A band saw for wood with their own hands

Tabletop

Every band saw contains a tabletop in its construction. It is installed on a pedestal base and serves to house the motor with the starter mechanism. In most cases the table top is made of thick plywood. To protect the work surface against drift, it is glued with textolite.

Some experts recommend making the tabletop pivoting. This design allows you to cut the material at almost any angle. In the design of this element, there is necessarily a parallel stop. It is made using roller-type guiding mechanisms or a profile that contains clamps.

How to make a bandsaw with your own hands?

Various tools are always useful in the household, especially when it comes to living in your own home. One of the indispensable products is a band saw. From this article you will learn how to make such a tool yourself, what are the features of this process. You will also become familiar with the safety precautions that must be observed while making the saw.

Features

Several blades of different widths and thicknesses are needed for efficient band sawing. When selecting a tool for a particular job, it is important to consider the following:

• Only soft wood should be processed with a thin band saw blade, otherwise it would bend quickly and the kerf would be uneven;
• The wider the blade, the more accurate the cut will be;
• the thick saw is not suitable for working with small bars and thin sheet material, they deform because of the heat;
• angled and curved cuts can only be made with a narrow blade.

Besides the geometrical dimensions of the blade, it is important to pay attention to the profile and height of the tooth. An important criterion of a band saw blade is the number of teeth per unit length.

Please note! The more frequently spaced the teeth, the flatter the cuts.

A saw with a frequent tooth has a longer service life because of less pressure on each tooth. A saw with a sparse tooth is preferred for hard wood because of the greater pressure on the cutting edge.

Quality of the cut is also influenced by the height of the tooth. The large tooth is great for rough work and cutting thick wood. Small bars and thin sheet material can only be sawn with a band saw with a fine tooth.

Another important setting is the tooth pitch. A distinction is made between a rhythmic pitch and a variable pitch. Saw with a rhythmic pitch is suitable for thin works, it is convenient to cut a small thickness bars, saw parts from plywood. The variable pitch blade should be chosen for processing large softwood blanks. Thanks to the asymmetrical arrangement of the teeth, such a blade will not block and will easily cut a thick board.

Making a bandsaw

Getting ready to work

Getting started, it is necessary to prepare all the tools and materials, as well as a place where it will be comfortable and safe to engage in the manufacture of homemade bandsaw.

Tools:

• Bandsaw with the ability to cut parts over half a meter long.
• jigsaw. The disadvantage of the jigsaw is the low quality of the saw.

• Band saw.
• Manual jigsaw. Highly labor-intensive process.

• Manual electric drill. Worse than a drill press in that it does not guarantee correct hole geometry. The drilling process is more time consuming.
• Electric screwdriver. The problems are the same as with the electric hand drill. Limited power of the tool is also added.

• Hand-held electric drill with sanding accessories. Can be difficult to grind at a 90-degree angle.
• Electric screwdriver. Same problems as a handheld electric drill. And the limited power of the tool is added.

Materials, fittings, fasteners

• 15 mm thick plywood;
• Solid wood block;
• Bolts for horizontal and vertical adjustments;
• PVA joinery glue;
• A wingnut for the adjusting bolts;
• Tape;
• Bearings under the upper axis;
• Two bearings for the drive axle;
• Two shafts;
• Cutting blade;
• Two sleeves with internal threads;
• Self-tapping screws, nuts, washers, lugs, studs;
• Tape or nozzles for the grinder or electric screwdriver.

Basic constructive elements

The band saw blueprint will include the following components:

Technology of sawing with a hand jigsaw

When doing artistic (propyl) carving, we use plywood to make various items. It is better to use birch plywood for this. It has a uniform light surface, on which it is easy to mark details with a pencil or to transfer the outlines of the future part with tracing paper.

When selecting the workpiece for the manufacture of the product it is worth paying attention to the irregularities of plywood, hidden cavities in places of low-quality gluing veneer layers, delamination of edges, as well as chips on the edges of plywood.

These and other defects lead to poor quality of the product, a lot of waste, and wasted time on the job.

Hand-operated jigsaw. Device, principle of operation.

At the lessons of the association “Artistic sawing” students work with a hand jigsaw.

Manual jigsaw is a versatile tool that is designed for straight and curved sawing of decorative (propylene) carvings.

The design of a jigsaw is simple. It has a metal frame with a handle and two clamps at the ends of the frame for securing the file.

Jigsaw file is a narrow steel band with teeth set to one side. Jigsaws differ in width of blade and notches.

To work with thick plywood the wide blade with big teeth is used, and to saw thin plywood. a narrow blade with small teeth. The finer the teeth, the longer the sawing process, but also the better the quality of the resulting surface.

To prepare the jigsaw for work, the file is fixed in the lower clamp so that the teeth are directed towards the handle.

a) correct fastening. b) incorrect fixation.

Универсальная ленточная пила из дерева своими руками/Handmade universal band saw made of wood p.1

Afterwards the tensioning frame is squeezed with a special device and the other end of the file is clamped in the upper clamp.

If the compressed ends of the frame are released, it will take its previous position, which will lead to the tensioning of the jigsaw.

and hygiene requirements.

When working with a hand jigsaw, the following safety and hygiene regulations must be observed.

Wear a gown or apron with armlets.

Only those tools and objects that are directly necessary for the work should be kept at the work place.

Only use tools that are in good condition and well set up.

Tools and fixtures should be positioned on the table so that they do not protrude beyond the table or fall to the floor.

The sawing table must be firmly secured.

Sit upright while working.

Jigsaw file should be kept perpendicular to the workpiece.

It is necessary to saw evenly, carrying out movements up and down, not pressing strongly on a file so it will not break.

The fingers of the hand must not be close to or against the movement of the file.

Every 10.Take a 12 minute break.

While working with the tool, do not get distracted and do not disturb others.

It is forbidden to blow off sawdust resulting from sawing. Remove them with a brush.

Spiked and cutting tools should be passed with sharp parts “toward yourself” and received “from yourself”.

When the work is completed, the tools should be placed in the allotted place, and the workplace should be put away.

Before you start, sand the plywood with sandpaper, then overlay the selected pattern, which is fixed with two paper clips. Draw over the entire contour with a pencil. Do not use a sharp or hard pencil when copying the drawing, because the jigsaw should not be sharp.к. If you do so, it may spoil the transferred pattern, which we will use several times.

After transferring the drawing on the prepared plywood, you can visually compare the two pictures. If you notice any inaccuracies or omissions, correct them. In cases where you need to translate a drawing with a more complex pattern, it is best to mark the outlines of the drawing with a pencil. When you have finished copying, all the marks should be erased with an ordinary rubber band.

When sawing with the jigsaw, fasten the special sawing table in the workbench back clamp. The workpiece is placed on the table and held with the right hand, while the left hand is sawing.

The plywood workpiece with a drawing (marking) applied to it is placed on the sawing table and held with the left hand. A table for sawing is a special support which is fixed to the table or workbench cover for convenient sawing with a jigsaw. It can be secured to the cover with a clamp or screws

Ways of fixing the table for sawing: a. with screw clamps; b. with screws; c. in clamps.

Take the jigsaw by the handle with the right hand and, putting the file to the workpiece, begin sawing The jigsaw file should be kept perpendicular to the workpiece.

While sawing make sure the file moves evenly and perpendicular to the workpiece plane. It is necessary to saw with a jigsaw slowly and evenly. When sawing corners (especially sharp corners) it is more convenient to saw in two directions.

Inner corners are sawn along the side of the corner to its top, and outer corners are sawn along the side of the corner from its top.

Sawing out sharp angles: a. inside, b. outside

In this case it is not necessary to change the sawing direction, and the corner will be sawn out clearly enough.

Outer contours should be sawed from outside from the mowing line of the marking, and inner. from inside. This means that the marking line should remain on the workpiece for orientation during further processing

Sawing: a. along the inner contour; b. along the outer contour. The gaps between the cutting line and the kerf must not exceed 0.5 mm. The scythe line markings after sawing will serve as the borders of the workpiece with the file.

If there are outer and inner contours in the workpiece, the inner contours are cut first.

When sawing the inner contours of the workpiece, holes must be made in it in order to insert the file into them. They are made close to the mowing line of the marking, but so as not to damage it. Holes can be drilled or made with a hand drill. Place a block of unnecessary wood under the workpiece to prevent the lower layers of plywood from chipping.

After that the frame of the jigsaw should be squeezed in the special device and the nut of the upper clamp unscrewed.

The freed end of the saw is inserted into the made hole and clamped again in the upper clamp. After removing the clamping device, the workpiece, together with the jigsaw, is carefully placed on the sawing table and work begins.

Small work is performed in the round hole of the table, and sawing of large and medium contours is performed in the cutout of the table.

When sawing on contour curves plywood is slowly rotated, without stopping the movement of the saw in the kerf. When the movement of the saw acquires the desired direction, it is possible to saw further along the mowing line of the marking.

Sawing technique: a. in the circular hole; b. in the cutout of the table

Design and principle of operation

For many, technically inexperienced users, the design of the band saw can seem very complicated and incomprehensible. If we look at its mechanism in more detail, it becomes clear that it consists of simple parts that precisely interact with each other. Of course, it is impossible to call a band saw an elementary device, because it, like any working equipment, has certain features of the structure necessary for proper operation. Before proceeding to the list of components of the machine and description of the principle of their interaction, it is worth noting that for the most understandable form of presentation, as an example, the simplest type of machine, without the tilt of the working table, rapid tensioning lever, speed regulator and other additions will be taken apart.

Basic elements of bandsaw, are pulleys (wheels, on which the saw blade is established). These elements are fixed on the opposite edges of a flat support rod mounted to the table and/or bed (base and side walls of the machine). The lower pulley is fixed in one place and the upper pulley is mounted on a special slide that changes its position in the vertical. A motor is connected to the lower wheel, directly or through a belt drive. A damper under the tabletop is used as a vibration damper. The most common and easy to manufacture tooling installed in this machine is the guide, which serves for precise cutting of workpieces. In the above design, lies the main principle by which the wood jigsaw works. Drawings with exact dimensions and a list of parts, are presented below.

Preparatory activities

Before proceeding to the assembly activities, guided by the drawing, you should prepare the necessary materials and tools. This will allow, first of all, to orient with the fact, whether there is everything you need for work (missing will need to buy more), as well as not to be distracted during the process by trifles.

Required materials and tools

To make a band saw, you will need the following materials and parts:

• boards or a sheet of plywood (or chipboard), which will be used to make the frame, table, pulleys;
• Sheet steel (for the saw);
• A channel used to create a support frame, or metal corners, or wooden bars and slats;
• bearings;
• steel rod. for making pulley axles;
• electric motor;
• self-tapping screws, bolts with nuts and washers;
• polyurethane glue;
• rubber from a bicycle camera;
• textolite;
• bushings;
• V-belt;
• varnish or paint.

The recommended thickness of boards. 20 mm. It is better to give preference to lumber made of strong and hard wood.

The following tools will be needed for the work:

• electric screwdriver (with drill bits);
• hammer;
• wrenches (sized for bolts);
• screwdrivers;
• pliers;
• grinder;
• angle grinder;
• sharpening machine;
• jigsaw.

Electric tools can be quite easily replaced by their handheld counterparts. But in this case, assembly will require more time and labor. When using metal angles or channel bars instead of wooden bars you will also need a welder and electrodes. The use of bolted connections creates additional problems with the tight fit of parts.

Guidelines for selecting a band saw blade

It is quite difficult to make a cutting blade with your own hands. For this purpose tool steel of U8 or U10 grades is needed. The saw must be flexible. Its thickness for relatively soft wood is from 0,2 to 0,4 mm, and for hard. from 0,4 to 0,8 mm. The length of the blade in the assembled version of the machine will be about 1.7 m. You will need to cut the teeth yourself, correctly separate and sharpen them. To solder the band into a solid ring (with a butt joint) you will need to use a gas torch and solder. The connecting seam must be grinded afterwards.

It’s much easier and convenient to buy good quality, ready-made cutting blade in a store, so you don’t have to spend time on its production. The width of the products ranges from 18 to 88 mm. Be guided by the material to be sawn. Manufacturers offer these types of saws according to this criterion:

• Bimetal, designed to perform work on metal (stainless steel and relatively strong alloys);
• Diamond, which can be used for cutting marble, quartz, granite and other hard materials;
• Carbide that allows you to cut high-strength alloys;
• tool steel strips for sawing wood.

The last one is quite often used in machines assembled at home. This is due to its affordability and practicality. But if you have to work with hard materials, it is better to buy a more durable, wear-resistant and expensive saw to minimize the probability of breaking the band.

If it is planned to make a curved cut with a band saw, then it is necessary to select the width of the blade taking into account the radius of curvature. Some relations between these values are shown on the picture below.

Choosing a wood saw, it is also necessary to take into account the pitch of its teeth (the distance between their centers). This determines the hardness of the wood you can saw. Here are the most common tooth profiles, their designations and applications.

You should also pay attention to the quality of sharpening of the teeth. Cutting edge should be sharp and flat. You should also ask the salesperson if it can be resharpened and how many times it can be done. Better quality blades are recommended for personal safety.

Important! For installation on the machine, it is better to choose universal saws, suitable for processing wood of different hardness. It will allow to change such blades much less often in case of replacement of the material to be treated.

Thousand first option for a stationary jigsaw

actually first a little backstory.Have recently had an argument with his wife not to save the family budget. Women in general sometimes have unmotivated “we spend too much” attacks!”.Like. in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, inflation, devaluation, falling markets, and the upcoming U.S. presidential election, we urgently need to cut back on unjustified spending.As an unjustified expense, she took my purchase of three cutters, as much as a thousand. I tried to mildly point out to her that I did not spend it on the right tools, like many others. And then it started:. Yes, for fuck’s sake, you even bought this router! For 20,000 !- Wow, you bought your own boots for almost that much money?- Boots are necessary, I wear them, and what did you do with your cutter?? Let’s not buy you a down jacket for winter. walk around with a cutter like a fool!.and frankly, it was a killer argument. But, those who are in a family relationship, know. in this in no case can not be admitted. So I proudly exclaimed: Everything for the next three days in the studio did not go! I’ll show you what a useful thing it is for the household!Well, now to our sheep. I should’ve cut templates for milling in 6 mm plywood. Tried a jigsaw, well, very uncomfortable. One hand holds the workpiece, the other jigsaw on it, and you constantly need to move. In short I decided to make the jigsaw stationary at the same time. Variants of such machines on the internet a lot, so immediately declare that nothing new will not be further, just another option performance.My jigsaw is a usual one, without any frills and for cheap.

Most of these designs involve attachment to the bed for the sole of the jigsaw:

This solution has two disadvantages:1. The sole height of about 15-20 mm., plus the thickness of the bed, so it steals the useful length of the saw.2. The sole to the jigsaw is screwed with two screws M5, which are held on the nuts simply soldered into the plastic body. When the soleplate is at the bottom, there are almost no loads there, but to hang the jigsaw itself on these miserable nuts, plus the vibrations, it’s not very reliable:

Based on these considerations, it was decided to remove the soleplate, and the standard mount to back it up:

I secured the jigsaw body to the adapter plate with an ordinary construction hanger:

In the bed, under the projecting heads of the bolts and supporting roller, I chose, with a feather drill, recesses:

Thus, the plate fits flat to the bed and screwed to it with self-tapping screws:

I decided to make a caterpillar from a profile pipe, thanks it was laying around for a long time:

Drilled mounting holes, grinded and painted:

Did not choose the color, just left the paint.Next is the rough mounting:

Do not be afraid to make a mistake on the outreach of the bearings, it can be adjusted with washers:

There is another nuance that I did not like in most of these designs, namely the need for a separate table. I went the other way and just recessed the heads of the fastening screws, so that they do not interfere with moving the workpiece on the bed. On the metal workbench I fasten with roofing screws, and on the wooden with conventional.

If you want to use the machine a couple or three times a year, it’s a good decision.When I don’t need it, I just put it up against the wall and that’s it.

Another plus is that, in this design, the machine tool is not shaking, thanks to the mass of the workbench, but a separate table will wobble, no matter how hard it is, if it is not screwed to the floor.Well, now for the fun part. the testing 🙂 The length of my saw is not the greatest, but you can find it in any store:

Height to bearing bracket 65 mm. I took a 50×50 bar for the test:

I must say the result just amazed me 🙂

The cut was almost perfect! Everything is absolutely straight and perpendicular.On the joy of it puffed up the necessary templates for the milling machine:

My wife walked around the workshop for three days, dying of curiosity 🙂 When I showed her four multilevel bases for flowers, I was forgiven, the mill took its rightful place in the hierarchy of necessary things, and I was deliciously fed and warmly greeted.

Parameters of band saws

Such equipment brings a lot of positive moments if you need to process wood. At home, it is needed for small furniture manufacturing business.

Some types of saws allow additional work with the following materials:

The high density of these materials requires the use of hardware that includes parts and consumables made of reinforced steel. If standard steel is used, the disc and teeth deform in a short period of time when machining metal or stone, so preparation in advance is required.

Consider not only the type of material to be processed, but also the production scale. The endurance and power of the equipment you buy depends on this. For one-time use, you can buy a cheap band saw or make it from improvised means and tools, but intensive work requires a serious and expensive unit.

The size and pitch of the blade teeth

When choosing a saw, you must pay attention to the size of the machine itself. The requirements are described in the instructions when purchasing the unit, but there are some nuances that are not specified there.

The following additional recommendations should be considered when choosing a saw:

• For longitudinal sawing wide saws are chosen, which are characterized by a smooth and qualitative sawing.
• In cases where a thin billet is processed, a tool with a small thickness of the blade is used. This is an important parameter, because a thick saw when working with thin material damages it.
• Circular and contour cuts require individual selection of cutting element, but if there is no possibility to buy several variants of saws, it is better to choose the middle variant. Considering the available widths from 14 to 88 mm it is recommended to buy saws with an average size of 35-40 mm.

The quality of processing is influenced not only by the size, but also by the pitch of the teeth located on the cutting blade. It determines how fast the work will be, the presence or absence of damage.

The following operating features should be considered when selecting:

• A coarse tooth pitch is only used when working with thin sheet material.
• Dense tooth set on the blade is used for large blades.
• Variable tooth setting average is used for synthetic materials. Increase cutting speed to avoid saw chip clogging.

Tooth arrangement and sharpening

Tooth set-up is critical for material quality, vibration, workpiece deformation and has a direct impact on the life of the machine. It is important to choose the right profile for the application. There are several types of cutting element profile:

• The profile, which has a corrugated shape of the teeth, is used for cutting thin material or small workpieces.
• Standard arrangement of teeth is used for larger workloads, contour cutting or vertical mounting of the machine. The teeth are on either side of the central segment of the blade, but there are variants with additional teeth in the center.
• The most expensive type of profile is a pairwise (alternating) placement of the teeth. This type of saw is the most robust of the presented range, copes effectively with cutting even coarse and dense varieties of wood, reduces the load on the frame of the cutting element, which significantly increases its service life.

When selecting a blade, it is important to make sure the teeth are well sharpened, the steel is uniform throughout the saw, and the cutting edge is straight. If you focus your attention on these indicators, then you can buy a consumable that has not yet been used.

It is necessary to ask the seller about the capabilities of the saw. For example some of the products are designed for resharpening, and it is important to ask how many times the teeth can be resharpened. It is not allowed to sharpen the segments on a saw that is not designed for it. It is an extra load that will dull the teeth or break them.