Burned my bandsaw motor?

[John T]

I was resawing some oak planks, 6" wide (or depth of cut, however you see it) on my Craftsman 12" BS. I have a wolf 3tpi skip tooth blade, and it is still very very sharp.

Anyway, I started to smell something hot near the end of the 5th board, so I shut down and started looking. The motor on the BS was smoking a bit! So I get the air compressor going and blow out the motor, and let it cool a few minutes (the case was HOT). I started to finish the plank I was on, then shut it down again. I haven't used it since.

Now, I noticed that the power on the cut seemed to be coming and going, but I figured at the time that the blade was just getting pinched or something occasionally. Now I know it was more likely the motor bogging down or everheating or something.

Is my motor fried? Or was it just overheated? Should I start looking for a replacement motor? get it from sears (if they have them), or start looking elsewhere?

I've got a bunch of planks to resaw yet, and I'd hate to have to just plane them down (most around 3/4", and need to be 3/8" finished. I was cutting to 1/2").

John

[mac davis]

John.. Hopefully, the motor is ok, though undoubtedly pissed off.. *g*

I'm certainly not an expert, but you might check your belt tightness.... I keep most machines a little loose as I'd rather have a bit of slippage than overload the motor or blade.. (binding a bandsaw blade can require a change of underwear if it breaks)

mac

Please remove splinters before emailing

[clutch]

6' oak on a 12" bandsaw seems like quite a load to me. My opinion, for what it is worth, is that you don't have enough saw/motor for the job.

If determined to do it with what you have, I'd cut a board and do something else for awhile and repeat.

The other option is to keep at it and use the burning up of your motor as a reason to buy a bigger saw.

Wes

[Jeff Cooper]

I did the exact same thing to my Craftsman bandsaw, except it was with 4" birch.

It turned out that what had happened was that the starting cap got so hot that it melted it guts down into the motor. You might be able to get away with just replacing that.

I ended up going to my local farm supply store and purchased a Marathon

1.5 hp as a replacement. The motor speed you need is 1725 RPM, the original motor on mine didn't even list the RPM. It listed the surface feet per minute the blade would travel; figuring out the RPM was left as an exercise to the reader.

That particular motor was physically a bit large for the Craftsman chassis. The motor base has 6 bolt holes and the chassis only has 4, but the front four will match up. The shaft was also about a inch too long, but a few minutes with a sawsall and a file fixed that.

The only thing you might want to watch out for if you increase the HP, is that the original wires running to the motor aren't heavy enough. If the motor is under heavy load the wires start to get warm. One of my projects this winter is to rewire in the chassis to support the motor.

I must saw that is does resaw much better with the larger motor. I haven't been able to make it bog down when I'm resawing 6" oak, so I'm happy with it.

Good luck, Jeff

[Charley]

You likely have damaged the start winding in your motor. When you apply enough feed pressure to cause the motor to bog down and the motor speed drops below about 1/2 it's rated RPM the centrifical switch in the motor engages the start winding. This winding is designed to get the motor up to running speed when you first apply power but it is not designed for continuous operation. In fact, running the start winding for longer than about 15 seconds will cause it to overheat. If the motor still starts and runs OK, then it'll probably provide you some additional use, but it is very likely to fail sometime in the future. If you still want to re-saw with it be careful with your feed pressure to keep the motor from bogging down. Care and patience is what's needed when you are pushing a machine to it's limits.