Bandsaw - table surface

[BlackbuttWA]

G'day all,

I have an antique Berry's bandsaw see "Gloat" post below.
Cost me $275 to have it "hard wire" connected, which was good.
The table is really rusty, not just surface rust but it has eaten into the surface.
I was thinking of laminating the table with Formica etc.
Has anyone had experience with this or can anyone offer an alternative solution.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers
Col

[Chris Parks]

Knock the rust off with an orbital sander and get the table as good as possible then maybe fill the holes with epoxy, sand again with said orbital sander. A sheet of formica would work as you suggest but it just looks wrong to me. The ultimate fix is get it surface ground and it might not be all that expensive if you shop around. Mind you the holes may not really be a worry apart from making you wish they weren't there.

[DenisB]

Congratulations! 'You have an absolutely unstoppable wood slicer there.

I picked up one of these for a song, about 15 years ago and turned it into the handiest tool in my shop.

Mine was missing the table, so I made a 3/4 ply one that fills the space between the blade and the column. plus out about the same outboard of the blade.

I was gonna cover it with white or buff formica, but never got to it. Too much fun USING the blinkin' thing to tizzy it up!

But I did spend some time making a decent set of guides with roller backstops and my own "Cool Blox" side guides.

I cast them fromk epoxy with cotton gauze bandage reinforcing, trying for an open weave material that would hold lots of graphite.

Just a simple 1/2 deep wooden mould covered with Sellotape so the epoxy wouldn't stick to it.

I laid in a couple of layers of bandage, pre-soaking it with epoxy on a bit of plastic cutting board. Squeegeed out most of the epoxy so as to get as high a graphite content as possible.

Graphite was from the hardware - dry powder used to lubricate locks etc.

I only needed graphite along the long edges of the coolblox, so I made the mould about 250 long bu about 20 wide by 13 deep, and cut bits to size and drilled them for retaining bolts as I needed.

Then just laid in three layers of bandage (It came off the roll about 60 wide, so I folded it into 3 and laid it in as "one" layer, then dusted graphite along the long sides at about 4 - 5mm back, then laid in another pre-soaked and squeegeed bit of bandage and more graphite ... and so on until the mould was full.

It's much harder to describe than to just do it!

Once the epoxy cured, I cut my coolblox into bits the size I needed, drilled and slotted the hold-down adjustment holes and fitted them.

I tension the blade, set the backstop clearances (go here for an excellent tutorial Band Saw Clinic with Alex Snodgrass - YouTube

Snodgrass is a bloomin' genius! Best ten minutes you'll ever spend if you have a cranky bandsaw. Be prepared to take good notes from his Youtube video.

No tilt on the table, but I make a sloping fence for the once-in-a-blue-moon time I need angle cuts.

I run a 1/2 inch 3tpi bi-metallic blade from Henrys Henry Bros Saws - Bandsaw blades & circular saw blades

It was about $60 but just keeps on going.

An equivalent in plain steel is around $20 and would probably be OK for a hobby user.

The guys at Henrys are super knowledgeable and will advise you anything you need to know about your saw, Just call them and be prepared to listen GOOD!

I'd only buy an ex-butcher's saw if it was real cheap, as you can steal a second-hand wood bandsaw from ebay for so little and all the work's done for you.

Cheers,

Denis in Tasmania
Bayview Guesthouse