- Joined
- Jul 26, 2014
- Messages
- 93
Thank you very much I now have a better understanding of why this is happening.
What you describe does not sound like the alignment is off. If it runs and stays on the wheels when not cutting, your wheel alignment is fine. If the alignment is off, the blade will jump off whether you are cutting or not. If it tracks fine when you are not cutting and doesn't track when you are cutting, then most likely your guides are not adjusted properly or the tension is *way* off. If you are cutting too thin of material for the tooth size, the material will go deep into the gullet between the teeth and something has to give. Either the tooth will bend or break, or the blade will stretch from the impact and jump off the wheel. That is what it sounds like is happening.
When you are at the top and bottom of tubing, there is more material in contact and larger teeth do fine. When you get to the sides, the material is more perpendicular to the teeth and you will see the problem because you will not have enough teeth in contact with the material. The only way to avoid this without changing the blade to a smaller tooth is to have finer control of the feed of the blade into the material. The spring of the 4x6 doesn't have that fine of control. Hydraulic feed control is about the only way for that.
If the tracking and alignment is giving you fits, the best thing is to start from scratch. Remove the guides. Put the blade on just the wheels and see how it tracks. It should track without moving and close to the inner rim. You adjust it on the end where you tension it. Once it tracks properly, you can then put the guides back on and get them aligned. Don't tension the blade all the way. The rollers should be barely touching the blade. Move the rollers until the blade is perpendicular to the fixed jaw of the vise. Then slowly tighten down the rollers until it twists the blade to the right vertical cutting angle. Once it tracks properly and the guides are aligned, you are ready to adjust the tension. It only needs to be tight enough that it doesn't flex when you are cutting. Too tight and you are just making the bearings and blade wear prematurely. Too loose and the blade will deflect and make a curved cut.
Sorry, got interrupted.Well what you recommended worked just fine. Thank you.
For your dampening issue. Hydraulics is most likely the best answer. But as you say, they can be proud of them. I would offer two possible solutions.
1) pneumatic. Put a small Clippard valve on the air line and you will have a fine snubber. These vales come as an open flow one direction and restricted in the other for a fast recovery. You would have to pull the cylinder back to it's stating position by hand or rig up some sort of pressure to drive it back. But cheep and easy? Just an air cylinder with a flow restrictor valve will work very well.
b
The two back issues you want are about ⅔ of the way down the page -can't see the article but I'm sure it's the same thing. I'm talking about.