Snowmageddon 2011 hit and I was unable to buy a replacement blade for my band saw until today. I bought the same metal cutting blade as before, but not without scouring the internet and a local machine shop. I was really tempted to get something really nice like a bimetal or carbide blade (these seem to be around $30 online). The local machine shop offered to weld a bimetal one for me for about $80–they aren’t really set up to do this for customers. I was too impatient to wait for an online order, so I settled with the Lowes one again.
The new blade cuts just as good as before, but made an annoying clunking sound once per revolution. I traced this down to a piece of dull metal sticking out in front of the teeth at the weld–this was smashing into my aluminum once per revolution. I ground this off with my dremel tool and it was working great.
I started going back to parts I cut to size a week or so ago and finishing the more complicated cuts.
The curves were supposed to have a 1″ radius. I found a conveniently sized container with the same dimension and traced that. I need to figure out what everyone else uses for these types of cuts. I did consider cutting out a bunch of circles on my CNC machine.
Its fun after reading other peoples’ build logs to finally be building parts I have seen before. By the way, I have no clue how that yellow protractor thingy is supposed to help me. I probably need to see someone who knows what they are doing use it.