First cut

First cut

Adding wheels. First run, guides and starting the table. The build gets more interesting from here-on, lots of different smaller tasks to get stuck in to.

I stuck the wheels on

The bottom wheel is about 20mm further in than the top one. WTF. I thought I'd missed a layer off the frame or something.

All OK though, I just needed to make a thicker spacer for the bottom wheel (not shown here) And all was ready for the first run:

Success - a piece of wood fell off and scared the bejezus out of me, but apart from that; all good. 

Making guides. I got stuck into this part so forgot to take any pictures. 

Using it properly, with a makeshift table. I guess that's not properly. Anyway - my first time ever actually using a bandsaw. Pretty good feeling to use it to build itself from now on...

I followed Matthias' advice and dowelled the trunnion ends after gluing them on. A lot easier than locating dowels, which I'm not great at doing anyway.

OK, on with the table...

Building the frame

Building the frame

I ended up buying most of the wood for the frame. I had some lying about but mostly used 144x2300x18mm pine planks.

I edited the sketchup model to add my planks to the cutlist so I could plan it out. I added numbers and labelled all my pieces so i could keep track. It would have been helpful if the plans numbered the parts and showed those numbers on the Frame Layers drawing. However I didn't bother doing it and I got through it OK, so i guess it isn't that important.

After thicknessing all the pieces to make sure they were uniform. I ended up planing off the numbers I wrote on them so sorting out the small rectangular pieces was a mild puzzle.

Starting the days-long glue-up. I have a meagre collection of clamps so it took a number of trips to the shed.

The glue I used.

When you trim the tops off with your skillsaw, make sure the angle setting is tightened up so you don't cut a 30 degree slot and have to make up the height by adding blocks to the top...

Pretty much done

 Done with the frame. The boringest part of the build for sure. Accuracy of cut of your pieces and taking time with the glue-up will save time trimming and truing afterwards. I didn't do those things.

Wheel Build

Wheel Building

OMG, almost exactly 2 years later I'm back to the bandsaw build. Workshop sorted and no. 2 daughter in meithrin so I have space and time again.

It took me so long to get to this stage, Matthias came out with plans for a bigger bandsaw so I switched to that one.

I'm following Marius Hornberger's wheel design

Cutting the blanks with my homemade circle cutter.

Laying out the next cut-out.

Clamps. All the clamps. I could clamp the centre by putting a bolt through the circle-cutting-jig pivot hole.

Cutting the bearing hole with an extremely scary adjustable hole cutter. Not fun having that thing whirling around. I couldn't get a clamp close enough to hold down the bearing housing directly so I made a jig to hold them.

Glueing.

Truing the wheels and putting the crown on. I fixed the temporary drive pulley on by using the 4 bearing plate clamping holes.

 Before the wheel was down to the correct diameter I practised putting on the crown.

MDF dust is evil so I rigged up my dust collector close to the action.

Balancing the wheels - i cleaned the grease out of a couple of smaller bearings to make them super low friction

Drilling the hole in the end of the shaft for the retaining bolt.

Pulley sizes

I have to decide what pulley size to get for the motor.

You want your bandsaw blade to go past the wood at a reasonable speed. This will depend on the speed of the motor,  the size of the pulleys and the size of the bandsaw wheels.

I made a spreadsheet to juggle the pulley sizes, blade speed and v-belt length:

Pulley size, blade speed and v-belt length calculator

The motor

I got a cheap 2hp motor from eBay. 

Shiny and motory.

2 HP Seems like it might do the job. Is that 50% duty cycle? Probably ok.

Actually, S3 50% means 

S3 = Intermittent periodic duty
Sequential, identical run and rest cycles with constant load. Temperature equilibrium is never reached. Starting current has little effect on temperature rise.

Hmm, not a continuous duty motor. Is it a problem, no idea. I guess, worst case, it might melt if I do any serious re-sawing.

I immediately stuck a plug on it and turned it on. Looking at the business end, it ran anti-clockwise. This would make the bandsaw blade go round the wrong way. Rather than mount it backwards, I looked into reversing it.

I had watched this video from Matthias:

http://woodgears.ca/motors/reversing.html

Which gave me hope. When I took the plastic box apart that housed the capacitor etc,  I could see that there were only 3 cables going into the body of the motor. This is thus a 'non reversible' motor.

The Red and black wires are thick and obviously the main winding, the white one is one end of the starter winding. The other end is inside the motor somewhere, connected to the other end of the black wire. (Deduced from a circuit diagram in Matthias's video). I need to bring that end of the starter winding out to be able to swap it with the white wire.


I took the front off the motor to investigate :

Front Off

It looked hopeful - I just had to find the end of the black wire. Trimming off some of the insulation and so on revealed:

Success

Slightly perturbed by there being 3 wires attached to the black wire, all the same gauge. I was expecting two. I guess that probably the main winding has two wires and the starter winding only one and they've doubled up on the main winding rather than use a thicker gauge, or something like that. To check, i unearthed the end of the red cable (the other end of the main winding) and that indeed had two wires attached.

Anyway I detached all the wires and used the multimeter to find the starter winding, soldered a new cable to it and routed that back to the box. Now I could swap the ends of the starter winding over and put everything back together.

A bit of kapton tape and a wire-tie to stop my solder joint vibrating loose

The original joints were brazed.  Hopefully my solder joints will be ok. I tied everything down; vibration would be the danger. We'll see how it goes. If anything goes wrong, at least I know how to fix it now. Worse-case scenario; one of the wires comes loose and the motor stops. Or doesn't start. The case is earthed, however there's not enough movement in anything for a cable to get as far as touching it anyway. Conclusion: fixed.

It works!

I felt good about myself. I was the king of induction motor reversing.

Startup

I decided that a bandsaw would be a good addition to my workshop. By wading through Matthias Wandel's youtube channel and realising that it was something I could actually make myself I decided to go ahead. Buying one is an option, but bang-for-buck, making one is the best option.

Before the bandsaw though, I need to sort my workshop out a bit. Stuff has been thrown in there for expediency's sake. It looks a bit like this at the moment:

Argghhh

Not a lot of efficient storage space and I have no work surface except my table saw. My current project to the right there is a mobile power-tool island thing on wheels for housing my welder and various power tools (belt sander, drills, etc) with a vice. I then need to put up some sort of work bench and I can start.

The table saw is also on wheels so I can swivel it round if I have something really long to cut on the cross-feed or whatever. In fact wheels will feature large in the new workshop.

So this is the bandsaw I'm looking at:

http://woodgears.ca/bandsaw/homemade.html

It's a 16" - plans at that address. (I later switched to his 20" bandsaw:  Me from 2 years in the future)