Thoughtophone

The blade arrived and I've fitted it. I've spotted a neat trick for measuring the tension of the blade, which involves clamping calliper jaws to the blade and measuring the stretch as the blade is tensioned. here for example. I haven't bothered with this yet. I've tried cutting a few different materials. In all cases, it leaves characteristic vertical groves on the work. On solid pine and MDF, this is very fine: A tiny bit of sanding and it's gone. This is also true of aluminium angle. The 8mm aluminium rod is a little more noticeable. 3mm polycarbonate or acrylic is pretty rough. Not really sure what the cause is. Another thing I've discovered about this saw is the t-track for the mitre guide isn't standard, so it's also not possible to buy an after market mitre gauge. That's a shame, because the provided one isn't great. What I'm working on now is a sort of sliding table. I've cut down a strip of hardwood to fit in the mitre

Turns out that bandsaw blades are made in very long lengths (10m+), then cut to length and welded into a loop. I don't have the equipment to weld them myself, but there are companies like www.justbandsawblades.co.uk  who will weld custom lengths for you. I can choose any blade 6-13mm width. It seems that I need to choose the the number of teeth by the thickness of the material. This is quoted as TPI. There need to be between 2 and 10 teeth in the material at once. I sometimes cut 1/8" angle. This is cut at 45 ° , so that's 3/16'. I guess that's 12-60 TPI. If I cut 20mm stock, I need 2.5-25 TPI. It seems like my actual choices are 14TPI or 24TPI. I don't cut 20mm stock very often, so it makes sense that's the outer limit of the blade. That means 24TPI. I asked the helpful guys at Axminster, and they suggested 24TPI two, which is re-assuring, but I actually bought the blade from justbandsawblades.co.uk. Sadly I haven't got it yet. The blade guide up

I've been tinkering with my circular saw cross cut guide. It doesn't always produce great results, and it's because the rails aren't all that strong. They aren't that strong because of the saw's low clearance, which make most conventional jigs impractical. Add to this the showers of aluminium chips it produces, and scatters everywhere, and the difficulty of adequately supporting some materials, and I am less than satisfied. It will still work for the other projects I had in mind for it, but for robotics, I've been looking for something else. I'd nearly narrowed it down to two proxxon machines: The FET table saw and the micro band saw (MBS). These both have there down sides: basically the aren't all that powerful, and can only be used with very small work. Then Axminster discounted there hobby bandsaw to £100, and I decided to buy it. This is not without it's issues. In truth, this was a bit of an impulse. What makes the Proxxon micro ba