Well I finally got the Lennox 1" blades and was able to "put some wood" to the saw. I can tell you that the Lennox 1", 2/3, Bi-Metal VP blade was the nicest blade I'd ever used until I installed the Lennox 1", 2/3, VP Tri Master. This blade is everything that Mark Singer and Jim Becker said it was. If you do alot of resawing for venneer or bookmatching, this is the blade. More on the blades at a later time, and onto the saw.
As I stated earlier, I beleieved that the saw was maybe a little too "lite" for the pro user, my experience has validated this in my mind.
I started out having tracking problems, I could not get the blade centered on the upper wheel, and the teeth of the blade were over the front edge of the lower wheel. I contacted Rikon on the issue and they were extremely quick to return my call, and explain what adjustment was necessary. As a matter of interest, I have called Rikon on three seperate occaisions, and they have returned my calls immediately, I was very impressed. The adjustment turned out to be the alignment of the four bolts on the back of the lower wheel housing, these bolts align the "pitch" and the "Yaw" of the lower wheel, incidentally the weight of the wheels are 23 lbs for the upper and 28 lbs for the lower. I had to remove both wheels to understand the design and get everthing aligned, so I weighed them. The upper wheel, however turned out to be a little more problematic, and this problem is in my mind, the Achilles Heel of this machine. The tracking adjust for the upper wheel is a bolt that extends thru the frame, and applies force to the backside of the upper arbor/tension assembly. The cross section of the threaded end is not much, ~ 3/8" dia. and subsequently places a lot of localized pressure on a small contact area on the back of the arbor/tension assembly. This resulted in the deforming of the back of the arbor/tension assembly, and placed a "Dimple" on the back that interferred with the smooth operation of the quick release feature. I removed everything,and pressed out the deformation. I have since placed a 2" wide, 6" long and 1" thick piece of tool steel on the back side of the arbor/tension assembly. This gave me a more progressive tracking adjust, and also corrected the "Yawing" of the upper wheel. Any owner of this saw will have to address this issue. or over time the tracking adjust will have to be continually readjusted, and the quick release will begin to bind as the tesion/arbor assemble tries to slide down and out of the deformation to release tension.
The saw is childlessly simple to take apart and reassemble, in addition to the 4 allen wrenches provided the only other tool required are a 13mm wrench, a small flat head screwdriver, a phillips driver and a square and a machinist scale for alignment.
Once I resolved the tracking issues I aligned the saw with no problems.The guides are essetially large Carter guides and all the hardware was of good quality, which made for easy, quick alignment. The table has a "Thin, Lite" appearance but is very strong and stiff, with no perceptiable deflection when bearing weight on during resawing. The blade guard is pretty cheesy, and actually intereferes with blade installation. I'll manufacture a different style of guard that will go on after the blade is installed, but this also no big deal. To install a 1" blade I needed to remove the doors, again easy to do and very quick to put back on. The blade installs from the front of the saw, and accomodations have beem made in the fence assemble for rapid removal. The fence is removed by loosening 4 large plasic wingnuts and pulling it toward you. There is a guide built into the extrusion of the fence rail to reinstall it exactly as removed, again pretty simple.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the purchase. It was purchased solely to resaw, I have my Jet 14" for the lighter stuff, and it does that very well. Would I recommend this saw? it depends. If you were on a budget and was only going to have 1 bandsaw and you wanted it for everything, I would say look at the Grizzly 18"-21" bandsaws. If you already have a smaller 14" like I do and just wanted it for resawing, it's great. If you're a pro and make your living with a bandsaw, well then there's Mini-max and Laguna. This saw definitely fills a void in the market though. For a little over $1K with a Lennox Tri Master, it's a hard value to beat.
I'm going to attempt to attach some Pic's of the saw.
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