Best small (secondary) Bandsaw?

[Allan Speers]

Re JB Weld:

One thing folks should realize is that, while it has "pretty good" tensile strength, in my experience is has lousy shear strength. Significantly worse than most epoxies I've tested. I suspect that's because of the steel filler particles. It's great for filling holes (exactly what it was made for) and certain mechanical repairs, but it's a very bad choice where 2 parts will have heavy "sideways" pressure applied. (Unless there's a LOT of mating surface area)

That's my experience, anyway.

I think that for reinforcing with screen, or fiberglass, or whatever, it wold be an excellent choice, & I probably WILL do that on my saw, since there appears to be lots of room around that part.
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The "Marine" JB Weld is intriguing, I never saw that before. However, I suspect that it's just "regular" JB Weld in a different packaging, to go after the System 3 market. ($$$$) It is the same color, and has exactly the same cure time & tensile strength.
- Like "Plumbers" "Household" and "Automotive" Goop. That's all exactly the same stuff.

But who knows?

[Tom M King]

Inside that crankcase half, there wasn't much contact area where the breaks were, but there was a lot of room around where the clutch goes. I used a Dremel with wire brush, cleaned the metal, and put in pretty large fillets, so was able to get a lot of surface area like that.

I would have used regular, but the NAPA that is close was out of it, but had a large selection of all the others, so I just grabbed the Marine one.

So far, that trimmer probably has 50 hours on it, and is still working fine. At 20 years old, 400 bucks for a new one is only 20 dollars a year for the machine, but might as well keep it going as long as it will.

I was just thinking, since you mentioned a possible JBWeld repair on your bandsaw, that it might be worth a try.

[Allan Speers]

I was just thinking, since you mentioned a possible JBWeld repair on your bandsaw, that it might be worth a try.

Absolutely.
Like that crankcase, I think tensile strength is what matters there, plus being able to solidly fill in tiny gaps, which regular epoxy is not so good at.

-And luckily I don't have to repair the hanger, just reinforce it to lessen the chance of it breaking in the future.

[Pete Staehling]

I understood the problem was fatigue from bending larger and thicker blades around tighter radii. I've read about problems with small 3-wheel bandsaws. But from a mechanical viewpoint, it seems to me that scaling the blade down with the wheel radius would be fine.

I agree. I'd use one with blades specifically intended for it or ones that just happen to fit that criteria. That means narrow and thin blades (especially the thinness). There are blades specifically labeled as three wheeler blades. Supercut three wheeler is one brand (harbor freight is one source). You can also get Starret blades in 0.014" thickness (woodworker.com sells them).

BTW, it probably isn't a bad idea to run them on any of the small 2 wheeled saws. I definitely use them on my 8" delta and usually on my 9" ryobi. Yes I have two tiny bench top saws, one has a rip fence on it most of the time and the other a crosscut sled. I typically am cutting tiny parts often and they are handy to have set up that way.