Best 14’’ BS for doing Curvy Work/ Not Re-sawing...

[richard poitras]

Best 14’’BS for doing Curvy Work/ Not Re-sawing

I am wondering what ever ones thoughts are in regards to the best new band saw on the market for doing curvy work. Basicly working with 1/4’’ blades and lower,with a larger than 6’’ height capacity possibly? (Could go either way on the capacity)and possibly using one of the Carter blade Stabilizer for fine blades? (Not sure how good the Carter blade Stabilizers are either so help on those would be appreciated as well. Also I would like it to be 110.

Re-sawing is not something I am after as I have a Laguna LT18 with the Driftmaster fence and re-saw king blade.

Thanks Richard
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Carter Stabilzer

[John Bailey]

Check out the General International 90-125. It's a basic Delta like 14" with a standard 16"x16" table. That size table helps when swinging longer work pieces when doing curvy work. If you're not married to the 14" size, for not a lot more money you can pick up one of the ubiquitous 17" models. Bigger table and 3 more inches of swing room will make curve work a lot easier. Swing room is more important when doing curve work.

Otherwise, any of the 14" models are going to serve your needs well.

[Dick Mahany]

I have two Delta 14" saws and they are the only thing I have experience with. One is for resawing, the other I recently rebuilt after an incredible find on CL. I put the Carter Stabilizer on it and use it with 1/4" and narrower blades. I recently made a few Lois Ventura type bandsaw boxes and the stabilizer worked well for tight curvy work where the blade needs to twist. It is understandably not as capable of perfectly vertical cuts such as when using guides, but it worked as advertised on 4-1/2" thick hardwood with out problems.

[richard poitras]

Any thoughts on the Rikon 10-325?

[Kevin Groenke]

Richard,

I put in a Rikon 10-325 yesterday so all you'll get from me are initial impressions.

The saw runs smooth and quiet, features are nice (tensioning lever, rip fence, table and guard rack & pinion, worklight). Quality/fit and finish seem good, nice big table w/2 miter slots (but no miter gauge included), paint is fine, assembly wasn't too bad but the saw-to-base fasteners were a bear to get at.

Concerns:

The tracking seems very sketchy, it just doesn't "lock-in" like the 14" deltas that we're used to. I might have wheel parallelism issues, I'm going to give them a while to see if they "seat-in".

The tires are rubber, I would expect them to be polyurethane.

The euro-style guide bearings are very finicky, they're hard to adjust and combined with the tracking issues instill no confidence. I might have to see if Carter bearings can be retrofit.

Dust collection - the only provision for it is below the bottom wheel and it's baffled down to a 1/2" x 4" slot. We'll probably try to fabricate a shroud that encases the bearings to capture the dust at the source.

We're in academic shop, so this saw should get a good workout. We're on spring break now but I'll try to update this thread in a couple of weeks as we get a better sense of the efficacy of this machine.

-kg

[Rich Enders]

Kevin,

Noted your comment about rubber versus polyurethane tires. My field is polymeric materials, and we usually think of rubber as superior to polyurethane due to the higher potential cross-link density, and resulting higher molecular weight. This would manifest itself as better resistance to deformation, especially at elevated temperatures.

Of course there are many types of each so perhaps the tires available in rubber use an inferior grade compared to those available in polyurethane. I am interested to know more about the available tires if you care to comment.