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.