Thread: Happy with the Hammer

Obviously worth the wait, congrats on the new machine.
I thought these had flat tires, if so I'd not want to cause premature wear on them and run the teeth off the wheels ...
Just saying as I've not seen Mr Snodgrass refer to any flat tired machine before.
Might not be an issue if you intend to run narrow blades frequently also, and replace tires down the road for crowned ones.

If you are not planning on doing the above, then it should be fairly obvious the much reduced wear on not only the tires, but also the thrust guides, should you keep the teeth off the edge, it will have less tendency to walk towards the thrust guides, as the edge acts as a crown with a wide blade like that, as it has sufficient beam tension for it to stay put.
Not sure what guides are on those saws nowadays, maintenance free Euro guides or ceramics , or something needing cleaning regularly
If the latter then it definitely would be noticeable.

Cuts look good
Best of luck with the saw, bet you're a happy camper
Tom

Your right, it has flat tyres and is fitted with euro guides. I wasn’t paying to much attention to the tracking position… I was mostly referring to Snodgrass for understanding how the guides work and how to and how to dial them in.

One oddity one the N4400 is that the lower thrust guide is adjusted with a hex head bolt instead of a knob. This suggests to me that you dial it in once and rarely again touch it. I’d thought this would be a pain if tracking the gullets to the centre of the wheel was important, because the thrust guide would need to be fettled for every blade change.

If I track the blade so teeth are off the tyre, I could probably set the thrust guides once for my widest blade and use the same setting for all blade changes. Teeth won’t always be off the tyre, but it probably matters less for smaller blades.

Or have I got this totally wrong - do people change thrust guides every blade change?

What's the damage these days?

I'm vaguely looking for a bandsaw and thinking to buy once, not buy cheap and buy again.

Originally Posted by pippin88

What's the damage these days?

I'm vaguely looking for a bandsaw and thinking to buy once, not buy cheap and buy again.

Yeah be interested to know the all in price you paid as i think im moving to a similar boat

Originally Posted by rogerwilco

If I track the blade so teeth are off the tyre, I could probably set the thrust guides once for my widest blade and use the same setting for all blade changes. Teeth won’t always be off the tyre, but it probably matters less for smaller blades.

Quick squiz at the user manual suggests this approach should work. Felder recommends blades narrower than 16mm should track in the centre of the wheel. Larger blades can track forward with teeth off the tyre.

As for price, I’d suggest giving your local Felder dealer a call. They’ve a good reputation for being a helpful bunch and my experience was the same.

I could tell you a number, but bear in mind that these come from Austria and the cost of shipping a container has increased significantly in recent times, so it wouldn’t be a meaningful comparison.

I run my big resaw with the teeth off the front of the tyres, it works well and the blades seem to last a fair while before touching up. I found with the flat tyres if you try and run the band on the centre of tge wheels it wants to kick back towards the back of the wheels a lot, and will wander in the cut more. Glad to see you’ve got it dialled in ( for that blade) straight off, sometimes it takes a while.

Lol your comment about rarely touching the guides because of the lack of a handle, suggests to me, you got the right machine, and you're a Euro guides man
Proper faffery using allen keys for everything it is surely, unless you only plan on running a wide blade all the time.

About your narrow blade comment
I suggest you do move it... sometimes, as you don't want to be wearing a track on your tires.
Keep an eye on it and adjust accordingly.

My saw was a lemon, and the misalignments contributed well to the machine getting used in anger,
Was being used for cutting up pallets or something, judging by the score marks on the table.
It took me a long time to figure out how to fix it, as I couldn't get a wideish band to track reasonably.

This was the good tire, the strange hollow in the middle suggested narrow blades were used on the machine
The misalignments likely added to the wear, and I guess the only way it could have been run like that, was either dangling on
the front of the tire, or at the very rear, which would explain the deep slice into the thrust guide.

DSCN1700.jpg

VFD bandsaw.JPG

Likely any tire wear which is uneven is a remedy for needing to use narrow blades eventually/
So you can't really get away from that, as you're never going to track narrow blades beyond the middle of the wheels.
But if you take note of things and not make grooves into them,
you could make it so you only ever have to dress the back of the tires, and it wouldn't be so difficult since it would be a slight amount of material needing to be removed.

Or you could swap the tires for crowned at that stage, you might or might not be that concerned about thrust guide wear so much if using a narrow blade, compared to only using a wide blade with "beam strength" which is stout enough to stay away from the thrust guide and cut quieter.

As to how often you should move it, from reading a few posts on this recently, it seems that there is possibly much variability on this subject, as the only real rubber bandsaw tires are apparently specifically vulcanied to the wheels,
and presumably cannot be bought.
This is what I'm being told from a Canadian forum ATM.
It could also be real rubber used with cork rubber tires, but from what I've read, seem to be a bit less durable.
Even if both tires are vulcanized, it might not mean the same, as my lower tire is easier scraped than the top.

Can't tell you if it's common for both tires to even wear evenly, as it seems most folks who use flat tyred machines
just replace them and don't hang about.

If you were concerned you could get a bic or whatever biro you use down under, even black would do,
and see if any wore off in a particular place if you were concerned about it.
A new lemon I'd bought before my old one had issue with the blade wanting to nip the tires, you could hear it, and see some rubber dust, those wheels were cambered and a wide blade was tracking off the camber.
I can only guess things need to be even more dialled in regarding flat tire setup.


I've been trying to get as much info on this as possible, as there seems to be a lot of missing information regarding all things tires.
Even some easy ones to answer, I can't find this info.
i.e
concerning flat tires...does vulcanized have better grip of the blade than composites?

Seemingly after dressing my tires flat, they appear to have better grip on the wheels...
Can't say if it's just a bit of rubber dust or some other reason, but this seems to me, likely less chance of the blade walking into the thrust.

I haven't even read of "rubber" vs urethane, apart from "my machine runs 10x better with these blue/orange tires"
I'd be interested to read about it but strictly concerning flat profiled tires, as the true camber takes any grip out of the equation.
I have a feeling the Italian's and those who follow suit in this day and age, haven't being doing it for nothing!
Sorry, for the big rant, partially clogging you're TAS bandsaw gloat, should'a put this on my thread
Do carry on, and make sure to rub it in everyone's faces.


All the best
Tom

Originally Posted by havabeer69

Yeah be interested to know the all in price you paid as i think im moving to a similar boat

I was quoted $5847 incl GST and delivery so $4115 for the unit alone excl GST

Sent from my Nokia 3.4 using Tapatalk

I paid $2100 (delivered) for a brand new Hammer N4400 (4 hp) from Felder .. about 9 years ago.

There are a few mods for the N4400 on my website: http://www.inthewoodshop.com/Powered...ery/index.html

I have a few others that need to be written up still.

Regards from Perth

Derek