and we have lots of conversations with customers about this is frustration with their bandsaw they fitted a new blade and they just think instantly it's going to cut true it's gonna strip cut straight but a lot of guys really struggle with this so we thought we'd spend a bit of time putting a video together I'm doing Mike on a 30 years of experience with band saws just to help you get the very best from your machine to get them performing and cutting like this stick with me let's do it okay so as you can see I've taken the table off the machine I've taken the blade off the machine just so you can see the bottom guide set no personal preference on this particular trade level machine that we sell I prefer to take the table off so quick nice and easy and it gives me total access to the bottom guides so the first thing I'll do the first thing I check before I put a blade on is for debris on the on the bottom wheel and on the top wheel because we're number one cause of vibration on a band saw is muck on the bottom wheel blade is actually running on the muck not necessarily on the wheel so what I do I'll take a little scraper blade in this instance I've got a blunt Stanley knife blade and being very careful not to put too much pressure on to to damage the rubber wheels so just with very light pressure I'll just run that round just to take off the crud that's been pressed into the wheel okay just like that it's much much much smoother you don't get so much on the top but I always pay a little bit of attention to the top most of the waste falls down doesn't it on the bandsaw so you get more build up on the bottom wheel then you do the top very light look over with this tiny little scraper blade that's just gonna ensure that my blade and we're gonna put on he's running on the wheel not on the mark on the wheel okay so next now I'm happy that the wheels are clean I'll give the guide set clean now as I said you don't have to take the table off your bandsaw it makes it a lot easier if you do this particular model it is really really easy to do but what you can see I've got total and clear access to the bottom guys to get those cleaned and set perfectly so maybe I'll just give them a little little brush out all round just having a look for any debris any little bits of wood chips or little off cuts that have been stuck down inside the guide so that could prevent could prevent the the guide set moving and doing what it needs to do so once we've got guide set and wheels clean what I do then is open up all the bearing guides out over the way out back them off I'll open them up so they don't at this point make contact with the blade just in case we start the machine and the blades are in the wrong position and these bearings come into contact with the teeth which is a big no-no the body of the blade behind the teeth yeah not the teeth it's an instant quick way to to ruin a brand new bandsaw blade so top tip back the guides off out of the way this machine again nice and easy to do it both guides are released and with a simple cam we can open them up out of the way I'll back off the rear thruster Ola and back off again both sets of sight guides and I'll do this top and bottom don't neglect the bottom guys just because they're sometimes a little bit more difficult to get to we must pay attention to them they're as important as the top guides that is nice and clear for me to get that blade running through those guys and get it set on the wheel in the correct position first so I want to do some dead straight cutting so I've got a half-inch 60p i ground tooth blade from the excalibur range to put on it is a brand new blade so I know that it's gonna be perfect out of the box but if it wasn't a brand new blade you were putting on it's always worth just giving it a little look we're looking for twists we're looking for cracks and it's good just to hold up to the light we're looking for a buildup of debris on the body of the blade because that can have the same effect as the debris on the wheel but as I said I know this one's really clean so now I'm gonna put it on the machine it's all really matter whether you hook it on the bottom or the top first but a little bit easier I feel just to hook it on the top and we're gonna slide the blade down through the guard slot through the bottom slot there through this little cutout on the side of the machine and then I'll hook it on the bottom but if you have a trouble with them hook it on the bottom and the top comes off hook it on the top and the bottom pops off here's a little tip for you just get a couple of little spring clamps hook it on the top and then just put a couple spring clamps on just well you get everything positioned on the bottom just makes life just a little bit easier if you're struggling particularly on a long skinny quarter inch bandsaw blade that can be a little bit tricky did it okay so I've got the blade positioned on the wheels where I want it halfway through the thickness of the wheel and the reason we do that is the wheels got a camber on it it's got a slight curve on the edge here and that stops the teeth from digging into the wheel and it doesn't flatten the self one side of the bandsaw blade so the step you know you're one tooth bent one way want to spend the other with high tension sometimes if this is running on a flat wheel here it can pull the set off the inside of the blade here so without slight curve the teeth are making very very very minimal contact with the wheel itself it's um it's the body of the blade that is actually sat in the middle of the wheel so I'll put some tension on so i'll just quick release leave up another nice thing about this so this particular bandsaw we can just take up some of the tension with the quick release lever we're not at full tension yet so I just need to crank this top knob up the wheel will subtly gently lift up putting more tension on as we go and we've got a tension indicator on the back of the machine here just to give us a rough guide that would there or there abouts with our tension so what I'll be doing I'll be checking in this area here now I much prefer to check my tension in this area purely because we've got blade guides here designed to restrict blade movement and width if we've not withdrawn them enough it's difficult to get a true idea of where are our tensions at so I always check it here because between this point and this point there's nothing coming into contact with the blade in the middle there so it makes life a lot easier so I'll crank up that top wheel and I'll be checking attention now how much tension that's always a question we get I like about a centimeter about 3/8 of an inch of movement on my blade here I think if I can touch the body of the machine with the blade it's too slack now don't worry you really really have to go some to bloke break a blade through over tensioning quite often you'll get more blade breakages some through under tensioning and that blade moving and flapping about so give it some high tension 3/8 of an inch of movement we'll say not to be able to touch the body of the machine with the blade then I will try and replicate the running of the machine Jesus gently just spinning that top wheel trying to keep the finger out of the way I don't want to damage my finger but nice and gently and what I'm looking for there is the tracking is my bandsaw blade staying in the middle of the wheel both top and bottom if it's not well we need to make some adjustments so just to get this blade running in the ride sir right on the wheel but the ability to very subtly tilt this top wheel now what I try to do is try and replicate the running in the machine fairly quickly with the left hand and the right hand is just subtly ever so gently turning the tracking knob the very first movement with the left hand you quite slow subtle movement with the right hand on the tracking on just keeping an eye on where that blades running until we find the center of the wheel and then we'll knock it off okay so now the setting of the all-important guides that's important you get these correct so first step what I tend to do is obviously whether the guide travel the up and down of the guides here I like to have it kind of halfway along its movement just in case there's any variation this doesn't come up and down perfectly straight perfectly parallel this particular machine is really good for this everything's very very precise but some of the less expensive machines this isn't absolutely perfectly parallel I'm running up and down with the blade so what I tend to do yep is just find kind of halfway along its travel and then lock elf what I'll do then is I'll be looking to set the rear thrust roller so let's have a closer look now when the machine is free running I mean we know timber being put through it but actually running turned on um no guides come in contact with the blade at all so the rear thrust roller I like a millimeter away from the back of the blade so the gap at this point from the back of the blade to the front of the bearing is a millimeter make sure both are locked off nice and tightly what I'll do after that I'll adjust exactly where the position of the sword rollers are in relation to the to the teeth really on the blade cuz what I don't want is as I said before is this lovely nice new bandsaw blade coming into contact with the teeth coming into contact with the bearings it's an instant blunt blade and a mistake I'm sure good few people make to be honest so what we'll do we'll retract that and what we're looking for is for the the face of the bearing to be about two millimeters away from the gullet line it's nice and easy to do a little bit too close there we go then we'll do the butt the bottom will be here you see the beauty being able to take this table off really see what we're doing otherwise just really dark and awkward under there there we go so next step is to set the two bearing side guides now you can clearly see that they are too far away from the blade and we really have we even with a good sharp blade and nice tension we've got the potential for this little bit of wandering so what we'll do is bring these guides in to just away from the blade not quite touching not a millimeter away is probably still a bit too far away but not quite touching some people like to use a little feeler gauge and what I found some people do is they'll take a corner of their their bandsaw blade pack it and use that as a as a feeler gauge just in this point here because it's about the right sort of figure this right sort of distance from blade personally I like to do it just a little bit different these are these are on camps so they'll roll into the blade and away from the blade and I'll just gently rotate the wheels roll the bearing in till it just makes contact and start moving you see that and then back it off till it stops and I'll do the other side just the same rolling in it just starts moving back it off till it stops and I know those two side guides then are very very close but not quite making contact and completely silent nothing is rubbing on the blade at all the only kind of little rubbing noise you should be able to pick up is the brush running on the wheel I'll do exactly the same down the bottom bringing those two side guides into position and then I think you know we've got we've got guides we've got tension we've got tracking we've got the right blade for the job it's time to put the table back on and get square okay so we've got tension tracking guide set in the correct position I'll put the table back on but you know if we're looking to get a very very precise cuts nice and straight nice and square maybe want to cut some veneers we need to make sure that our blade firstly is Square to the table now clearly even with my dodgy eyesight that isn't quite right so we need to make some adjustments to the machine just to make sure that in this area we're square now I tend to always check on this side not so much on this side because we've got to slice through the table there that helps us get the blade off if we if we don't take the table off and although that though is just precise it's nice and flat level I always like to check in on it and a really good clean solid surface there so it will always my self will always be checked on this particular side it in right let's make some adjustments so to get this table square we've got a little stock bolt that's located underneath the surface of the table um I'm just gonna whine this stop bulb down and you can hopefully see that we're getting square root and square just stop there and just offer it up quite right still got a little gap down the bottom now this really once you get your machine from you do this set it up as long as you lock everything tight down here it's one of those set-and-forget things you don't need to do it again as I turn to find that it stays where you need it to stay and if you do take a table off to change the blade or even if you're tilting the table to get you a particular angle of cut then once you get that table back down to its square position flat position it goes back perfectly square yeah my eyes it's pretty good I'll just check from the front and if it's difficult to see what's going on maybe the light isn't great in your workshop I do tend to put a little light behind it or even a light white piece of card or piece of paper just so I've got a white background so I can see through and see whether we're square so what we're looking for ultimately is that when our squares against a table and our blade we've got no gap in this area here our table is now set Square to our blade it's a one final thing just to make sure that if we're looking to pick up any any angles through till in the table I'm gonna set this to zero know that I'm Square and in effect it's zero I'll set this to zero and lock off okay so really the final thing we've got to do is make sure our fence is set in the correct position on the table it's gonna be parallel in line with the blade and Square to the blade as well so we've already taken the time to make sure that happens we need now just to make some minor adjustments to make sure it's square there and in line with the blade first we'll get it square so I'm now going to check the the fence is Square to the table in this place here for this I use the trusty engineer square little 6-inch engineer square kind of in my opinion one of the woodworkers best friends because it really does help get your machine set up very very precisely and the machine is cutting square cutting straight it certainly saves you a lot of work cleaning up afterwards so this is what I'm going to do I'm just flat on the table and then up against the fence and we'll have a look in this area and see how square we are or are not so we can see we've got a bit of a gap at the bottom nice and tight at the top just meaning that this fence isn't quite square to the blade so let's make some little adjustments just to get everything running perfectly straight perfectly parallel okay see the adjustment to get you you'd get your square to get your fence Square to the blade and square to the table is most of the time most machines is all in the fence rail so we slacken off these and then that gives us the ability just to move the fence rail a little amount just to get our blade square so number the table get the square up against just certain adjustments just bring it in the square and then pinch it up when we're when we're close to double check it's good [Music] knock it off one final check there we go absolutely now have a fence that's square to the blade blade that's square to the table meaning that our fence is square and straight when in parallel with the blade so we're really close almost there to the perfect setup everything's square everything the tensions correct the Tracking's correct right blade for the job guides are perfect the one thing we've got to ensure now is that our rip fence is running parallel with our blade Cup no you know you can do a test cut after test cut making minor adjustments as you go to make sure the your parallel and straight but we've got a little device that I really just tend to use all the time now and it's the ujk bandsaw buddy bit of a funny name but it really does help you out basically it's used like this so what we've got is two magnets a little cutout to house the the set on the teeth so that the offset on the teeth doesn't throw the bounce will buddy out of line this will literally clip on the blade like so then you're able to bring the fence over toward the bandsaw buddy lock a fence off and then look down the line the parallel line between the two checking gap front and back is it the same so let's have a look down the line and check out the alignment between the bandsaw buddy and our bandsaw fence we can see at the back here there's a very very tiny gap and then a huge gap here clearly showing that this this fence is out of line so like on a lot of bandsaw fences for bolts on the top of the fence learn if we can get that load and key in there we go we'll release this and we can clearly see what its gonna do now it's gonna give us some sort of alignment so let's have a look I look from the back so don't get in the cameras away look from the top I don't know what you think but there looks pretty good to me so once we're happy with our alignment and what I'm looking for again is this gap here versus this gap here if you want to use a little gauge actually as pencils coming in quite useful so maybe a bit tighter there then we are there all that says to me is that's got a swing around a little bit and that is looking parallel so once we're at that point and the gap here is the same as gap here because all this all this bounce all blades are doing though this bandsaw body's doing is extending exaggerating the width of this blade so we've got a better sight line because trying to try to do the very same across that sort of width is impossible so it extends the width of your blade and gives you a really good side line of what what your fence is doing in relation to that to the blade itself so once we're happy there we will tighten these four up no double check it hasn't shifted while I've been pinching them up I don't think so okay so I'm happy there with my alignment so I'll take that off conveniently attach you to the side of the machine using the magnets so I think that's about it I think we're ready to go let's um let's close the door turn the power back on and do a test cut [Music] [Music] all right so that's my preferred setup technique I say that techniques been developed from for me and work for me for about 30 years I'm actually a little bit more than than thirty years started working on band saws as a 14 year old butchers assistant my job to clean down the bandsaw twice a day change blades and all that sort of stuff so I've been dealing with in and around bounced walls for an awful long time and I've just found that that setup gets me perfect results every time so whether you're cutting straight veneers or even whether you're cutting more curvy more into curved stuff on using a quarter inch blade and no matter what size of machine it can be a big machine with with 2 foot diameter wheels a very small bench top machine with 8 inch diameter wheels just follow that simple set up technique and I'm sure your bandsaw will perform and really really start to surprise you thanks very much for watching goodbye [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Axminster Tools

Views: 97,825

Keywords: power tools, woodworking, machinery, hand tools, workshop, woodturning, tool shop, tool store, diy, tradesman, axminster, tools, how to do it, how tos, how to series, bandsaw set up, tuning, set up, aligning

Id: 3B9qnAASn_g

Length: 24min 5sec (1445 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 11 2018