this band saw is now fully functional so it's time to work on the enclosure
and i'm going to start by making the base more final i kind of like these horizontal pieces
on here and i want to put these casters here but i like the height that it's at
so i need to make these pieces a bit thicker to get the right height with those casters
i just glued those up now i need to plane them square
the limiting factor with wood screws like this is the head pulling through the wood hence the washer
before working on the blade guide guard i'm just working out how the top enclosure is going to work
but then i decided to leave that until later i'm cutting the material for the guard above the top
blade guide out of some old radiator cover now i need to bend the channel out of this thing
the tricky part is this is a bit thicker than i need it to be so it'll be really hard to bend
not as sharp a bend as i would have liked but it'll do i used a block for banging it
for the second bend but that bend wasn't any sharper than the first one either
i hadn't used a guide for my angle grinder when i cut the piece out in
the first place so some of the cuts weren't entirely straight
so now using a piece of hardware as a guide to straighten some of those cuts
a guard fits here leaving room for the blade it also has to fit around the wheel
so that as i move this up the wheel is actually inside the guard
then i have this idea for extra fancy detail to taper down the front of this guard a little bit
for better visibility but i had a hard time getting into that corner with the tin snips
i should have just started that cut with these tin snips
i cut this back a little bit so that this part overlaps now i just need to bend that over
there didn't even need to weld that i just gotta grind off that little protrusion
so i got a bit of clearance for the blade in here and the guard fits around the wheel as it goes up
and that's kind of important because when i got the blade guide way up
that guard needs a place to go the hinges for the cover will attach to this thing later
now with this blade guide in place and this part and this temporarily here
i feel much safer using this saw because the blade couldn't come off in a way that would hit me
also when i'm using the saw here i'm used to reaching over here for the switch and
right where the other side has got the switch this one's got the blade so
this is very important so now i'm finally ready to try a wider blade on this saw
oh
and the blade came off and they went nowhere just so you know it seems to
have gotten stuck in this log bottom wheel kept turning for momentum that caused it to
come off on the bottom and on the top okay more blade tension this time let's try again
looking at this blade the end of the teeth have got quite a sharp hook angle which means they
kind of pull themselves into the wood i think that's what's causing a lot of this jumping
so for resawing this ironwood two thirds of horsepower not quite enough power
works fine resawing this oak though but definitely could use more power
and i could also use more of an enclosure because that dust is just ending up everywhere
so the next thing i want to do is investigate some of that banging when i'm resawing
might have something to do with the blade and then after that um i think i'll focus on the
bottom cover instead of the top because the bottom cover helps to contain the dust but it's all very
slow going because while i'm doing this i'm also working on the plans for the saw that's always
a long slog and i decided to start working on that beforehand with the videos in the build
so that hopefully once the final build video is out i'll have the plans ready
too