Make a Mini Vertical Metal Band Saw TIPS 579 tubalcain

howdy once again it's mr. Peter YouTube's shop teacher and in the last few months I have beaten the subject to death regarding bandsaws and vices especially drill-press vices and this last video was very poorly received so I know I'm doing too much of it but getting back to the vertical BAM sauce they are so useful in the machine shop and so very very few people have them they are very hard to find and if you do find them they are expensive and I'm so thankful that I have two of them and i featured several videos recently on my craftsman vertical 15 inch metal cutting bandsaw this is the boys crane so I have one downstairs and one in the garage but since these are not really available other than twenty-five hundred thirty-four thousand dollars or something like that or a new wall or a robe that is too heavy and too monstrous to move although they are the best we have to think smaller than that and let's let's talk a little bit about some alternatives to a vertical pants on our vertical bandsaw is so handy well so is a horizontal but I just go to this saw all the time that's right near my bench and let me give you a few suggestions of what you might do in your own shop many of you own portable band saws and here's a porter-cable genuine Porter band that's a trade name and here's an older Black and Decker that I've had for many years and these are very reasonable used and even fairly reasonable new if you buy one from a horror or freight and I've been told that they are satisfactory I don't know I haven't really used one but many people have made videos regarding putting these band saws into a vertical position and using them as a vertical metal cutting bandsaw because they run in a nice slow speed the blades are cheap and readily available at any box stores not something you have to order at outrageous price so it would be a handy to use now you can only use half inch blades so you can't do a lot of whole contour sawing or curves with a wider blade but it will suffice suffice so I'm gonna show you how to make a very simple and well cheap it's it's free the way I'm doing it and a stand for this that will mount in the vise if there may be a part two if there's any demand for where I would make a free-standing stand for this one but I'm gonna concentrate now on the porta band and remember porta band is a registered trademark we see a little are up there so it's a a word that means that it's made by porter-cable board event alright let's get started I've only owned this off for a couple months you may have watched the video where I buy it I think I paid $25 for it but normally they're handheld but we're going to mount it in a vertical position and put a little table on here now this is cardboard but I just did a mock-up so the table will go something like this matter of fact exactly like that and it will mount onto this guide right here just with a couple screws so you can take it off very quickly and then I will be welding a couple of pieces on here that will give us a mounting point onto a bench vise now everybody's bench vise is gonna vary according to where you have it mounted on the bench and how high it is so you'll have to adjust for that but let's see how this is going to work I haven't made a prototype yet I went down to the high school of welding shop to see mr. Taylor my buddy and I said I need a piece of 3/16 stock about this size and he said take a look around see what you can find well how fortuitous was it that this is almost exactly the same size well it is the same size so I took two of them free of charge and all I'm gonna have to do on this of course is round the corners a bit and take the burgers off because this has been sheared but it is flat enough and you can use different thicknesses you could use a quarter inch it might be even better although it's going to be a little bit heavier in weight this is heavy enough the way it is probably weighs almost what the bandsaw does so anyway I'll round the corners and I'll make this cut and see how this is gonna work the first thing I'm going to do is put the slipped in here now I'm going to use the bandsaw and I'll actually have to make two cuts one cut isn't enough to give you a wide enough kerf in order to mount it on the saw so I'm going to make two little cuts side-by-side originally I considered using one of these slitting saws but then I thought people watching this will not have a milling machine or the saws to make that cut and the set up this kind of laborious so it's just as fast to do it on the bandsaw but of course many of you are gonna say well I don't have a bandsaw well you could use a deep throat type of the hacksaw if you have one anybody it won't be easy but you're better off going over to a friend's house and using his bandsaw and breaking his blade hey note that I drilled a 360's hole where I can terminate by two cuts and have the piece fall out of there I temporarily have the bandsaw held and a big drill press twice so that I won't crush this but I'm just doing that for fit-up purposes and photography purposes I just bought that vise isn't that a beauty looks like the landscape of the moon all right let's fit this up and see what it looks like not all band saws will be the same this these directions are specific toward the Porta band so you'll have to examine yours and see what the guides and supports look like here but let's see that's going to fit up just about the way I wanted it to so it comes up almost against the frame right here and I've already laid out tentatively a couple holes here where you see the white paint right here and right here those will be 3/16 holes I have to make sure they do not interfere with any of the other parts this one here is questionable because if I drill back into here it's going to go into the frame so let me take this off now there's just two screws on the back side that hold this thing on right here so I'll take those out and this piece will come off along with that lower guy alright I'll drill those two holes 3/16 I've got two 360's holes drilled as such and I'll be using these flathead screws now the difficult thing is transferring these two holes on to the table plate the table plate is temporarily clamped into place and look what I did back here in the far corner I used a well I guess it's a 5/16 tool but just as a parallel to kind of square the plate up with the frame of the porter band and now I will transfer one hole and drill it and then do the exact same setup for the second one I like to do one at a time so I don't spoil the piece I have one screw in place not countersunk yet and now I will transfer the other one using a 3/16 transfer punch I've got my spacing pretty good right here in comparison to the blade relationship to the blade so I will mark that drill it and countersink and get right back to you ok the two screws are in place I'll use lock washer on the bottom as well during final assembly but the reason I chose 3/16 or thicker is that in order to use a countersunk screw like this you need a fair amount of thickness so that it will be flush for instance right here that isn't even flush yet it's not a count or something deep enough but these are flushed another thing now is this table mounted square to the blades yes quite square thank goodness not a whole lot I could do about it other than to shim it but we'll only be cutting rather thin stock with this anyway there won't be any 4-inch stock show through there it's for cutting plates and small pieces now next just how rigid or solid is this table I'm going to now lift the saw and manipulate it and move it around it seems to be pretty sturdy and it is what it is and that's what it looks like from the bottom now it'd also be possible at this time to build this as a free-standing unit by boxing this in with metal or you could use wood like some of the commercially made stands that are available but I'm going to do it a different way at least for the porter band and how to mount this to the Vice you're thinking well I'm using this three-eighths stock it's simply something that I have it's heavier than what I really need probably quarter-inch would do but a piece of this cut off and bolt it on something like that will work and then the other piece weld it onto it and this is what will be held in the bench vise there's all kinds of other ways of doing it in fact you could use angle iron and other materials so that everything is held together with screws and bolts rather than welding well two weeks has passed since I've worked on this project I've been traveling a bit and the weather turned sour here in Illinois and it was too cold developed in the garage I needed to do some welding so and by the way I visited the irk and Kohner in Kentucky if you don't know what that is it's Noah's Ark reconstruct it was just a wonderful exhibit so check that out if you ever get that way I really really enjoyed it we went on a bus trip for old people but let's get back to this now there will be lacking some continuity here and as you can see I progressed on it a little bit further than I wanted to without filming it and some film was lost for whatever reason so let me back up a little bit here and we'll get going on this all right here I am standing in front of the Ark you wouldn't believe how big it is some of you perhaps have been there inside the earth there are many exhibits would you believe who this is this is tubal-cain there is again that's me thousands and thousands of years ago I guess back to the subject at hand I have already fabricated this piece so you're not going to get to see that but it's probably not necessary anyway but this again is 2 inch wide by 3/8 thick hot rolled stock and I did not here a little bit to fit up against this guide probably totally unnecessary and I drilled quarter inch holes and then transfer them and these holes are drilled and tapped yeah 1/4 fine which is 1/4 twenty-eight quarter 28 and the grade 5 simply because it's hard to find fine threads that are not hardened but they don't need to be hardened I got some D burn to do here and I welded this up it's just t-shaped and this is way too long at the present time but this is the part that will be held into the vise now I know that some of you are gonna say well that's not rigid enough for what you're doing but it really is rigid enough I was kind of surprised how rigid is and very satisfied and happy that it is so let me go ahead and bolt this back on like that and the bolts had to be cut to just the right length so they do not protrude I like that word on the top side all right ready to go on and later on probably not even in this video I will cut this off too you know whatever length I need and it's really gonna vary with you people if anybody actually would make this depending on the Vice that you have the height of the Vice the position of the Vice on the bench whether this is gonna be a right or left hand mounted this mounts to the left side because I like my bench wise on the right hand corner of the bench but some of you will even have mounted in the middle that is the vice someplace in the middle of the bench although to me that seems like it's in a way now we need some kind of switch for this and I've had this Dayton foot switch in stock here and I never have used that I actually kind of forgot that I had it but then it dawned on me but I will plug the porter band into this grounded outlet and then this court of course plugs into the wall and this is what operator it's just on an office not variable-speed this particular bandsaw has a variable speed right here not all of them have that I don't suppose then the bandsaw switch has to be locked in the on position fortunately this bandsaw it kind of surprises me has that lock kind of like many electric drills used to have and if you don't have that you'll have to either use black tape or a wire tie to keep that on so that all of your electrical control is with the foot switch this is gonna be pretty awesome and here's how it works a foot foot switch can be dangerous I don't mean just because you might trip over but sometimes you might step on this by accident so be sure and unplug things for safety purposes if you're in doubt about the safety of the situation and here is how this is going to work we're gonna take the saw and I would like some of the weight to rest right on the handle here not all of it by the bracket but that's good vary depending on the application but this is going to bolt into the device like that and then again it's resting down here trying to make sure that it's approximately in the vertical position that is plumb Haider's ready to go looking at the top of the table now notice that the bowls here are flush and so are the flat heads now later on and a few minutes after I'm done with this part of the demonstration I am going to round all four corners because this is a bit hazardous right now kind of sharp so I'm going to round those real nice but notice how nicely the slot lines up and as I showed you before the table is mounted square with the blade now one of the downfalls of this type of saw is you cannot bring this guide down close to the work like you would with a regular vertical bandsaw that's always bad also there's more blade exposed such that it is a hazard and it is dangerous so be very careful with your fingers in your hands and and so on when using this but it does work quite well and again I'm gonna put this push on the switch noisy notice how rigid the sense I'm really surprised to get only being held by the two screws to the bandsaw itself I'm really pleased with that and that's why I think this is a great method if you have a bench vise as a pulls to the freestanding ones that have a little bit of a boxed in deal because if they set on the bench you're gonna have to get get them clamped down because you need to exert quite a bit of pressure against a piece of metal when you're cutting it in a bandsaw it's not like a wood saw you have to push real hard where are your safety glasses [Music] this is 3/8 aluminum but of course this blade really is meant for steel it's course it's not a skip tooth blade and it's running too slow and will measure the speed here in a few minutes that was pretty slow going because this blade was used even when I bought this machine at an auction so you know it's not a in great condition but it's okay but it's the wrong blade for cutting aluminum but we need to get by on these saws with Universal blades that will cut any material that we happen to be doing in the shop because this is not a production shop because this is a half-inch wide blade it's not suitable at all for making contour cuts I mentioned that earlier in the video but it can be used very nicely for a cut-off saw but for round stock be sure and hold your work in a vise so it doesn't roll on you next I'm going to take the table back off and round off the corners and just soften the edges and all of that so that a fella will not hurt himself just being around the darn thing so I'm just using my fine point marker here on this template to round off lay off the corners and then I'm going to saw them a bit well how are you gonna saw them that's all it will be taken apart and that's the whole fallacy of this video is that I'm using this ace saw to do a lot of the work but we don't really have a saw yet or you don't have a saw until you do this so you got to go over to the neighbors I guess and impose on them if they have a saw but very few people have a vertical bandsaw everything that's what this is all about I do have the luxury of many band saws and many tools and I'm over at the Boise Crane bandsaw right now to cut the majority of this off and then I'll finish off the radius on the belt sander but I was just thinking about remember norm Abram and the new Yankee Workshop and he'd make a chest of drawers and a half an hour out of the finest cherry wood and he had a hundred machines all set up probably by a staff you know and so he was working with the greatest of luxury with a high budget and some of you guys and even myself I don't have much of a budget I'm just on a teacher's pension you alright that looks better doesn't it and everything's D bird looking pretty good I should wire a wheel some of the rust off but I I really can't be bothered so now I'll go ahead and saw this piece off just a little bit a couple inches off of there anyway so big and cloudy and then I will reassemble it off-camera and be right back there is some danger here because of the open wheels on really what amounts to the backside of the bandsaw but everything in this shop is dangerous so I rounded off the corners it looks better and it's much safer now let's check the speed of the blade remember this is a variable speed saw all right that's the very lowest speed and it's right at 100 feet per minute and that's really good for steel now I will move it up to the very fastest okay this is the maximum speed and it's right at 300 there's a multiplier there because this is has three different Rangers so the lowest speed was a hundred and feet 100 feet per minute the fastest was 300 feet per minute and you since its variable speed infinitely variable supposedly anywhere between 100 to 300 feet per minute is the capacity of the Machine 300 would be good for aluminum well there it is a little vertical band saw made from the little port abandoned vise mounted but it could be held in other ways as well but I think this is a good idea well maybe you don't let me know if you think it's a good idea because it's really quite sturdy be very handy in a shop where you don't have a regular bandsaw and you could start with a little horror freight saw for a hundred bucks and work that up these saws will all be slightly different on the guides as far as how you're going to mount this but that's just a general idea something that you can do in your shop this is tubal-cain saying so long for now leave a comment and watch my 1,200 other SHOP videos you

Channel: mrpete222

Views: 86,688

Rating: 4.9234552 out of 5

Keywords: grob band saw, doall band saw, portaband, metal cutting band saw

Id: CBTWLUcpHOY

Length: 27min 29sec (1649 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 22 2019