Clarke 6x4 Bandsaw Restoration

[Dr.Al]

Next up was some welding.

I had some offcuts of 20 × 20 × 2 mm box section, so these got trimmed slightly such that I had two long pieces and two short pieces. Holes were drilled and then I welded some nuts (four per length) into the longer sections.

The photo above shows what the longer lengths looked like with the first pairs of nuts welded in and the welds cleaned up with an 80 grit flap disc. I then used the M8 screw you can see at the top of the photo (which had been in the citric acid bath with the nuts to get rid of the zinc plating) to make sure the nuts in the other side of the box section were thread-aligned with the ones already fitted.

I turned up some brass bushes (I don't know how good brass is compared to, e.g., Phosphor Bronze, but I don't have any bronze in the right size and it's not going to be working that hard, so I'd guess it'll be fine). I also drilled some holes in a couple of bits of angle offcut and welded some nuts by one of the holes in each piece. Then the frame got welded together, first the outer pieces:

Then I used an offcut of 12 mm silver steel to hold the bushes in alignment and welded the cross-member in place:

All cleaned up:

Last manufacturing job was some more washers and some "uprights" - these were made out of 8 × 20 mm steel purely because it's what I had. Probably overkill being 8 mm thick!

Here's all the bits together:

Assembly was a bit of a pig as a result of the amount the lead screw wobbles / precesses. Essentially a case of getting it together, then fiddling until it runs smoothly for the vast majority of the length of travel of the moving jaw.

First the angle got attached (after drilling and tapping some M6 holes in the base frame - the holes in the angle are 8 mm to allow for some adjustment here).

Then the rest of the frame was built on top and everything tweaked and tweaked and tweaked until it was right (this took about an hour!)

Here's a shot with the top arm down: the vice handle is readily accessible:

This was a lot of work, but hopefully will deal with the longest standing annoyance that I've had with the saw (which had also been exacerbated by the lack of a blade wheel cover at the moment: although the saw is off when I'm loosening the vice, the blade is still sharp!)

 

[Dr.Al]

Got the rattle cans out and did some spraying yesterday afternoon and this afternoon as it was sunny and not too windy.

I now have a blade wheel cover again. I've learnt over the last couple of weeks that I tend to lift the arm of the saw by grabbing the end (not the handle) and lifting it. With the blade wheel cover missing, I can feel my fingers against the saw blade. Thankfully I haven't tried to do this while the saw is running!

Anyway, I'm glad to have it back on again.

Close-up:

It is currently held closed with the original screw, but I've taken @Hopefuldave's advice and bought some clips from screwfix, so once I've figured out how to mount them, it'll look different. Here it is sitting in place (but not attached in any way).

There's a second blade wheel cover that goes underneath that sticking out bit in the second photo. I was going to paint that at the same time as the main cover, but could I find it?

Anyway, after the main cover had been primed and had two coats of black on each side, I finally found the other bit. So far it has only had primer, paint will have to wait for another sunny and non-windy day, although it's small enough I might be able to do it in a corner of the garage.

 

[Hopefuldave]

It is currently held closed with the original screw, but I've taken @Hopefuldave's advice and bought some clips from screwfix, so once I've figured out how to mount them, it'll look different. Here it is sitting in place (but not attached in any way).

View attachment 211283

Saw a little tab out each piece of the guard, or if you're flash (I'm not) put a spacer plate behind each piece of the catch and bolt right through

Dave H. (the other one)

 

[Hopefuldave]

Saw a little tab out each piece of the guard, or if you're flash (I'm not) put a spacer plate behind each piece of the catch and bolt right through

Dave H. (the other one)

P.S. - put it t'other way up on mine, so the bail didn't keep catching on the hook and annoying me...

 

[Dr.Al]

Today I finished making my version of Mike Cox's cut-off table. I've been planning this for a while (as you may have noticed if you were paying attention back in post #64. In fact it was one of the few instances where I'd even created engineering drawings before cutting metal rather than just making it up as I go along!

There were a few criteria that I had for the cut-off table.

1. I wanted the length stop feature for cutting stuff to a consistent length.
2. I wanted ideally to cope with lengths up to 200 mm.
3. I wanted it to be removable from the bandsaw very quickly: I have very limited space in my workshop. Now that it has a new base with castors, the bandsaw is constantly getting wheeled between being in front of the mill, in front of the lathe and in front of the workbench, depending on where I'm working and where is least in the way. When it's in front of the mill, I'd be pretty much guaranteed to walk into the cut-off table if it were still in place. If it's quick to remove and replace, I'll remove it and replace it. If it isn't, it'll stay on until I get annoyed by walking into to it and then come off never to be returned!

Anyway, here are all the bits I've been making over the last week or so:

Unsurprisingly, I didn't make the screws in the top left corner of the picture!

The screws go together like this (in keeping with the rest of the bandsaw screws):

Then the top-half of the frame gets put together along with the mounting pins (two of which have the bigger diameter section 3.5 mm longer than the other two):

The captive screw goes in:

and the the other bottom piece goes in:

Then it's flipped over and the table is attached:

You may remember back in the earlier post that I machined these features into the side of the bottom casting:

The mounting pins locate in the four outer machined holes and press against the counterbored surfaces. The screw spins into the middle hole and pulls the mounting pins up against the counterbored surfaces.

Here it is (without the length stop) installed:

Those two tapped holes you can see are M4 tapped holes (in the 3 mm top plate: I didn't want to mess around with nuts underneath - hence the fine pitch thread).

 

[Dr.Al]

Here's a close-up of the angle section from the first photo of the previous post:

It's a piece of 40 × 40 × 4 mm aluminium angle. I milled a shallow slot in one face for the steel rule to go into so that the rule is flush with the face. My plan had been to copy Mike Cox's approach and glue the ruler in, but when I did a trial fit, it was so tight in the slot that it doesn't seem to need any glue. Result!

The scratch you can see in the bottom left was from my cackhandedness when deburring the slot with a file.

These three bits make up the length stop:

The pins are glued into the clamping piece (bottom right) and are a very loose fit in the holes in the main block. The threaded hole in the main block is counterbored as I was wondering about having a spring on the shaft, but it doesn't seem to be needed so I haven't done so.

This is what it looks like assembled:

and here's the angle (without the length stop) mounted on the cut-off table:

You can see that the ruler is above the bit of bar that I've got clamped in the vice, so not usable for direct reading on small bars. That was a deliberate decision for the simple reason that the ruler being higher up is easier to read for my 6'6"/198 cm frame! In instances where you want to be quite precise with length, it's very easy to either use a short square or, more appropriately, fit the length stop:

I've done a couple of trial cuts with the table fitted and it's brilliant: the cut-off bar tends to stay on the table rather than getting fired out into the swarf tray (or beyond) when the saw finishes cutting. The angle stays fitted to the table when the table is removed and is aligned perfectly with the vice jaw and cutting line when it's refitted. It takes about 10 seconds to fit or remove the table.

 

[Dr.Al]

I haven't done much more on the bandsaw recently, but I did finish painting the (arguably slightly pointless) bottom blade wheel guard:

Today I fitted it. Not very exciting really.

 

[drmico60]

That is definitely the de-luxe version of the cut off table. Superb job.
Mike

 

[Dr.Al]

That is definitely the de-luxe version of the cut off table. Superb job.
Mike

It's a fantastic idea (thank you). Even without the length stop it makes such a big difference to cutting bits of stock off and not losing them as the cut-off bits roll under something. I cut a couple of short lengths of small diameter bar a couple of days ago and when the saw finished they just sat on the table rather than disappearing into the swarf tray.

 

[Dr.Al]

The weather was atrocious again today, so I spent most of the day in the workshop.

When I bought my bandsaw, it didn't come with the table for use as a vertical bandsaw. From what I've heard, this isn't a major loss as the standard saw table is supposed to be pretty poor quality.

I've been umm-ing and ah-ing about how to make a saw table for a while but had come to no real conclusions. Anyway, with nothing else to do for the day I had a bit of a ponder and came up with a plan. I'm particularly pleased with this as everything I used to make it (with the exception of a handful of cap screws, a screw-in foot and a bit of mild steel I used to make a slitting saw arbor) came out of a couple of different skips so the saw table has cost me approximately nothing.

Anyway, enough wittering; here it is:

The only thing holding it in place is the bandsaw vice. As a result, it's really quick to fit / remove: loosen the vice, drop it into place, tighten the vice. Takes a few seconds, tops.

The table top is 10 mm thick aluminium plate, about 300 × 200 mm. I got a whole load of bits of that plate out of a skip a few years ago and have mostly been using them as fixture plates on the milling machine, but I thought it would make a good table top for the saw.

Apart from the table top, most of the rest is made out of what I believe is called "T-Slot Extrusion": 30 mm square aluminium with some slots in - again, this all came out of a skip.

Here's what it looks like with the top removed (you don't have to take the table top off to remove the table from the bandsaw, I just did it for the sake of a photo):

You can hopefully see what I mean by "t-slot extrusion".

Here's the underside of it sitting on the bench:

The screw-in foot that you can see was the fourth one of a set that I bought. The other three were used for a material support thingy. I suspect I over-did the amount of extrusion in the structure under the table, but I've got loads of short (and otherwise rather useless) lengths of the stuff, so what the heck.

Here's another view of the underside:

That bit of plastic (acetal) you can see screwed to one of the bits of extrusion acts as a stop to prevent the saw arm coming down (I think the conventional way this is done is with a little bit of bent steel that attaches to the base casting, but it looked a bit naff to me).

Hopefully this picture shows what the acetal block is doing:

and just for completeness, this is what that foot is doing:

I've only used it for a little test cut so far, but hopefully it will prove useful. A fringe benefit of having the vice tightened around a bit of 30 mm extrusion is that it leaves a lot of machined surface space behind the vice that I can sit on while using the saw.

If my milling machine were a bit bigger, I'd have a go at making the front and rear faces absolutely parallel to one another, which would help with fitting a fence, but I can possibly come up with some sort of fence that doesn't rely on those reference faces.

The only major disadvantage of this design of table that I've found so far is that it's massive and a bit of an awkward shape. I haven't quite figured out where I'm going to store it when it's not in use!

 

[Dr.Al]

No more updates for now, but for once it wasn't actually raining today, so I wheeled the bandsaw outside and took some better photos.

Compare and contrast:

More photos:

As you can see, at the moment I'm still living with the acrylic sheet clamping the rubber gasket over the gearbox. It's not leaking at all, but now that I've got a plasma cutter I'll probably cut up the original cover to form a clamp around the edge (but without obscuring the view of the gears). I need to make a template (and get a lot more practice with the plasma cutter) first though.

While I was at it, some less blurry shots of the material support thingy:

Now I just need to get round to writing it all up in a coherent (ish) manner for my website.

 

[Dr.Al]

Small update today - I followed @Hopefuldave's advice and added two clips to the bandsaw. Made a couple of simple metal stand-offs (using my vertical saw table!)

The belt cover clip was fairly straightforward (although I didn't get it exactly central judging by the photo - ah well). This actually slightly slows down access to the belt compared to the friction lock that was there before, but it makes the bandsaw quite a bit quieter as the belt cover was bouncing around a lot when the saw was running.

Also added one for the blade wheel cover:

This had an interesting challenge: the blade wheel cover has very little clearance from the casting so I wanted to use countersunk screws to mount the clip that's shown on the right-hand side of the picture. That part of the blade wheel cover is U shaped, so there's no way to get a countersink bit to the inside face of it.

In the end I did some tool abuse and cheated slightly. I've got some 4 mm countersunk head woodscrews that are designed to cut their own countersink (in wood, not metal!) - they were sent by Screwfix a few years ago by accident and when I rang them they told me to keep them. I think they're called turbo gold screws or something like that. I put one through the hole from behind:

I then gripped the thread in the cordless drill's chuck and ran the drill in reverse. The screw got very hot (and I used one for each hole as it wore the screw down as well as the sheet metal), but it worked surprisingly well.

Here's both clips in one shot:

 

[Dr.Al]

I still haven't had any issues with the acrylic gearbox cover leaking, but since I've got the plasma cutter I decided to make a clamp for it.

Only part way through at the moment, but today I turned this:

into this:

Now I just need to prime it and paint it. Sigh...

 

[Dr.Al]

Finished priming and painting the cover so now it's in place providing some extra clamping to the acrylic window:

Not very exciting really, but there's really not much more to do on the bandsaw now!

 

[Dr.Al]

I've tried to write everything up into a coherent (by my standards) story about the restoration and put it onto my website:

https://www.cgtk.co.uk/metalwork/bandsaw/restoration