On 29 Jun 2008 00:15:39 GMT, with neither quill nor qualm, "DoN.
Nichols" quickly quoth:

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.

Waaaay too much work. I thought they might have used very thin tires
on the stepped wheel.


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.

I'll likely eBay it to get a good downpayment on a new 4x6. I'm
finding much less time to fiddle when I'm in the shop nowadays.

Besides, I like white tools, though Griz Green is also a fave color.
The lighter the tools in my shop, the brighter the shop.

Now to go clean the shop out so I could possibly _work_ out there
again some day soon...

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