Tips for Maintaining Metal Fabrication Bandsaws

Tips for Maintaining Metal Fabrication Bandsaws

Tips for Maintaining Metal Fabrication Bandsaws

Understanding your bandsaw is a lot like trying to understand a motor grader. Both need the proper maintenance to help keep up the health of the machines, and both are difficult to master if not correctly trained. However, as far as heavy machinery goes, the best ideas to take care of your saw start here. Here are some tips for maintaining metal fabrication bandsaws.

Inspect Your Bearing and Belts Regularly

While preserving your saw and protecting yourself, make sure to perform daily inspections of your bearings and belts. When looking over the saw, remove the cover. This will give you needed access to the belt’s tool bearings. Analyze the tool’s connections, check to see if they are stiff, and if they are, lubricate them with vegetable oil or some band saw coolant. After that, check for rust or wear and use an air compressor to remove sawdust pieces that collected over time.

Put Lubrication Onto Your Blade

Maintain the overall health of your bandsaw by checking on the blades. If your blades don’t work properly or cut as clean as before, you’ll need to add some lubrication. You can lubricate it with a bandsaw coolant to ensure it can cut smoothly without getting damaged. After using the bandsaw, you’ll need to use the coolant each time the blade is used.

Sharpen the Blade

Before you begin any cuts, perform the best maintenance by regularly honing the blade’s cut. While preparing to sharpen your blade, use a sharpening stone to help with trimming the blade’s side and the gullet at the bottom.

Use the Right Speed and Feed Rate

When parrying defects of any kind with your blade, it’s a good idea to use the right speed and feed rate of your bandsaw machine. When using your metal cutting bandsaw machine, make sure to use the proper speed. Even though faster rate speeds lead to more rapid cuts, it can also lead to the machine overheating.

At Mac-Tech, we ensure speed safety by looking at the colored metal chip that’s inserted. If the chip shifts from silver to golden brown, the cut is forced, and there’s too much heat. If there’s a blue chip, you have more heat than you need, and this will shorten the life of your blade. The same thing goes for the feed rate. When we use feed rate, we know that we want to quickly remove as much material as we can. However, we need to understand that keeping the feed rate is important when making cuts to the material. Proper speeds and feeds, even when combined, need to produce chips that form in the shape of sixes and nines.

When using a bandsaw, keep these tips for maintaining metal fabrication bandsaws in mind while working. Knowing these will help you learn how to take care of your saw and increase the performance rate.

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