So after much deliberation over the choice of bandsaw verses powered hacksaw, and having settled on a bandsaw I ended up choosing a model "HV 128" from chester machine tools.
I do have to say that I wasnt terribly impressed with Chester's customer service prior to going to their showroom, especially via email where they gave information in homeopathic proportions, that being said I still chose to buy the bandsaw and the face-to-face experience was much better.
Anyway, getting on to the review. (at last
) This post will be about my experience with assembling it and getting it to work initially. I'll post up with more when I've used it for a while.
1st thing to say is that the box weighs about 55Kg's, is about 4feet long by 15" wide and about 20" tall.
Opening the box exposes the wonder that is the Stand. It's called a "wonder" because you will spend quite a bit of time wondering how on earth to put the whole thing together. Basically when you open the box and pull out the 4 legs, 4 spreader bars, 1 bag of assorted bolts and nuts and several initially unknown pieces of steel.
At this point in the unpacking procedure it is usual to cast aside the instruction/owners manual in a manly fashion, which I of couse did. However, after a few rather blank glances at the assorted nuts and bolts and various mystery steel parts, I strode over in a manly fashion to where the manual landed earlier and turned to the pages that would tell me how to assemble the stand.
..........
Stepping over the small pile of crumpled, useless chinglish jibberish that is an extremely poor excuse for a manual, I started to assemble the stand in some form of a fashion to make a shape that vaguely resembles a bandsaw stand.
Here is where a flaw in the design of the stand becomes evident. The stand is held together by short coach bolts ( I think thats what they are called ), about 16 of them with washers and nuts.
The problem is that when you tighten up the nut, the thickness of the 2 pieces of pressed steel that you are trying to fix together is less than the depth of the square shoulder of the aforementioned coach bolt, and so no matter how much you tighten the nut, the 2 pieces of the stand can never be fully pulled together.
Bravely ignoring this major design flaw, I pressed on and assembled the stand. I stood back to admire my handiwork and noticed that I had created a less stable, metal version of a newborn Bambi. Wondering ( there's that "Wonder" again ) about how this would fix to the bandsaw itself, I then happened to notice, hidden away in the packaging was 2 more pressed steel brackets that fit onto the "Bambi" legs. Once bolted in place the legs firmed up quite a bit.
This gave me confidence ( or was that hope? ) to carry on and mount the bandsaw on the stand. This was no easy task as I have a tiny workshop, and I was alone. So I removed as much weight as I could ( vice and motor ) and then mounted the bandsaw on the stand, carefully supporting the saw while I fastened the 6 nut and bolts that held it on.
True enough, the stand firmed up a little more once the bandsaw was bolted in place, but was still too wobbly for my liking due to the design flaw of the stand. This picture shows what the problem is, I've reversed the orientation of the bolt to show the problem.
See how the square shoulder sticks out slightly. Well, what can a budding machinest do to sort this out
I chucked up the bolts, removing one at a time to save completely tearing down the bandsaw, in the lathe using a ER32 collet to grip without damaging the threads and took a cut off the shoulder with a parting tool.
Before
After
After doing this to just 4 bolts the difference was amazing, much more solid. So 16 bolts later and the transformation to the "Bambi" stand was astounding!! A hundred times sturdier. Anyone who buys one of these, or any other bandsaw that has the same design flaw, should do this before mounting the bandsaw on the stand. ( saves doing it one at a time )
So here is the bandsaw in it's present place in the workshop, this is it in the horizontal position,
Vertical, but without the table fitted
And here is it making it's very 1st cut, some mystery steel about 20mm diameter, a 1mm slice. This is straight out of the box, I have not adjusted or tuned or even set up anything, it is also the stock blade that came pre-installed.
That's all I have at the moment, I will post up again when I have used it a bit more. So far I am very happy with the bandsaw, the stand, as it is supplied is not really fit for purpose. This is a real poor point on this bandsaw and the only thing that is worse is the abismal manual. Yea I know that pretty much all these far-eastern manufactured machines come with fairly abismal manuals, this one was worse than the others that I have had. Why local suppliers could not re-write the manuals I really dont know. Chester machine tools went to great pains to tell me how much better quality their Tiwanese factory give as compared to the Seig factories, to be honest I expected a bit more from them.
That's all the ranting I have for the moment, hope some of you are still awake after reading this epic tome
Tim
