Hi. This is my cheap Mastercraft bandsaw from Canadian Tire.
And it was worth every penny. That's because I got it for free.
So, the previous owner had the tire come off
and it go shredded by the blade. And he tried to glue it back on.
But with the high speed that these little things run at
it didn't stick. So he didn't have much luck with it.
And he just wanted to get rid of it.
I really didn't want to invest in a tire for this saw.
So, first I ran the blade just on the metal wheel.
And that worked all right. And then I put some electrical tape on there
and that seems to work ok.
Of course, I wanted to make sure the blade tracks on it just fine.
So, I'm checking the wheel alignment.
It seems...
Seems as though the bottom wheel is a bit forward of the top wheel.
And checking the top wheel alignment, the mechanism is a little bit iffy.
So, the top wheel slides up and down like this
And it's held in place with bolt and a washer.
And it used to be just a short screw in here.
The problem is this screw needs to be a little bit loose for this
part to move up and down. But there's nothing to lock this in place, so...
I could have put a little Loctite in there to permanently fix that screw.
But I didn't want to do that. So what I did instead
is I got a much longer one.
And that longer screw
goes all the way through. Comes out the back.
And I just put a nut on there. And that locks that crew in place.
So I can position it so it's always just snug with a tiny bit of play
to allow it to have room. But it will never come loose from vibrations.
The bottom wheel of this saw is actually mounted directly on the motor.
Sp it spins at about 1750 RPM.
And that makes for a ridiculously fast blade speed.
But, obviously they were able to save a few dollars that way.
But, annoyingly this bottom wheel has got a
bit of wobble to it. So, you can see it moving back and forth.
Let's put the dial indicator on it.
So, you can see we've got about 20 thou
worth of sideway wobble. That's about 1/2 millimeter.
But that's really not that important. It's just a nuisance.
But the problem is this wheel also has a wobble radially.
So, now I'm just measuring against the rim which was machined along with the surface
of this. And, we see...
good 6 or thou 7 worth of variation in there.
So, this wheel is a little bit off center.
And, I've had this wheel off before and checked the shaft.
The shaft wobbles by less than a thou.
So, most of this is actually that the hole and the rim
are actually a little bit off center from each other.
Now, with this bottom pulley having a bit of a wobble like that
it's hard to check the wheel alignment like that but overall
for different positions of this wheel it does look like
the top wheel should be brought forward a little bit.
And certainly, when I pop the blade on there
it always tends to be more forward on the top
wheel. So, either I bring the top forward a bit, which I can with these screws
but I don't want to bring it too much.
Or I could try tilting that bottom wheel, like this a little bit
by shimming the motor. To do that, I have to take the
wheel off. But, I have to do that anyways because when I had it off last
I only put it on temporarily and I didn't put the key back in.
So, I'm gonna put the screw back in here.
Just so that my gear puller has something to push against.
And, this has got 5 spokes on it.
So, maybe a 3-prong pulley might be better.
But, I've pulled it off with this one before.
It's a bit of a mess.
And, now with a wrench.
We can just pull that off. And we can see it's coming already.
And, off comes the wheel.
I'm also gonna take the table off the saw just to give me a better view.
So, now I can loosen the screws for the motor.
So, the screw holes on here are about 4 centimeters apart.
And, the actual wheel center to center
is about 40 centimeters.
And, I want about 3 millimeters worth of adjustment.
So I need 1/10th as much of a spacer on here.
This cut up plastic pop bottle is about .3 millimeters thick.
So, that's ideal. And, I'm just gonna make some holes
in here using a hole punch.
And, I need to punch several holes.
Because the actual screw that needs to go through there is a bit bigger
than the hole that this punches.
So, let's see. Well, I can get the screws through here so
that spacer will do.
And so the tricky thing is putting these spacers in. They need to go against here.
But, if I just put them on the motor and tilt the motor onto
the mounting flange here. They'll just fall off.
And there's no way to get them in there
once I hold the motor in place. So, what I'm gonna do instead
is I'm gonna put the screw in here for starters.
And then put the spacers on the screws so I will already have them in place.
But, even so, it's still kind of tricky to get this on.
So, hopefully, I'm not gonna have to do this twice.
Well, I managed to get both of those in there. Success.
So, now checking that motor shaft.
You can see the dial indicator moves back and forth about a thou as I turn it.
So, this shaft has got a little bit of wobble to it.
But, that doesn't account for all the wobble that the wheel is seeing.
And some oil on the rest of the shaft. Just to make it
go on easier.
Now, let's put the plate on. And I'm putting it partway on the keyway.
So that hopefully this will
stay lined up.
Now, to hold this in.
I'm just gonna use a screw.
Well, that was tough going getting that on there.
But now I can just loosen this up and back the screw out.
And, now I'll put the proper screw in.
Now, let's see about that wheel wobble, if I can do anything about that.
So, first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my electrical tape tire off of here.
So now, with the dial indicator on the surface.
Let's see how it does.
And, it's about the same.
So, I'm gonna try to machine
that surface, just a little bit. I'd also like it to have a bit more crowning.
So, I've got a high speed steel cutter from a metal lathe
securely clamped on my vice grip.
And I'm gonna try to actually turn this, a little bit, freehand
just by jamming that in there
and trying to touch the wheel. See if I can machine it down a little bit.
Shit.
Well, that just put a little bit of gash in the side of the wheel.
Fortunately, not in the middle of the surface. So I think I'm still ok.
Let's try that again.
So, important safety lesson learned here.
The way I held it on there initially.
As soon as the wheel started pushing down
there, then that pushed the tool further in.
And that's what caused it to jump like that. And put the gash in the wheel.
So, always do as I say not as I do.
So, with the tool held on like so.
When the wheel pushed down on here that pushes it out of there
which makes it stable. So that I don't get this sort of, getting caught.
And that seemed to work pretty good.
So, here's the gash that I put in at the beginning.
And you can see on the surface there's a dark area here.
This is where I haven't milled anything away because
I didn't want to mill away too much so...
basically the wheel was already a little bit
lower here so this part didn't get milled.
So, the important thing is when doing this sort of milling
is to not hold the tool entirely freehand.
I'm always touching against the side here so that my tool doesn't start vibrating.
So, that I'm cutting nice and round on here.
So, let's check that wobble again.
So, we still have some left.
Maybe 2 and a half thou.
But, that's as close as I'm gonna get on this bandsaw.
I think that's good enough.
Half as much as it was before.
Now, my electrical tape is 7 thou thick.
And I need to make sure I have the exact same number of layers of it, all around.
Which is why I marked my starting point, right here.
And, I need to wind it on
the same way
that the wheel turns. So that if the end of it comes loose
it's gonna wind itself on and just flap around a bit as opposed to
unwinding and going catastrophic.
And the tape is a bit wider than the rim. So I'm just making it go over the back
flange. And making it flush with the front one.
Be too much trouble to try to cut this tape to width.
Now I need to put more than one turn on.
Because with just one turn this end could come loose and start undoing itself.
As soon as I have more than one turn
That's no longer an issue. But I can't just put a turn and a half on here.
Because of the tape thickness I have to put
and exact, even number of turns on the wheel.
And, I think this time I go for 3 turns.
I had 2 turns on it before.
I can't tell you, for sure, that electrical tape is a good idea
for bandsaw tires.
But, I've run this saw, a fair bit, with just electrical tape on there and that
seemed to work.
Again, I don't want to spend money on this saw.
And a new tire would probably cost me twenty bucks.
Ok, so that's the second turn now.
Because I'm back to my starting point.
So, now the third turn.
And, there's the mark again.
So, let's cut that right here.
So, there we go.
No cost bandsaw tire.
So, now let's put the blade guide back on.
Before I put the blade on. Because that's impossible after.
And, we'll see how that blade is gonna line up.
So, I backed the blade guides way off.
And I have to re-adjust the tracking, but
it seems to be tracking
fairly well, now.
So, let's measure the wheel wobble again.
This time, on top of the blade and on top of my electrical tape tire.
So, I think I have a total of about 4 thou of variations.
Think that's ok.
So, let's check that top wheel the same way.
I'm just gonna put this against here, rested
against the knob. So, hopefully it's steady.
And, again I'm measuring against the blade.
So, it's quite bumpy up here
because these tires.
These tires are rarely very good.
And we actually have a bit more variation on the top than we do on the bottom.
So, let's check that against my homemade bandsaw.
And I've opened it up. And I've rigged up the dial indicator up there.
So, I have about the same amount of variation on this one.
And this is a wooden wheel that I turned by hand.
And an inner tube as a tire.
But, well this bandsaw is twice the size of this one.
So, relatively speaking it's actually much better.
Another easy way of checking if there's wheel wobble is
to just see if the blade changes tension as it turns.
So, I'm just gonna pluck this and turn it slowly.
And you can hear the pitch going up and down slightly.
This is more pronounced if I release the tension a little bit.
And, let's just spin this up. I've got the blade edge way backed off.
So, let's see how it runs.
Reasonably smooth.
With the blade tracking now I can adjust my blade guides to that.
This is a little bit of a silly design on this bandsaw.
I need an Allen key to adjust the blade guides.
And, worse yet, I need different sized Allen keys for the top and bottom.
These are very, very tiny little blade guides.
Because it's a tiny little saw.
And the truss bearing can be adjusted laterally by rotating the shaft.
I'm just gonna take the guard off here so you can see better what I'm doing.
So, these are at 45 degrees.
Gets the idea so it doesn't get in the way so much when you tilt the table.
The thing about blades for these small bandsaw's
is they have to bend around a very tight radius.
And bending a blade on a too tight a radius puts a lot of stress on it and it causes
it to fail from metal fatigue. But if you make
the blade thinner then it's more flexible.
So the blade on this saw
measures 18 thou. And that's actually quite thin. 2
Compare that to the blade that I've got on my 16 inch bandsaw and that one measures 2
28 thou so about 1 and a half times thicker.
So, that makes the blade a bit more fragile
but you're never gonna be doing any re-sawing
with a bandsaw like that anyways. So, it doesn't matter too much.
Now, let's put the table back on. The table only
has one trunning which screws against the back.
A very quite simple design.
And this is the handle for locking it on there, which is actually fairly solid.
And when you push/pull on this you can rotate
the handle with respect to the screws so
it's a lot of back and forth. But, if you put an Allen key in the middle and push
you can just turn that screw and it goes on a lot quicker.
So, the table is not quite 90 degrees to Th blade anymore.
So, I'm just gonna tilt that table.
And there's a 90 degree stop in here and when I loosen that nut on here
you can turn that screw in just a little bit.
I still need to make an insert for this saw and
I made one out of this very thin material.
But, it's too light and it tends to bounce out so I'm gonna make
a thicker one out of this material.
It needs a little bit of sanding.
But, let's see here.
Oh yeah. Perfectly flat.
So, I drilled it out the back and I'm just gonna open that slot a bit more.
Just so that if somebody tilts the blade without removing this
It doesn't get kinked.
So, the blade that came with this saw has got almost no set.
But that makes for a very fine cut compared to this cut with my other bandsaw.
Or this cut, which is just a bit thinner, that was cut with a Japanese Duzuki.
Of course, I can hardly cut any curves with this blade because it has so little set.
So, that's as tight a radius as I could cut with that blade.
Well, this blade with almost no set to it
actually makes for a very clean cut, even in soft wood.
Cleaner than this cut, for instance which was done on my table saw.
So, this saw will just barely cut through two layer of the Baltic Birch plywood.
Which is really important because that means you could use one of these saws
to cut the wheels for building a better bandsaw.
Canadian Tire doesn't sell this particular bandsaw anymore.
They've replaced it with a slightly bigger model with 9 inch wheels.
And having a close look at that one.
I think that one is a little bit better than this one.
But, in the meantime well, this one works pretty...
I don't think I'll be using it much in my shop.
But, it'll be handy for using it outside my shop.