"Jon Danniken" wrote in message
...
"SteveB" wrote:
I wore out four chop saws before I went to a band saw. In that time, I
had about half a dozen wheels that were just screwed up from the factory,
particularly Pearl brand, which were the cheapos of the day.

Bottom line, if everything's right, it should work. If it don't, the
wheel is out of kilter, mounted out of kilter, or something else is
throwing it out of kilter.

Stop and figger it out before you launch yourself into the next zip code.

Thanks Steve, and everyone else who helped me on this as well. I picked
two other wheels, both of them Nortons, but the thicker model (89359).
The vibration was greatly reduced, and my cuts improved, but it still felt
a little "loose".

I decided to do some measuring, and what I found was that the wheels
themselves are not in a perfect plane, but they have some error in them.
I determined this by measuring the runout of the wheel at the
circumference. By loosening the mounts and rotating the wheel; no matter
where I rotated the wheel, the error occured at the same place each time.

What I also noticed, however, was that the error would be decreased or
increased depending on how I rotated the wheel, which suggests that
something besides the wheel is contributing to the error (the shaft arbot
isn't true).

Considering these two error sources, they are magnified by the flimsy
nature of the machine itself. Holding the base with one arm, and rocking
the motor/blade assembly with the other, there is a large "twisting"
motion observed, due to the less than optimal solidity of the machine.

In other words, I think it's a cheap piece of tin that isn't fit to rotate
a 24oz 14" disk at 3600RPM, much less create anything approaching a square
cut, and that is the significant source of my problem.

So, it's back in it's box, with the receipt in my wallet, and will be
returned to HF. I'm going to exchange it for their model 1624 (on sale)
which, from what I can tell in the store, feels a heckuva lot more solid.
At least I hope so.

Jon

All of the saws I owned were Makita. Other major brands are good, too. I
even used most cheap wheels, but there were a brand or two that just weren't
very good. Consider biting the bullet and getting a brand name. Or get two
or three or four cheap ones in the same time span. The good ones DO cut a
slight bit better, having better jaws systems, IMHO.

Steve