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42VIDEO Adjusting the Bandsaw
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Jan 24, 2024
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View Video Transcript
0:00
Well, this video is going to be the longest and most detailed of the whole course because it's all about
0:07
adjusting bandsaws so they work properly. Now, not all of the steps that I'm going to show you here need to be done every time
0:14
It really depends on whether you're changing blades or changing work thicknesses, workpiece thicknesses, different things like that, but I'm going to go through all the steps
0:24
I'll tell you whether they need to be done or not depending on your situation
0:27
But as you'd expect the first step is to unplug the saw and also to verify in fact that it is off because you're going to be getting your hands right in there and you just don't want that thing to turn on by itself
0:42
So the first step has to do with blades and you basically need to make a decision about what kind of cutting you're going to be doing
0:53
Now if the blade that you need, the ideal blade is already on the machine
0:57
Well, you can forget about most of the things I'm going to tell you now, but chances are you're going to have to change the blade sometime for different purposes
1:05
So I have three here. This is a 3.16 inch blade, just a regular blade, and you can see it's got quite a few teeth on it
1:18
This is a 5 eighths inch blade, very wide. It's for re-sawing, and it's called a skip-tooth blade
1:27
It doesn't have as many teeth as it could in the space. There's room between the teeth, and the room is for the sawdust to get pulled out of the cut
1:38
Over here, we have what I consider a fairly general purpose blade
1:42
This is a quarter-inch blade. It's also a skip-tooth design, so it cuts a little more aggressively
1:49
It clogs less with sawdust. And most of the time, this is the blade that I have on my machine, because it can
1:57
makes decent straight cuts. It can also make decent curved cuts too. Let me grab a ruler
2:03
here and show you something though. So when it comes to blades, bandsaw blades
2:10
there's something called teeth per inch. So here this tooth here is lined up
2:18
with the number six. Can you see that? And I'll just count out the teeth. So one, two
2:22
three, four. So this five, eighth inch blade has four teeth per inch or four tPI. There's something else about this
2:34
blade too that you need to know. The blade, the teeth kind of hook back a little bit. Can
2:43
you see that? This part of the blade here is not straight. It's kind of hooked
2:50
back a little bit, 10 degrees in fact. And that's called a hooked
2:56
tooth and it makes the cut more aggressive. A little bit rougher, but a blade like this isn't about
3:03
smooth cuts. It's about chewing through thick wood easily, so that's what you've got there. Now just
3:10
looking here at the 316 inch blade. What do we see? Well, quite a few more teeth. Let's line up
3:20
a tooth with the five line here. And if I count them, one, two, three, three
3:26
four, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ten TPI. And this is just a regular tooth design
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so it's not skipped tooth. You can see there's a lot of teeth there. And then this quarter inch blade
3:44
we'll line up a tooth with the five line there as well. And one, two, three, four, five, six
3:52
So six teeth per inch. And as I said, the skip tooth design
3:56
So it's a little more aggressive, a little less likely to be clogged with wood
4:03
Now for our purposes here, let's install the 5 eighths inch blade
4:10
So we're unplugged. We're going to need access to the wheels, they're called
4:17
That's what these things are here. And I'm going to have to open this up as well too
4:23
Basically the bandsaw blade just sits on these wheels. and it rotates with the wheels
4:29
It is possible if you're not paying any attention to have the teeth the wrong way around
4:36
If you weren't paying attention, you have the teeth on the back of the saw, it's not going to work
4:40
The teeth have to be facing the front of the machine and on this side of the arrangement those teeth need to point down
4:49
It's just a matter of putting the blade on the wheels and then through the various
4:56
slots that allow the blade to go into position. So down here
5:11
Okay. The blade is kind of in position now. It's as close as we can get it without adding a little bit of tension
5:23
So right now the blade is quite loose. loose It had to be The wheels need to be close enough together so that you can easily get the blade on And this control here determines how far apart the wheels are So look over here See there a tension pointer there If I was using an eighth inch wide
5:51
blade, a very, very narrow blade then that would be fully tensioned right now. But the wider
5:55
the blade the more tension it needs. Oh, hang on a second, hang in a second. This is a little
6:02
tricky thing the blade was not is not on this wheel properly there we go
6:13
there we go still not on it properly but it's on well enough to apply the
6:19
tension and we'll be positioning that blade differently and fine-tuning that later starting to get some significant tension on there now I'm not going to
6:32
to apply the full tension right away because there's a few other things I need to do
6:36
but you see the pointer here is at the bottom of a quarter inch wide blade section
6:40
I need to beat it down in there ultimately but right now we've got enough
6:45
tension on the blade that I can start to rotate it by hand see I look down
6:52
here and a blade's not really on the wheel properly down here but let's just see how it goes as I rotate it okay there we go there we go
7:02
Okay. So we're getting somewhere. Where exactly are we getting? Well, we want the blade to be running in the middle of these two wheels
7:15
The blade will rest on the wheel in different locations on its edge, depending on the relative angle of the wheels to each other
7:29
Now that's called blade tracking and the way we adjust that is in this particular case is around the back of the machine
7:37
So just come around back here and you can see there's a knob here with a kind of a wing nut on it
7:46
So we loosen this off and now we can we can turn this one way or the other
7:51
Now watch what happens. We'll go around to the other side again. So as I spin this wheel, I can be turning the knob
7:59
that changes the tracking. You see how now the blade is changing position, right
8:04
It's now in the center and now it's going past the center. So right now the blade's too far back
8:13
I'll keep, keep rotating it and turn it the other way. Right now it's about in the middle of the wheel, which is where I want it
8:24
Now before I lock the lock nut on that knob, I'm going to take a look at the wheel down below and see how that is reacting, how that looks
8:35
And yeah, it's good. It's good. You see the blade is in the middle of the wheel
8:40
So now we're tracking properly. That's the way it's supposed to look
8:44
And that's the way it will run when we get it going
8:47
But the main thing to understand is that you can't adjust blade tracking unless the blade is moving
8:54
I mean I could sit here, if I'm not turning those wheels, I could crank this over as much as I want
9:00
It's not going to make a difference because it's a dynamic adjustment. It has to be made while things are underway
9:07
So blade tracking is good, but blade tension is not yet good
9:14
If you remember, we're still in the quarter inch wide blade tension range and we need to be in the five eighths inch range, which is the width of this blade
9:23
So I'm going to continue to add more blade tension. There
9:39
I don't need to over tension or in the range there. That will be fine
9:44
I know from previous experience that this blade works really well at that tension
9:48
But before I move on to the next step, I'm just going to try this again. Just want to make sure that we're okay
9:56
Now interestingly enough, with some more tension added, the blade is riding a little bit too far forward
10:04
So a little more tracking adjustment. There we're good. We're good on the top wheel and
10:17
we could be a little better on the bottom wheel Let's see if we can split the difference
10:29
That's going to do fine. I've kind of split the difference between the top and the bottom wheels
10:34
so that's going to work fine. And essentially we're finished with blade installation and blade tensioning
10:44
The next step is to adjust the support bearings. So a bandsaw blade doesn't have a lot of rigidity on its own
10:52
I mean you can see it can even if it's tensioned like this it can move from side to side
10:57
So that's where these support bearings come in. Not all bandsaws have actual bearings here that roll
11:05
Some bandsaws have low friction blocks that kind of go and come very close to the blade Either way what we want to do now is we want to support the blade properly in two different directions
11:20
So direction one is this side, this side of the blade. Direction two is the other side of the blade
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And direction three is the back of the blade. There's a bearing back there too
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So the first adjustment we want to do is to move this whole
11:39
bearing assembly so that the bearings are just back from the teeth. See if we have
11:47
the bearings supporting the blade way out here well the teeth are going to hit
11:53
the bearings and the teeth are they're bent out a little bit. It's called set on a
11:59
blade they're bent out a little bit so that the the swath that the blade
12:04
cuts is a little bit wider than the blade so that there's no or very little
12:09
little friction between the side of the blade and the cut. So what we want is we want to
12:13
adjust this whole block arrangement so that it's positioned so that the bearing support is
12:25
just just behind the teeth. You can see it in here? The bearings need to be just behind the teeth
12:35
That's where we are now, so we'll lock that into position. Now, these bearings are spring-loaded in this case from this particular machine
12:50
And as I said, some have bearings, some have little low friction blocks in a holder that you push forward
12:57
But what you want to do is you want to adjust it so it's almost, almost touching the blade, but not quite
13:04
quite. That's what we have here. So I'm holding it in with my thumb and I'm tightening this
13:10
So there it's in position. Now I'll do the same thing over here
13:15
Almost touching. In my experience you have to tweak these things more than once sometimes because the adjustment of one
13:27
affects the position of the other. So I'm going to go back. I can get a little closer on this bearing here
13:33
and a little closer again on this bearing. Okay, I remember there's a third bearing too, right
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It's back here and it supports the back edge of the blade
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So I'm going to put that forward. You want it just like you want it touching, but then just a tiny bit back
13:59
maybe a 64th of an inch or so. not very much clearance at all. So this way the bearings aren't really running into
14:09
into the situation until the blade needs some support. Essentially, see, they're not actually turning yet, but during a cut with some side pressure
14:23
they would start turning. So these three bearings are properly adjusted right now
14:28
And if we go underneath the machine, we're here going to see the very same arrangement. There's two bearings, one to support each side
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and there's a bearing on the back, and then we also want the whole mechanism
14:44
the whole mechanism to move forward so that the bearings are supporting the blade
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just back from the teeth. We don't want the bearings to hit the teeth because it
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will wear the blade out too fast. It'll create a kind of a buzzing
15:02
sound. That's how we know we're out of whack there. So we're in good position here. I'm
15:10
going to lock the whole assembly. Now I'm going to just barely touching. And some
15:20
people like to use a spacer and some cardboard or something in there, but I find that my eye
15:24
works better. It just works better all around. My eye and also
15:32
a final check to once we get things going we'll actually turn the machine on to see how the bearings are behaving
15:40
But now and then here's the back bearing. It needs to be adjusted so that it's almost touching the back end, the back edge of the blade
15:51
Just a little bit back from that. intermittently. There must be a little bit of a bulge in the back of the blade, but we're okay
16:08
We're okay. Now this assembly here will be raised and lowered depending on the thickness of the
16:16
workpiece we're working with. But for now I'll just arbitrarily lower it a little bit to something
16:24
like a more typical position. So at this stage, I think I think I've got the blade tracking properly and the bearings adjusted properly, but the only way you know for sure is to actually do a test under power
16:41
So I plugged this back in I got the doors open You certainly don want to make a cut with doors open like this but you do need to see how this all behaves under actual running conditions
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So put your safety glasses on, just in case the blade flies out or something like that
17:01
And I'm only going to hit it with a little bit of power right now, just to get it going
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I'm going to be listening for sounds. I want it to sound smooth
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I don't want any sort of repetitive rat-tat-tat or a buzzing sound or anything like that
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these sounds can indicate that there's a misadjustment somewhere. So let's just hit the power for a second and I'll shut it off right away
17:27
Okay, not bad. The bearings look good. I think maybe the bottom bearing here might need to be adjusted backwards a little bit
17:41
So I'm going to unplug. I noticed that this back bearing was spinning all the time, and it shouldn't really be
17:51
It should be only coming into play when the blade needs some support
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So let's see if that changes the sound of it any. Ah, there we go
18:06
That doesn't always work out this way, but that is the sound of a properly to advance on
18:11
There's nothing repetitive, there's nothing buzzing or making irritating noises. The blade's just spinning and it's properly supported by the bearings without being over-supported by the bearings
18:26
So I can close this now. Well, I'm going to unplug again. I can close this now. We're almost complete with our adjustments
18:39
blade tension is still good the blade is still tracking well on the wheels so
18:46
button this up and the only other adjustment really is quite simple it's one I've
18:54
mentioned before and that's adjusting the height of the supports here the guide
19:04
so that not much of the blade is exposed but there's clearance for the workpiece too
19:14
Oh yes and then back here there's that that lock nut that I needed to tighten in order to lock this into position
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Another adjustment that you may have to do on your bandsaw, it depends on the model
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but most bandsaws have the ability to tilt the table so you could do some angle cuts
19:39
But what you want is when you crank that table back down and it bottoms out
19:46
that it actually is level and perpendicular to the blade. So you can see that this one is
19:56
This is a machinist square. It's the greatest thing for setting up machines
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Don't use a wood and metal tri-square, a woodworking tool or a combination square
20:07
They're not accurate enough. This baby is accurate to within 2, 1,000th of an inch of square over the length of the blade
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So you can count on it. And you can see where nice and square here
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The table is square. And the adjustment that makes it possible is some version of what you see here
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If you come around here, you can see there's this bolt with a nut, and the bolt hits this
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So by varying the length of the bolt, loosening the lock nut, extending it or putting it in, and tightening up the lock nut again
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by trial and error you can arrive at the point where the table is square to the blade when it goes fully down
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So when the bolt head rests on this. Now, you do need to tighten the lock nut before you can actually accurately check the setting because without the lock nut tight, the bolt can move
21:08
it's kind of loose in its thread so you need to tighten the lock nut before you
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actually check to see how square you are and just as an aside too sometimes
21:16
you might want to go a little bit past square for whatever reason and that's
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why they they allow you to move this out of the way so when this is in position
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the head of the bolt's gonna hit here and presumably that's a nice square
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arrangement but if you want to sort of go past for whatever reason several
21:34
degrees you can move it out of the way and then you can go
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you know, this is going to drop down more in this case. So that's what that's all about
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Many bandsaws require this sort of an adjustment. And you only need to do it once because the idea is you put it down
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You don't have to think about it. You don't even have to get your square out if you've already checked that it is square
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And then you can just lock the table and continue. Well, there you have it
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Everything you need to know about adjusting a band saw so it works properly
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Now, I hope this doesn't strike you as being daunting or complicated because it's one of those things when you, if you practice, it's going to become second nature
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Many of these adjustments don't need to be made every time either. So it's just a matter of learning your machine and with practice you're going to get really good at it
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And with proper adjustments, you're going to get some really good bandsaw performance
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