Band Saws

I am thinking that perhaps what I need to do the rough cuts on the next Delrin project is a band saw. Not a big band saw--Sears has a 9" band saw for $119--but a band saw seems a bit more controllable than a router. Since everything that I need to cut is a rectangular solid, this has potential.

I need to see if my neighbor who does woodworking has one. I think I want to experiment a bit before I commit myself to one.

And yes, I know that band saws have another common use--by butchers. Even more than a drill press, one must exercise great care in using a band saw.

UPDATE: One of my neighbors has a band saw--a 12" Delta that looks ancient enough to have been made somewhere that at least they use a Roman alphabet, even if they don't speak English. This is definitely the way to do this. He didn't have a fence appropriate to my needs, but even free hand, I managed to do an adequate job of making a couple of rough cuts.

Not wanting to wear out my welcome, I stopped with two rough cuts, and didn't make the other two, much larger rough cuts--and regretted that decision for the next several hours, as I removed a .35" x 1.57" x 2.75" chunk of Delrin with an end mill. To my surprise, I found a monstrously big end mill--0.75" diameter and about 1.75" tall cutting surface--and so I was able to make make all my motions in the X and Y planes. But because of the height of the cutting face of the end mill, I was only taking off 20/1000ths of an inch on the forward pass, and 5/1000ths of an inch on the backward pass. (Trying to take off more than that caused it to chatter.)

In spite of, I thought, extraordinarily careful measurement, the final result would not quite fit into the leg, so I had to make a few cuts here and there. The good news is that the final version slides right in, and is actually more amenable to band saw work, with just a few minutes of precision work with the end mill.

My plan to use the Vixen leg as a template for positioning the holes in my piece worked perfectly, and it actually looks like something that might have come out of the Vixen factory! (Provided, of course, you don't look at the ugly surfaces that are now hidden inside the tripod leg. Production will be better.)

I also made a set of casters for a customer who sent me his leg (tripod leg, of course) because the Celestron 93493 tripod isn't exactly the same dimensions as other Celestron tripods that I have made for. This went very well; I received the leg today, measured it, picked out the stock to work from, and machined the parts in time that I will be shipping the leg and the caster set back tomorrow. Had I been thinking a bit farther ahead, I could have dropped them at the post office this afternoon.