LIVE!? - Welding Bandsaw Blades & Startrite Saw

all right I think we're live are we live this thing on what's wrong with your audio it seems to be working it's the same as hold on a minute hold on that should be better welcome to my very first life well at least there's no interlacing I have no idea what happened that last video my apologies I mean I did absolutely nothing different how was it interlacing even a thing anymore I'm shooting in 1080p with a state-of-the-art camera here let me see if it's gonna be a little tricky showing you the camera I'm actually recording this with you know how fast of a scan rate this thing has but let's dig right in there's something I'd like to show you after all these years after all the searching and sleepless nights finally my dreams come true the first person on YouTube with a green vertical bandsaw I don't mean to imply that these things are rare they're not they're all over the place it's just not easy finding one at a price I could really justify as a hobbyist until now what is this bull this isn't live I can clearly see the Edit this is by no means a lightweight saw and listed shipping weight with the palette and some other junk was about 500 pounds so there's some heft to it though it is nice and compact it's not that big for its capacity I mean I'm taller than the thing and I'm only 7 foot 2 this all isn't really the point of this video I do want to share the latest edition with you but that's not why I'm making this video what I'd like to try is welding bandsaw blades I think we'll make a little jig talk some welding but while we're here might as well cover the basics for anyone that might be curious for the benefit of some of our younger viewers maybe they can't read yet this is a start right 18 t10 though no lie my brain has started parsing this is start right now I just can't get that out of my head 10 speeds 18 inch throat and T of course stands for Tony now perhaps the more acute among us may have noticed it's living in the space where the shaper used to be yeah I've got maybe some bad news I got rid of the shaper helped fund this saw actually but it turns out honestly the shaper wasn't happy here and I can't blame it in fact I never quite trusted it from day one I noticed it making eyes at my grind and it wanted to I should I put this move on let's say [Music] all kidding aside I just don't have the space and a vertical saw for me offers more bang for the buck that and just between me and you I've got my eyes on another little piece of kit I've always wanted now you'll be the first to know if it works out I don't want to jinx myself but getting rid of the shaper there was also some planning ahead involved in that this is all welded steel construction it's nice and solid in a beefy cast iron table baby had I just a smidge more self-confidence this might just warrant a few Tim the Toolman grunt it's 19 inches a smidge over or 480 millimeters it tilts not sure how useful it is just yet for me but it does tilt 45 degrees outboard and I don't know 10 maybe 15 degrees in towards the saw itself and it has a nice little fence that rides in a T slot that's cast in machine into the front edge of the table no miter gauge though and no slot in the table to accept one if I find a need one it might make for a good little project it also came with a small fine adjust that locks in the same t slot and screws into that tapped hole it's just a big threaded neuro wheel that pushes and pulls on the fence it's pretty basic don't make me dig it out it's an 8 inch capacity and as I said it's a ten-speed saw see it says so right there at 10 with a pretty fast changeover in the back it's got a pair of 5-speed pulleys and this 2 to 1 gearbox it's actuated by just pulling or pushing that lever for that knob and the start right designers did a great job with this retro speed spin o chart and is there any other more relatable emotion than the frustration of trying to get a good clean cut on a spice dose I know you're all just dying to know so I'll quit the teasing this saw does 56 to 32 hundred feet per minute aka 17 to almost a thousand meters per minute so for an industrial saw of this stature in order to offer the capacity that does in a relatively compact package naturally you'd rightfully assume that it must be driven by two large half wheels but surprisingly that's not what start right did this thing uses three smaller wheels instead s T fu not quite sure I'm following is that some kind of university judging by the number of exclamation points you must be quite proud of your institution how refreshing go s TF I have been having some fun cutting wood on this thing I think that's what it did in its previous life the blade you saw on the Cameo in the ring roller video I think that was for wood I have since installed a metal cutting blade now I was a little let down that the wheels are stamped steel as opposed to I don't know something a little bit beefier and that they're so small smaller wheels means more stress on the saw blade it needs to flex three times into a greater degree with every complete revolution that's where the expression being the third wheel comes from but it's made it this long so I assume the system works the tires aren't super great but there's still some life on them the table splits in two that's how you get the blade out now this all doesn't have roller guides it has solid inserts these little things one on the top and one on the bottom it only came with the ones installed these are for twenty five thousand CH blades I think they're just hardened steel actually now that I'm looking at it like maybe cast iron if anyone has any thoughts on whether roller guides or solid guides are better specifically for metal I'd love to hear about it all things being equal I may upgrade these just for convenience or make a few inserts as I need them these things aren't cheap right from start right sorry maybe I should make assumptions like that after all my mom watches these videos sometimes slow guides are what hold the blade where it's supposed to be help keep the blade in place and you safe while you're working I went out and cut just a small two or three inch piece out of my neighbors saw I hope he doesn't notice the blade fits here nice and comfy with just the teeth really unsupported and outside the guide just the sort of body of the blade is in there now these solid guides are for this size blade both in thickness and in width or depth I guess if I wanted to use say a narrower blade it would sit far too deep in these guides it would sit too far back the teeth would be inside the guides and one turn of the saw would flatten all the teeth out same thing would go for a blade that's wider when seated the teeth would be a lot further out and potentially unsupported maybe causing your cut to wander so four different blades I would need different inserts the convenience I think of the roller guides is that you can adjust them to accommodate whatever blade size you have in there loosen the bearings push them around and till it's fit for your blade these guides can also be adjusted left right in and out up and down but they can't be adjusted for the blade size so mom if you're watching I need some new blade guides apart from roller guides the other thing this saw doesn't have is its own built-in blade welder I haven't found any evidence that one was removed so I can only assume the saw was born this way let's head over the bench and talk about blade welding I bought these these are new blades I bought them like the day I bought the saw but four weeks before it actually arrived as mentioned I can't use these just yet for lack of proper blade guides but this is a little selection sooner or later I'd like to play with now there's a new metal cutting blade already installed just like this one I got two and then I have two for wood or four it's actually two and two a wider one hopefully for a resawing a little bit of resawing I might do and a thinner one for cutting curves tighter curves the thinner the saw the tighter the curve it can cut the wide Saul's want to go straight it's not that they want to go straight it's just that they can't do tight curves they run into their own kerf I'm not going to get into actual bandsaw in here if you want to know more about using a vertical bandsaw just pick up a Woodworking magazine any one of them and just open to a random page odds are pretty good it'll be about bandsaw these on the other hand are from my smaller chop saw same size 25,000 CH but shorter obviously they're not really sharp anymore but as an academic exercise I'm going to combine these two short blades into one longer one for the vertical saw now in my case it's not really super convenient for me to weld my own blades I don't go through enough of them to see any real cost savings I don't think in buying long coils and making my own as I said this is more academic than anything else though I have often come across boxes of bandsaw blade stock in my scrap yard adventures never really have much interest to me and of course now they'll be impossible to find but if I do find some for metal another right size and this little experiment works out I definitely consider rolling my own lol tot losing his touch now he needs a bandsaw like the rest of us PS go STFU wow that must be a really popular school I mean it's not like I don't have better things to do than to share minuscule technical topics just supposed to vid this is a piece of one and a quarter-inch chromoly around 30 millimeters I want you to pay close attention I'm only going to do this once in continuous take with a mere snap of my fingers now hold on I'm not done with you just yet right II make a comment face can you read that older bansal's I mean I guess even the new ones the industrial ones are typically fitted with their own blade welding unit they cut weld grinds all in one place their only function of course is to join blade stock to make one continuous blade but that isn't always just to make a new blade sometimes you'd want to separate and rejoin an existing blade maybe not so much these days but it's a thing this is the very first cut I did on my homemade CNC plasma cutter this cartoon-style wrench here I don't have the plasma cutter anymore I broke that down years ago and recycled most of those parts for my CNC router but say you had a part like this with an internal contour where you wanted to cut an internal contour before plasma and freaking lasers what you could do is take it over your bandsaw cut your bandsaw blade feed it through an opening in the contour weld this back together the blade that is and install it back on your bandsaw you would now have the blade threaded through your contour and you could do the work that you needed to do once done cut your blade again get your part out weld your blade back together would actually do this probably not but again it's one of those little tricks one can keep in their back pocket if you ever come across a part or a feature you need to cut and have no other options so anywho I want to join these two saw blades making sure that I weld them as straight as possible if you were weld them like this well your saw might cut a little lumpy they help me get this alignment straight I'm just gonna mill up a very simple jig basically just a small step in a piece of scrap stock okay I found out cut off its aluminum seems like a decent length the longer the better probably you know without getting too out of hand I apologize I think earlier I called the scrap stock I think technically it's just scrap huh though if your supplier gives you stuff that said anything like mom I'm just gonna mill a shallow step the length of the part [Applause] hey this old Tony how's the faucet doing hey I appreciate you asking it's holding up but I'd hate to ask you to take my word for it let's have a look at some live real-time feed from my bathroom camp drei is a boat [Applause] I told yourself nothing very complicated at all I've got a step to help align the blades and then I just cut a simple slot just to give me some clearance to weld and when I flip it for the weld bead underneath any buildup that might happen during welding and there it is straightforward enough I think I've got some can't twist clamps keeping the blade onto the guide block and the guy blocked clamped on my bench I've cut both ends of the blade as square as possible and I tried to get the pitch of the teeth more or less lined up you can see the spacing at the gap is you know relatively consistent frankly that's not a super big deal here just because the tooth pitch on the blade is relatively fine but if you had something coarser it may be a little bit more important I also hit it with some scotch brite I don't know if you can really tell but it should be nice and clean and ready to weld I'm going to TIG weld this however why don't you braise it you know you can braise those right your jokes are dumb unsubscribed how come you're not brazing at work we braise the okay okay I get the gist I'm going to take weld this however you could most certainly braze them just like we saw in the last video except now the material here is very thin I mean this is 25,000 maybe what we saw before you'd want to create a bit of a scarf joint or sort of like an angled lap joint so the blade maintains its thickness there you have a little bit more braze area to give the joint some strength as always there's usually more than one way to do something though if you tried to cross drill this and use a bolt that probably might not work so great now I did do a couple of tests on just some cut-offs before jumping right into this saw my welder settings were actually pretty close what I had more trouble with was dialing the camera in so you could actually see this I settled on 25 amps 25 percent duty cycle and two and a half pulses per second though I was using a foot controller using the thinnest filler I have that's 40,000 millimeter mild steel in this case I lit up right on it to the filler sort of takes the bullet for me at the get-go there in case the arc strike tried to blow a hole in that saw I'm starting at 25 amps but as you see I'll likely come down to 15 20 by the time they reach the teeth I'm moving ahead a little bit cold so I walk my way back just making sure I have a good tie in there it is have a little bit more material towards the back it's a little more sunken up at the front I can't tell if that's below the surface of the saw or not we'll find out when we grind it there's the back looks like I'm all the way through pretty good could have maybe used another drop of filler just on the spine there but again I'll see what it looks like once I grind it down so it looks pretty good from here it could probably stand just a little bit more grinding I could see the beginning in the edge of the bead just barely I'm sure in the camera it looks like the Grand Canyon that looks passable let me try the other side okay that looks continuous this is the side to had the little line on it and I was worried was gonna be incomplete Fusion through the thickness of the blade but maybe that's still true and I just hit it with the grinding but this was a backside and actually it looks better than the front side alright next step we need to anneal these so these are the cut-offs I did my testing on I did two I can get rid of those yeah these are welded not ground obviously and since this is high carbon steel after welding it becomes quite brittle see that's not good keep this from happening to keep them from breaking the welds need to be annealed let me grind this out so we're talking apples here they're close enough again if I try to bend this it would break like this one because it's become brittle to anneal it I'm gonna heat it up locally to like a very slight dull red color just with a propane torch I don't know how much of that you actually saw like the color changes I mean it's quite subtle and I'm under artificial light that always makes it tricky but it was just the dullest of red now I'm just gonna let it cool down now if all went well yeah it's starting to crack but that's pretty aggressive Bend well hopefully you can see it's not as brittle as it was before in fact it's taking a set it's bending I'm gonna do the same thing to my new saw I've got to do that in two places this now has I think three welds in it one factory in two better than Factory I'll put it on the bandsaw by the way maybe you could have done the annealing with the TIG torch but you'd be working through hood I don't know if you'd catch the dull red colour in time but it might be fun to try and if you're braising these of course those don't require annealing they're already quite annealed after the braise just braise them clean them up load them in your saw before installing this it's in there and it's tension that's ready to go before installing this I took the little insert out a solid blade guide we saw earlier and just ran it around the saw specifically over the new welds and I did find this one that was a little too snug so I just hit it again with the air file just ground it a little bit more this thing does wobble a bit it's not the welds I think it was just that this set on the saw like in the band from having spent time on the smaller chop saw but I bumped the guides forward a little bit I'm sort of holding it forward so hopefully we don't see much of that frankly part of me is just expecting this thing to snap again these are old saws there's now three welds on this thing but let's give it a try I don't know if you see that but one of the two Sol's that I joined cuts better than the other so my cuts moving in Florida fits and starts nonetheless this thing should be running faster I think it's still set up for steal give me just a second all right I think you could probably really see it there sort of the cut rate fluctuating between the two saws I'm pretty sure you could hear that fluttering I'm sure that's probably one of the welds the one that felt a little snug could probably stand to be thinned out a little bit more but it didn't break so I'd call that experiment of success I'm gonna put my good blade back on there this probably isn't the safest thing to be running you know what while we're here let me show you something I probably shouldn't be sharing you could weld your bandsaw blade it'll seem counterintuitive but if you introduce a 180 degree twist before welding you turn the blade into a mobius strip simply put you end up with a single sided two-dimensional saw blade and you can start making parts like this your creativity need no longer be bound by three dimensions thanks for watching

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 455,366

Rating: 4.9511366 out of 5

Keywords: bandsaw blade welding, startrite, tig welding saw blades, vertical bandsaw, bandsaw, tig welding, annealing

Id: 5kRCT18R3LY

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/inertialfall]

That mobius strip thing is going to bounce around in my head for hours now...