New Jet 18" Band Saw (Gloat)

[Keith Outten]

I recently upgraded my 16" Grizzly bandsaw to a new Jet 18" model and although I have only had the new saw for a couple of weeks it is a much needed improvement. I have been able to resaw wood and Corian up to about 9" wide effortlessly. I expect to see an additional performance boost when I can find the time to order a higher quality blade although the stock 3/4" blade ain't bad :)

The new Jet BS will reduce waste and provide me with a way to make thin inlay material for the blue beast in the background of the photo.

[Mark Singer]

Keith,

Very nice...Enjoy it well!

[Mark J Bachler]

Nice looking saw Kieth. How are you & the beast getting along?

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Keith......Nice saw! I looked at that saw with a lot of interest while visiting my youngest son in San Antonio. It's still on my finalist list when I am able to seriously pursue acquiring a bandsaw!

[Keith Outten]

The ShopBot did strain my shop budget so I couldn't reach as high as I would have liked to on the Band Saw. I am very pleased with the Jet though, it seems to have plenty of power and is enjoyable to use.

The learning curve on the ShopBot is very steep, even more so than I had anticipated before the purchase. There are two programs that are necessary to learn, a control program and one for design. Aaron dropped by the shop last night and had a go at making circles and rectangles, we determined that there are software bugs that are causing problems with Win98SE on my laptop. Very soon i will have to move my backup machine from my office to the shop to remedy this problem. We definately need more CPU power as well, when previewing large projects the wait will be excessive on the laptop.

My time is still strained these days but I have managed to spend one hour per night with the new router, however I am still crawling. With the holidays this week I should be able to get all of my current projects completed and hopefully have a considerable amount of time left to spend with the router. My goal at this point is to be able to send files from the design software to the control program by Sunday...maybe I will actually get something worth taking a picture of completed :)

I only wish the router was as easy to use as the new band saw :)

[Ted Shrader]

Keith -

Congratulations on the new saw. Did that one follow you home from the Woodcraft sale the other day?

Regards,
Ted

[Keith Outten]

Ted,

You Bet! I took advantage of the $200 off sale on the band saw at WoodCraft. For what it's worth I waited untill the Turn-A-Thon was over to shop and I got a nice discount on a couple of router bits :)

I have moved the 24" Dual Drum sander to my storage building and I'm still hoping you are going to drop by and pick it up :)

[Steve Inniss]

Keith,
Congratulations. I have had the same saw for 3 yrs. or so now. I use it constantly for doing bowl blanks and resawing and it does a great job - lots of power and easy to set-up and change blades (getting to the lower guides is a bit awkward).
The blades that came with mine were almost useless though. Better blades made a massive difference. -Steve

As a matter of fact, I just cut up a batch of white oak from a tree cut down by the utility company. I did it quarter-sawn using the Jet, and it's nice and wormy. I'll be making a sweet little table out of it - in about two years!