Bandsaw

My dual purpose bandsaw, design to cut aluminum/steel and also wood. The stand its sitting on is 1.25" square tubing, 1/8" wall with steel castors rated at 400 lbs each. The stand is darn near as heavy as the band saw ! The saw appears to be sitting off center but in fact the stand is almost exactly the outside dimensions of the bandsaw. Nice cast iron wheels. The two HP 3 phase motor. The pivoting moter plate was salvaged from some piece of junk I didn't pay for. A close up. The 5/8th ready-rod pivots. Inside the 1 1/4" square tubing (bolted to the frame) is a piece of 7/8 shaft, cross drilled and tapped. Another view of the system. Note the extra pulley on the motor shaft and the idler shaft. I can swap the belt to the other two pulleys and get four times the speed for cutting wood. The secondary reduction system. Outside of the bandsaw itself, the small pulleys and the pillow blocks are about all I bought for this whole project. Almost everything else was sitting around. This plate also pivots to tension the idler to bandsaw belt.
Here's how the idler plate pivots. Crude but effective. Side view of the idler plate. This is actually quite the massive assembly. The shaft is 7/8" diameter and the spacers under the pillow blocks are 1.5" diameter. I didn't quite think through the pivot mounting plate. Note the top bolt has room for a washer and lockwasher, the bottom does not. The holes are actually slotted on this side. I wanted to be able to adjust the idler so as to get the shaft very parallel to the bandsaw shaft. Intermediate shaft to bandsaw drive. This pulley is off a compressor head that I bought, rebuilt and gave up on. It's been sitting (along with two more compressor heads) in a corner for years. I was just NOT going to spend 40 bucks on a 12" pulley. I had to bore it out as it was a tapered hole and then fab up an insert. The insert needed a pair of keyways, inner and outer; I milled them with a 3/16" endmill. The heart of the system; the electronics. Power comes in on the left, goes to the Variable Frequency Drive and out to a three phase connector on the right. Barely visible on the far left is a small white connector. This is for the speed control. The bandsaw came with a 1/2 HP motor. I can use the VFD to slow the 2 HP motor down to 1/4 speed, at which point it's making 1/2 HP. The motor running at 1/4 speed (1/2 HP) coupled to the double-step reduction and I'm down to about 150 SFM. I can even go slower on the motor if I want, at a corresponding decrease in power. Basically this means I can cut aluminum or steel at close to the right speed without switching a belt. And if I want to cut wood, well, I do have to change the belt, but that's pretty quick to do, as you'll see later. Here's the electronics panel now mounted to the stand. The power switch and speed control knob. All these were spare parts as well. (Yes, I'm a bit of a packrat)
The front side. Like I said, a snap to change the belt. There is no back side cover, as you can see, for two reasons. 1. I expect to put the saw right up against a wall, and 2. I have no more aluminum. What I used on the three sides was rescued from an old piece of network gear the university was throwing out. If they throw out another one, the bandsaw will get a back cover as well. folderimage folderthumb