Bandsaw.......I got a problem here...

[Jebediah Eckert]

MAYBE I FIGURED IT OUT?

I ran it today for close to an hour and it ran fine. So I think the capacitor just let go at the 20 year mark.

Now the wavy cuts.....I finished that 8/4 job on the tablesaw, so I didn’t have anymore of that to do. Today I was also cutting a bunch of soft maple, but it was only 3/4”. The first couple went through fine, then the waves started! I reset my guides and checked my tension. The tension felt right to me, and is where I always set it. I intended to make a tension tester, but my head just started to hurt reading about the math.

To cut to the chase....my fence somehow got out of parallel with the blade. I have a fence that is adjustable for drift. Prior to all these issues I used the fence in the short position, then put it back to the tall for the soft maple. The levers that release the fence are below the levers that adjust for drift. In my head I always get them confused and they make more sense the other way around. I remember loosening the drift levers to change the fence position. In the process I moved it off I guess?

When I was cutting the soft maple I was using a feather board. All the boards were rough width, but not exact. I’m thinking that the wider ones were pressed real right against the fence and those gave me the wavy cut? Maybe the “drift” was pulling it away from the fence and the feather board was pushing it back. Maybe that explains why they all started straight and got progressively more wavy on the boards that were tight?

That’s all I can think of anyhow, maybe that doesn’t even make sense. But I got the fence back parallel with the blade and I cut dozens of 3/4” stock fine without any Wavy incidents.

Only time will tell but it seems to be solved for now......

[Andrew Hughes]

I was going to mention something I remembered today with drift.
When I changed my capacitor I had to remove the table. I didn’t get it positioned correctly and my blade wanted to cut away from the fence. Sometimes it’s the table sometimes the fence ?
Thanks for reporting back now we close the case on this one.