The Mysterious Bandsaw Drift...Solved? // B4WMT #9

bandsaw

drift

, is it a myth, is it a marketing plan or is there really something to this? For as long as I've been using

bandsaw

s, I've heard about the

mysterious

phenomenon of bandsaw

drift

, but I've never been able to get a definitive idea. answer to the cause of this problem my first band saw was the 14 inch Grizzly saw that I bought about 20 years ago. I spent months trying to get the bandsaw to saw wood again and gave up a year later after countless hours of blade exchanges and customer service. phone calls just before starting this channel.

I bought a second band saw at a trade show. My son and I are with another guy who photographed us. This Rycom bandsaw was what I needed to start my YouTube channel. Unfortunately, the same problem started again. The blade would work again. works fine and then I would start cutting away from the fence and at an angle towards my material, but then I remember the fence and the sales pitch that came with the saw: there is a small knob on the side that moves the fence to account for the derived from the leaf. when it's set you lock it and now the issue is re

solved

but it was actually only re

solved

for a short time before the issues got worse.

It's been a few weeks using my internet research equipment, but I finally got a very definitive answer to this problem. So many different positions and ideas have emerged from this phenomenon. Here are just a few. Drift is the natural tendency of a blade to pull a workpiece in one direction when cutting. It is caused by a blade as an uneven set, which is the set or quantity. The part of each tooth that is bent outwards from the blade is not the same on both sides. Lastly, you will need to account for blade drift. The tendency of a bandsaw blade to pull to one side of the workpiece when cutting due to the way a bandsaw blade cuts.

Through the wood a situation called drift can occur, it is a reaction to the shape of the blade, in reality the sharp square angles on the trailing edge of the blade cause the wood to move away from parallel alignment with the blade to make a straight cut, that angle is the drift angle for your bandsaw blade, unfortunately you cannot use the same drift angle for the next blade you install on your tool because each blade has its own cutting signature, which which creates a separate drift angle with all these bits of information, there is no wonder that the term blade drift has a mystical aura surrounding it.

Fortunately for all of us and the industry, there are a couple of methods to control this problem that have broad universal support among all the authors I have researched. The first method involves drawing a line that is parallel to the edge back here on the saw. I'm going to follow the line I drew before. I'm going to get halfway and then I'm going to stop the band saw on the outside. This, according to the experts, is the drift line right there now I can put an external leader on the edge like this and I'll put it right on that line.

I'm going to add a couple of clamps to the front and back as I cut, I should stay on that line and that actually works great for my advanced bandsaw mechanical guide. I still have the ability to use a sliding fence, except that after cutting a piece of material, I just need to move the fence to the angle and lock it, make no mistake. The method works, but it means I'm cutting a lot of pieces of wood that I prefer to save for templates or other projects, and if you don't have this fence, you're wasting all kinds of wood every time you need it.

To establish an external fence, the next method, which is actually a very good method, is to create a single point stop that sits next to the blade, a single point bandsaw sled is all in the name , you have this front edge, here you keep your distance. that you're looking to cut away from the blade and then lock it with clamps because I don't really like using clamps. I made mine that uses the expansion bar in the slot and I can lock it wherever I want. It has a metal tip, so it really stops a lot of the friction problems that the wooden ones have.

There are two different ways to do this. You can set your line on your stock and then we'll cut a little bit now that the saw is off. I'm going to go ahead and push this against my material. Now I just need to cut from here on the second method and the one that I really like to use is to cut both sides of my material and then bring it here. align it again with the sheet. I'll find where I am right in the center. If you didn't watch another second of this video, this would be the best option for your band saw, but let me tell you why, while band saw blades are a continuous band of teeth the positions of the teeth are critical for band saws work each tooth is placed on the right of the blade or on the left with the blade enlarged you can see the teeth alternate on the left right left right I have drawn a line here and exaggerated how the blades look when We saw them placed.

It's important because we want to be able to clean the back of the blade so that the teeth are set at an angle so we can get the sawdust out and not. Let the back of the blade capture some of the reasoning I read earlier is that these teeth are not positioned correctly. I'll go ahead and delete some of these. If the teeth are not positioned correctly, the blade will shift to one side. with the greatest resistance, which would be this way, but this is not where most problems occur. If you go back far enough to the 1940s, you will find that they knew the answer;

However, if the sharpening is overdone, the blade becomes dull. one side of the blade is dull and the other side is sharp, the blade tilts towards the sharp side and he goes on to talk about how the blade invariably becomes dull on the side of the wheel it touches as it spins around the method of creating the blades Saw blades, as well as the advanced materials used in those blades, have improved tremendously in 70 years. The teeth of modern saw blades remain sharper than at any time in history, but the problem of one edge becoming duller than the other has the same consequences as it did 70 years ago.

Blade drift occurs because one side is sharper than the other, so new blades are more likely to cut parallel to the edge of the table, but let's try this. I have my fence exactly 10 inches from The edge is a very old blade so I'm going to check which way it goes. If I take it out, you can see that the blade has shifted this way, which would make these teeth sharper than the other side to test whether or not, this dulling of one side creates this mystical drift. I'll use a whetstone and move it to the right edge of the blade.

Now I'm going to turn it over to the other side. This is the side I cut last time. Let's see if the blade moves because of what I've done and as you can see it got a lot wider which means I've dulled this side enough to pull in the other direction just like it was written in En Popular Mechanics of 1949 we can see that having an unbalanced blade in terms of sharpness is the real problem when it comes to skidding now that we find the reason for the skidding, what can we do to stop this or can it be stopped, obviously the only way to solve it?

Keeping a band saw blade sharp means not using it, but preventing the blade from deflecting. We need to make sure we don't put excessive pressure on either side of the blade, prematurely dulling both sides. There are a few things we can do to make leaves. Lastly, as I mentioned in bite size number 129, starting on the table saw and cutting both sides with an inexpensive circular saw blade before taking the stock to the band saw helps. This is how I do almost all my resawing, but let's think critically about what is happening with the blade in our stock?

In a perfect world, cutting carcasses from dead trees would work the same as a pair of scissors cutting paper as a living organism. Wood is very complicated between species. Each piece of tree reacts differently. In fact, even between species. trees of the same species or even the same tree we can have two pieces of wood that act very differently with all these anomalies we have to remember that when we work with wood we are working with an imperfect material the good news is that when we dry the wood, we are taming it enough to make it much more manageable.

We still have to remember to buy dryer wood or allow the wood to adjust its humidity and temperature to its store before using it, but it is in a form that can be easily managed. If you are cutting a piece of wood with the fence like a table saw, half your attention will be spent holding the stock against that fence, this is putting a lot of stress on the blade, especially if our stock is trying to open, but You don't have to throw away the fence of your band saw, we just need to make some adjustments first and foremost if you are splitting a small section from a larger section of material, keep the longer section or the side with greater mass against the fence If I am cutting pieces of matchsticks, the thickest part is what I will put against the fence, this will allow our wood to open.

Think about how the band saws work at Lumber Mills. The wood is not cut from the bottom up but from the top. A better method is to add a fence to your fence that stops in the middle of the blade, this will allow your material to open while cutting easily allowing the energy to be released. You will want to use a piece of sacrificial scrap. run it through the blade at the end if you plan on cutting like this the second way to do it as we mentioned above is to use a single point method which again allows our stock to open like someone who has spent most of their time . life using band saw fences.

I'm really impressed with the single point method. If you are interested in the steel toe sled, I have a link at the end of this video as well as in the description below, those methods work for split wood, but how? about the stock that closes immediately when you push past the end of the blade in this situation adding a shim on the end also helps free our blade. You can buy a pack of these door wedges which are perfect when you need them. There are some more. Basic things you can do to set up your bandsaw for better cuts, which I'll leave a bite of at the end of this video, but blade drift is due to the sharpness of the blade's teeth and not a cutting signature. strange, while the older method of Fastening an external fence at an angle can help straighten things out.

You'll still have to deal with the blade being dull on one side over the other, so it's a very temporary solution. Thanks so much for looking. It means a lot to me that you do it. I'm here, I'd like to welcome a couple of new sponsors to this channel, both Mike Laurinitis and Lesen, they are part of a growing group of people helping with the equipment and material costs for this channel. Thank you Michelle B Keith, current Willie McNally, Jerry Adams. Tommy QR Zach Finch Rich Lightfoot tutor the barbarian Mike laurinitis decreases and Gary g press the thumbs up subscribe and ring Bell and thank you so much for being a part of my store leave a comment below find me on Instagram at makeings with Rob and remember keep doing foreign things.