On 2008-06-28, Larry Jaques novalidaddress@di wrote:
On 28 Jun 2008 03:27:44 GMT, with neither quill nor qualm, "DoN.
Nichols" quickly quoth:
[ ... ]
O.K. First question: "saur" -- sort for "dinosaur" to indicate
the age, or just a creative spelling of "saw"?
Hey, I got it from Gunner. It's a bit of both. g
O.K. Good enough.
Second -- does the Wilton 4x6 actually *have* tires? The import
one which I have from MSC has a cast iron wheel with a flange and a
groove to clear the set of the 1/2" blade teeth -- no tire. I thought
that all of the 4x6 saws were like this.
That's the way this is, but someone recently mentioned tires on a
metalworking bandsaw and it got me thinking that maybe I was missing
something. This thing's pretty clapped out and the local ACE hardware
stores now have ShopFox 4x6ers in stock for $149, so...
Hmm ... to put tires on it, you will need to totally re-turn the
wheels -- get rid of the flange, and put in a groove for the root of the
tires. And I don't know whether tires will work well with the design of
the 4x6 -- toss in the sharp twist to the blades, and the short distance
from the guides to the wheels, and I'm not sure what will happen.
The benefit of tires is the ability to use a wide range of blade
widths, and to make them self centering on large wheels which can't be
easily tilted. There are tires on my Emco three-wheeled saw (with
fiberglass-reinforced plastic wheels), but the blade is not twisted like
the 4x6 does, and the guides are less aggressive.
I would suggest keeping the flanged wheels for the 4x6 and just
using it as a cutoff saw (it is pretty useless as a vertical saw -- not
enough throat to allow much work guiding) and get something better with
wheels for freehand sawing to shapes. That's what I do with the Emco
three-wheeled one, which has three belt positions including one
which gives a high enough speed to make sawing aluminum a lot better.
But that is one tiny little belt -- some of these days it is bound to
pop. I just don't have room for a proper floor-standing vertical. The
3-wheeler came from an eBay auction. Emco seems to have discontinued
it.
Enjoy,
DoN.
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