Dear All,
Well, it only took forever, but tonight I finished work on my Wadkin Bursgreen 20" bandsaw and made first dust with it!
I brought the saw home in pieces (it weights over 600 pounds) and started rebuilding it. I did some body work, fixing dings and holes drilled in the saw over the years. I drove the saw around the corner to a friend of mines place, who just happens to have a full spray set up in his garage, to have the saw painted (Nice job Mike!).
One serious problem with the saw right off the bat was a cracked trunion. The trunion is cast iron and irreplaceable. I deal with a local welding school through work and I was able to have one of the instructors weld the trunion for a very small fee. Cast iron has to be welded in a very special way, both heated and cooled in an oven to be done correctly. It had been repaired badly once before, and this time it was done correctly.
I had HTC build a custom mobile base for the saw, it works very well, I can move the saw around effortlessly. This helped a lot as I worked on the saw, I could move it around with ease. I don't have 575/3ph at home, so I replaced the stock 2hp motor with a new 220/1ph 3hp Lafert unit. This is a metric flange mount motor and it was a bit of a challenge to find one. I also obviously had to replace the remainder of the electrics to handle the new voltage/higher amp draw. I put on a new Dan Foss magnetic starter and
20amp twist lock plug/cord.The wheels are like the old Delta bandsaws, with the little groove around the rim. Since I could not get new tires from Wadkin for this saw, I tried a set of Delta's. Turns out my saw is not really 20", but rather the metric equivalent of 19.5". You would think that 1/2" wouldn't be enough to make a difference, but the Delta tires "flapped" on the rims of this saw under power and did not work. I found a company about an hours drive away who re-hooves (vulcanizes) bandsaw tires, so I took the tires to them for a rebuild. They also crowned, installed the new wheel bearings and balanced the tires as well.
The guides are a set of Carter MicroPrecsion bandsaw guides. I was able to order new "Tefloy" blocks and thrust bearings from a local Carter dealer without too much difficulty. Any part of these guides can be replaced or fixed, so that they were in bad shape did not concern me. Rebuilding them was much cheaper than having to buy a new set.
For some reason, someone had painted the cast iron table top black. This was a good thing really, because when I scraped the paint off with a razor blade, there was clean bright cast iron underneath. By the way, the table alone on this saw weighs almost 150 pounds.
Rebuilding the saw was pretty easy really, the only marginally challenging task was aligning the guides once reinstalled because off their many axis of adjustments.
You can see in the photographs me resawing a 12" wide pine board, the saw blew through it. I also did some resawing on an 8" wide hard maple board, no matter how hard I pushed, I could not get the saw to stall or slow down one bit. Note from my framing square that there is over 16" of clearance under the guides of this saw.
This saw will be used exclusively for ripping and resawing. I am going to keep a 1" blade on the Wadkin and a 1/4" on my Taiwanese 1hp 14" bandsaw. Now I will never have to change blades for different applications again!
I figure that I have about $1000 into this saw and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
What a cool saw...