Building a bandsaw on the cheap from mostly scrap wood

[glatt]

Sunday 5/22 continued

I had made the frame for the top mounting block last time I was working on the band saw, and I need to reinforce the corners. It will be holding the tension of the blade, so the corner joints of this box need to hold a couple hundred pounds of force each. So I need to take those weak butt joints and reinforce them with splines. Kind of like making my own plywood.

I started by figuring out how to hold the frame at a 45 degree angle to the table top. I had picked up this knife storage block off the curb in front of my neighbors’ house on trash day years ago. They were moving out and put a ton of stuff on the curb. I never knew what I would use it for, but it seemed like it would come in handy some day. Today is that day. It’s my jig for holding the frame at 45 degrees. Here, I’m holding it next to the saw blade to set the blade height.


Next I put the fence in the right spot and visualized how the cut would go. I wasn’t happy with it. The fence was too short and the work piece wanted to rotate over the fence when I pressed it to the fence. It would ruin the cut and might cause a dangerous situation.


So I dug out an auxiliary tall fence I had made for a router table that I never use. This tall fence was made from a counter top I dug out of the trash at work. The counter was perfectly good, but they were redoing the space and tossed it. Nice melamine over very thick particleboard. I also put some blue tape on the knife block jig to tell me how high the blade was. This felt much more secure and sturdy. I’m happy with it.


So I made a bunch of cuts. 20 to be exact.

[glatt]

Sunday 5/22 continued again

With the slots cut, it’s time to make some splines. Through trial and error, I set the fence to the exact distance from the blade to get a good spline thickness. My zero clearance blade insert is critical here so the spline doesn’t fall down into the saw as it is cut. I used some of the last scraps of that maple bed frame to cut a few long skinny splines, and then cut them into triangles with the miter gauge.


And then I started gluing them into place. This was kind of messy. I got glue all over my fingers.


And while the glue on the frame splines dried, I turned my attention to the wheel shafts. I had bought a 2 foot fucking metal bar online, and needed to cut it to length. So I started with the lower shaft. It needed to be 20 centimeters. My son had been using the hacksaw a lot to make various zombie weapons and it had basically no teeth left anymore, so I put a nice new blade on. He saw me do this and was thrilled. The hacksaw will cut again!


I tried to rotate the cut of the hacksaw so it would be held by a thread of steel in the middle of the bar and wouldn’t have a nasty burr on the corner, but even so, the cut was a little rough and I had to file it smooth.

[glatt]

Sunday 5/22 continued yet again

I needed to keep the wheel from falling off the shaft when it was spinning on the saw, so I started by drilling a hole. (With my cordless, drill, incidentally.)

It was slow going, because I had to stop every 5 seconds or so to add more oil. The cuttings were flinging the oil off the end of the shaft. So I wiped off the shaft and made a duct tape dam to hold an oil reservoir.


Drilling was much faster now. And it was time to tap the hole with threads.


I’ve mentioned this before, but I always feel so badass when I’m cutting threads into something.

[glatt]

Sunday 5/22 the final chapter
And here I am screwing a big old washer to the end of the shaft.

It fits perfectly around the stationary center of the bearing but not the spinning outer ring of the bearing.


This is how the finished wheel will look mounted on the saw.