Bandsaw won't start after storage

Overload reset button on tthe motor. John T.

Good idea. I went back and checked again in case I missed it. There's no fuse and no overload anywhere. It's a Shopcraft. The manual says 1/3 HP universal motor, infinitely variable speed, but they give speed in linear feet of blade rather than RPM.

Have you tried turning the motor manually? With the power OFF in case the blade starts to move on its own. Maybe some piece of mouse crud is stuck in it.

Huh. Gotta admit, I hadn't thought of that, and I should have.

LOL I almost didn't suggest it because I thought it would be insulting. Does the motor get warm after a while?

If there is anything to push, you could poke the pully with a stick while the power is on, but that probably wouldn't do much more than when the power is off.

Um, maybe not a good idea. The pulley doesn't show without the cover open. The interlock will stop you from starting that way. It is easy to override, just push the little tab, but picture worse case: it stats up and the blade comes off and wraps around you.

If the motor hums but doesn't start, like a bad capacitor, then you can get it running by pushing the blade down with a junk of wood. But mine doesn't hum at all.

I have a 10 inch 3 wheel bandsaw, probably like yours, and it has no capacitor.

Once when the range hood and its light wouldn't go on, I speculated that mice had eaten the wire to it, but a couple months later, I noticed that I'd taken apart the dining room wall switch on the other side of the wall.

If it doesn't hum or get warm, and there is power to the motor, you have nothign to lose by taking the motor apart. I don't know if mice really eat wires or not, since they didn't eat mine. But I hear they eat everthing. (Once one ate through the heavy vinyl/plastic like bag that the mouse poison was in, but it didn't kill all of them. Might not have killed any.)

I once found a clock-radio in the trash, and it was full of mouse poop. I don't remember if any of the wires had been eaten.

The bandsaw is fixed. How? Dunno for sure, but:

There are three things that can interrupt the power: The safety interlock switch, so it won't run with the cover off; the on/off switch; and the speed control.

When I was taking it apart I sprayed contact cleaner in both switches and worked them repeatedly. They seemed to test okay, but the speed control didn't seem to have continuity, so I was considering jumping that out. But I tried it with power one more time and now it runs.

I don't know if mice chew wires. They sure pee and poop everywhere. When we lived in Germany, we learned that martens (a weasel relative in the northern US, German name is Marder) will climb under your car hood and chow down.

I had electrical problems in my Sienna, and found piles of seeds from a nearby tree piled on my engine, and had to repair wires with insulation chewed off.

I once went on a hike in the Olympic Mountains in WA, and a ranger was throwing moth balls under car engines because the local critters had been eating wire insulation and belts.

Well I guess that settles that. Squirrel, mice, not much difference.