Bandsaw Set Up Issues

There’s a video on you-tube by Snodgrass that has everything you need to know to set up the bandsaw perfectly. I can’t find the link right now.

Is there no place else you can get a new 115” blade from fairly quickly? Even a cheap one should be able to make a few cuts in 4” oak before going bad. Unfortunately, despite the great reviews for the saw you might find some negative reviews for Laguna’s customer service.

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Thanks, Joe.

Is this the video you are talking about?

We could have easily ordered a wood slicer blade from Highland, but we got strung along at every junction and assured that the fix was right around the corner. If we had know it was going to take close to a month for the blades to arrive, we would have certainly gone in another direction.

I had heard mixed reviews of their customer service, but had high hopes.They obviously make good stuff and when you talk to them on the phone, it’s great. It’s what happened after we hung up that was the problem.

-- Jay Gargiulo, Naples, FL www.swallowtailwoodcraft.com "Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things."- Miyamoto Musashi

That’s the video – lots of good info in it, lots of things to do to tweak the saw but at least you only need to do it once.

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I have a feeling your problem is still the blade,unless the reason for labouring is the belt slipping or the saw is wired for 220V (although unlikely but worth checking out),I would install a totally different brand of blade,and like Joe said even a cheaply made blade should cut nicely for the first few cuts.

-- Ken from Ontario, Canada

I also think it is unlikely the saw is wired 220 pluged into 110 but I would check it.

You need to wire if for 220 (230 in the manual). This will give you full power. My brother had a table saw that had the same problem once he wired it for 220 it worked great.

Laguna says it is wired from the factory for 115. These dual motors almost always run better with the higher voltage and they will actually use less electricity.

230 volt tools using LESS electricity??? I don’t think so.
Bill

-- bill@magraphics.us

and they will actually use less electricity.

suggested reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity

http://www.rapidtables.com/convert/electric/Amp_to_Watt.htm

-- there's a solution to every problem.......you just have to be willing to find it.

From Inspectapedia – So what advantages do we get from running an electric motor at 240V rather than 120V?

Electrical Energy Usage Measured in Watts

The watts consumed (and therefore the size of your electric bill) for running a water pump or other electric motors will be almost exactly the same regardless of whether you are running the pump wired at 120 Volts or 240Volts.

Using an imperfect “water pressure” analogy, sending water through a pipe to move a water wheel, if we double the pressure (volts) at which we are supplying water energy to push the wheel, the number of gallons per minute (amps) we need to do the same work is cut in half.

So if we keep our pipe and water wheel and all else the same, but send water through the pipe to push the wheel at 240 psi, we would need half as much water quantity (measured in gallons per minute or “amps”) to turn the wheel at the same rate as if we were pushing on the wheel at 120 psi.

Electrical motor voltages are similar in this regard. If we have an electric motor that is designed to run at either 120V or 240V (not all of them are) then the label on the motor will tell us that at 120V (pressure or potential) the pump motor will draw about twice as much amperage (current) as at 240V.

Our label (photo at left) shows that this 1/2 horsepower jet pump electric motor can run at either 115V at 10.8 Amps of current draw, or at 230V at 5.4 Amps of current draw.

With this example, if an electric pump motor draws 10.8 Amps when running on a 120V circuit, it draws 5.4 Amps when in use on a 240CV circuit.

10.8 Amps = ?Watts / 120 or doing the algebra, 120×10.8 = 1296 Watts when our pump motor is running at full load and wired on a 120 Volt electrical circuit.

05.4 Amps = ? Watts / 240 or doing the algebra: 240×5.4 = 1296 Watts when our pump motor is running at full load wired on a (nominal) 240 Volt electrical circuit.

The electric meter at a building measures electricity usage in kilowatt hours (KWH). If you run a 1000W electric heater for one hour, you’ve just used 1 KWH of electricity. So the pump is costing essentially exactly the same to run at either voltage level.

http://inspectapedia.com/electric/120vs240_Volts.htm

-- Les

Hi Jay,

Ugh. Sorry to hear about the problem that you are having with the 14/12. I wrote the review that you referred to, and I am continuing to have a great experience with the saw. Over the weekend I sliced up a bunch of 11” walnut and it did it effortlessly. I’ve also sliced 6-8” maple without a problem. Today my dad was following a pattern and making some curved cuts on some 3.5” walnut using a 3/8” blade and he couldn’t believe how quickly and precisely it was cutting it up. 4” oak should be absolutely no problem. I agree with your hunch that the blade is dull, which is hard to imagine with that blade, but it is certainly plausible. Apparently the ceramic on the Laguna guides can dull a blade within one full rotation of the blade if the ceramic is in contact with the teeth.

I think that the 220 thing is unlikely, but I’d put an amp meter on the saw to see what’s happening anyway.

I would also try doing a free hand resaw or using a resaw pin to rule out a fence angle problem. I doubt that is the culprit either but it is worth trying. Mine needed no adjustments for drift. The 13” cherry resaw that you saw in the review was done without any drift compensation, or really any tweaking of the saw at all. I have since played with the drift adjustment a bit just to see how easy it was to adjust, and I found it quite easy to realign it properly to the drift angle.

I only had one other thought, and it is probably unlikely that you wouldn’t notice it on a resaw blade, but I actually was recently puzzled by a cutting problem on a band saw and then realized that the blade was installed backwards. My excuse is that it was a finer tooth blade and therefore less noticeable, but in reality I just wasn’t paying attention and it is super simple to do.

I’d stick with the support guys and make sure that they see you through this. I have spoken with two of the Laguna support guys and I was quite impressed with both of them.

-- PaulMayer, http://www.vernswoodgoods.com