Hi all, after some fairly difficult projects (chopping board, tool boxes, toy car) I though I would take on an easy challenge, and decided to build my own bandsaw - mostly because I want to build a rocking horse for my younger daughter's second birthday, and it would be easier to build the design I have in mind using a bandsaw.
I bought plans for making a bandsaw from Matthias Wandel, here. I wanted a bandsaw that had enough clearance to deal with at least 25cm resawing, and my budget was in the (low) hundreds, not thousands. Matthias' design gives me 27cm resaw capacity and has cost me to date (plans, motor, blade and pretty much all wood included) a bit under $300.
The first thing I did when I opened the plans was marvel at their detail. The sketchup file alone is pure gold with around 20 or so separate diagrams and views of absolutely every bit. I also like the fact it was all dimensioned in cm, rather than inches. The cut list, hardware list and the step by step instructions (with photos of his build) are similarly comprehensive and have helped considerably cut down on mistakes and wasted time.
So, first thing I did was cut the wood for the frame, all 72 pieces of it. Then, over about a week or so, I glued it up, layer by layer. The final laminated frame is very strong and when I stood on the top of it and bounced, it didn't - no flex, no movement, nothing.
While this was going on, I cut out circles of 19mm and 12mm mdf with my router and circle-cutting jig, and glued them together to make the wheels, and cut out a circle of 18mm ply in the same way to make a pulley for the drive wheel. After measuring my v-belt angle and depth I pinned the pulley onto my tenoning jig and used the table saw to shape its channel.
To put bearings onto the wheels, I had to hammer/press them into plywood flanges - after trying to press them in with my crappy vice (and bending the handle in the process) I used the gentle art of persuasion to get them into position. Then, I glued them to the wheels. The first wheel I made had too much wobble, so I had to make another one, cut up the flanges to extract the bearings and make new ones. But the new wheel has less than 1mm lateral wobble, so it was time well spent.
The plans call for spinning up the wheels with the motor and then truing them and putting a crown on the rim by turning them as if on a lathe. If you look at the photo of my initial setup, you might see a chunk out of the rim - I have no turning experience or turning chisels, so my single attempt to use a wood chisel to turn the wheel, not only took a piece of the wheel with it, it also took a chunk out of the tool rest I had rigged up and scare the bejezus out of me. So I switched to using a rasp and file instead to shape the wheel - possibly slower, but far, far, far safer and more controllable.
Of course, with all that yummy MDF dust, I set up my shop vac to catch as much as possible and wore a respirator, and found it fascinating to watch the stream of dust come off the rasp and flow in a tight stream through the air into the waiting hose, provided I held it in the right place.
To hold the wheels on the bench, I made the bandsaw's bottom wheelmount first, and just bolted it down. When I finished with it, I then bolted it to the frame.
Next post - building the top wheelmount and the tensioning mechanism