Atelier Lalonde
Paul Lalonde's Weblog

By 9:15 this morning the local mover’s heavy crew had finished dropping my new iron in the shop. It’s amazing what these guys can do with a forklift, pallet jack, steel plates, and rollers. It’s interesting that the two older fellows in the crew remember doing a few deliveries and pickups a week from the old machine shop (now a kayak shop) I got the saw from.


The maintenance and thought on this saw continues to amaze me. It was used in a machine shop for about 80 years, and over that time a lot of changes happenned. The babbit has all been replaced with ball bearings, for example. A nice example of machine-shop thinking is the upper blade guide: the many ball bearings that make it up are on eccentric shafts. Loosenning a locknut on each lets you adjust the spacing between the guide bearings really easily. As as with the rest of the saw, not one nut is seized. I feel charmed.


I’m also pretty impressed by the engineering. The blade tension and wheel tilt mechanism is nice. I described the key-way depth adjustment a couple of days ago when I brought that casting home. Today I got it into its slot in the top of the saw, and found the reason for the setup. The whole tension mechanism hangs from a huge pin at the top of the saw. To adjust the tilt of the upper wheel you just have to tighten the screw on the backside and the whole thing pivots around the pin. Slick, and very stable.

I dragged home the loose parts of the bandsaw today, and now get to start the general clean-up. I hesitate to call it a restoration: there’s so little to do. There are minor amounts of surface rust, but most of it just wipes off with an oily rag - nowhere is it even heavy enough to need to scrub. Mostly it has a lot of oily sawdust all over it.

The only chore will be installing new tires on the wheels. I’ve got the top wheel home and the old tire off - the adhesive (if any) was really weak. The old tire was nastily torn into in the center, without enough rubber to re-crown. What will be easy is crowning.

The top axle is mounted on this big block, which sits in a housing in the main casting - you can see the wheel from this picture in the overall photo of the saw - it’s the one in the middle of the throat opening. The whole block is pinned at the top, and holds a dovetailed slide that adjusts the axle up and down. For crowning, I’ll bolt an angle grinder to the “guard” arm and do it right on the axle, before re-installing the whole box.

The most surpising part of the first disassembly is how easy everything is coming apart: this machine has been well cared for. Only one nut has needed any penetrating oil to date, the one holding the shop-made guide block . The guide itself is made of a half dozen sealed ball-bearings bolted and drift-pinned together. I think I’ll have to replace the bearings, and I may want to machine together something that will give me a little finer front/back tracking control. Right now that’s controlled by the number of washers behind the guide block. Breaking News (20Jan2004): There is very good front-to-back adjustment on the guide. The whole assembly sits on a shaft with a flat side, where a set-screw bears down to hold the guide at arbitrary distances. The previous owner was *good* at machine design…

I’ve been using Lee Valley’s router table for a few years now, first with their simple wooden base, and later jerry-rigged between the rails of my table-saw fence. The jig and its accessories are set up so that the fence has to overhang the table - it clamps around the edge. That means that when I built a proper side table on my tablesaw the router table couldn’t stay there.

That’s when I discovered that the twin-screw vice on my bench opens just wide enough to hold the router table:

You want to avoid cranking down on the rubber pads under the router table when you tuck it in - you really don’t need any pressure to hold it. The other nice thing is that my dust collection hose can be held by a simple fixture running through dog-holes in the center of the bench. In this shot the table is set up to do some cutting on the edge of a plank facing the dust hood. You can, of course do your cutting on the other side of the fence, keeping the wooden auxilliary fences apart to direct chips back into the hood as well.

Here I am in my narrow boat - it’s about 18″ wide, and thought it rolls nicely, it tracks like a bear. I’m going to give my next boat a little more rocker and a little more volume in the stems. Thanks for the photos Marcel.

Over Christmas I finally got to move into my new shop.

It’s got 656ft of space arranged in an L-shape, with my old single-car garage forming one leg. I’ve given up on using it as a garage, and will now serve as a building floor for kayaks and small boats, as well as a staging and finishing area when required. The step down is a little inconvenient, but a small price to pay for a 36ft long alley in which to resaw long stock such as kayak gunwales.

A couple of weeks ago Peter at the local kayak shop mentionned something about getting an old bandsaw out of the attic. You see, the shop is located in an old warehouse that used to be a machine and engineering shop. When the shop was shut down some years ago the pattern shop was left behind. It had been built in a closed off section of the light well and the tools were too much of a bear to get out. It took until a few weeks ago for Peter to decide to reclaim the space and move the tools out.

When I saw it the saw was sitting on the main shop floor, minus its upper wheel. It’s a FW Reynolds & Co. (Acorn Works), I’d guess from the turn of the 20th century. It’s belt-driven, massively cast, with 30″ wheels and a table darned near a meter square. The table mechanism is driven by a large handwheel, and is smooth as butter. The babbit bearings had been replaced some years early with ball bearings, which put to rest my biggest worry about the saw. It does need new tires, and I’ll have to find

I contacted the owner, an elderly gentleman who used to run the machine shop, and offered to buy it from him. He got a fair price for it and a lathe that was up there also - I’ll write about the lathe separately once I get it home.

The challenge now it getting it home. A local moving company has a heavy crew who are willing to do it, although it won’t be bottom-feeder cheap. The problem is that my shop door is only 6′8″ high, and the saw, without the top wheel is 6′10″ - it will have to come in on its side and be righted inside. I think I’ll have to rig up some sort of a small crane to do this - I feel an engine lift in my future.

It’s tempting to put it on some seriously heavy-duty castors; or else I’ll never be able to move it. I’m thinking there must be some low-profile heavy weight casters around.