So it’s a bank holiday weekend and I was looking forward to lots of time in the shed, but on friday a nice lady held me down and shoved a screwdriver and a pair of pliers in my mouth so I wasn’t really up to much woodworking on the Saturday, but at least the extraction didn’t cause too much pain after the fact so today I decided to hit the shed and get on with some stuff, and I thought I’d start with some resawing.
The fence they ship the Titan bandsaw with is ridiculously awful, so this is what I normally use – just a length of extruded aluminum that normally serves as a straightedge when planing. I must see about getting a wider box section for this job though, the underside of the table has ribs so it’s not so easy to find a flat spot to get the clamps on without tipping the fence over when you clamp. But after some faffing about I got it all set and started to feed in the beech, and getting pretty good results (This is 75mm wide material, the upper limit for the machine).
Nice straight clean cuts, minimal saw fuzz, no wandering or blade drift, I was happy with that. Then on the last board…
Just literally ground to a halt mid-cut. Motor’s still spinning, but the blade’s not moving. I was sure I’d overheated the little motor or something so I turned everything off and let it sit for a half-hour and then tried again, but to the same result – the blade would move allright, but the minute it hit the wood, it stalled out and stopped while the motor kept spinning. So I opened up the lower box and sure enough…
Note, the belt hadn’t snapped, I cut it out of the bandsaw to save time, the problem is that the teeth are all stripped off the inside of the belt (note the melted fuzz on the remaining third of the teeth, and there were a lot of completely stripped off teeth on the bottom of the lower bandsaw cabinet). It’s a 124XL037 belt in case this ever happens to you, and like the bearings, these belts are industrial lego. If you don’t need them fast, you can get a box of ten from aliexpress for $16; if you need them tomorrow, Radionics will ship you two for the same price in a day or so. So I’ll be sorted before the end of the week, but it’s still a bit of a pain in the fundament.
Still though, got most of the boards done.
That bottom one is 100mm wide, it wasn’t getting resawn, it’s to be thicknessed. And the remaining board I was mostly through so I finished resawing it by hand.
Yeah, still not my favorite part of this hobby. But beech turns out to be nice to saw.
Then laid out the parts for the next project…
Bit of a glue-up panel for the back…
That’ll be ready tomorrow and then I can continue planing the parts. Then the outside frame gets dovetailed, the inner shelf and bottom get housing joints, I’ll rebate the panel into the frame at the back and thickness the door and that’ll be that.
Yeah, so only another six months 😀
And then maybe some stringing for decoration… or some carving… 😀
I also got some walnut pieces rough-cut from an offcut from the sidecar cot to be used in the experimental box. I’m just not looking forward to resawing that to a usable thickness and I hate thicknessing walnut by scrub plane, it feels like such a waste. Oh well. Frame saw time maybe.
