Central Machinery Bandsaw Casters

Bandsaw Casters

rear_casters.jpg (29826 bytes) Here you can see two of the casters mounted on the bottom of the saw. Seeing as how the saw was not at a standard height, I didn't feel that adding a couple more inches to the height would make much of a difference.

The caster on the left side is the one on the front of the machine. It is hard to tell from the picture, but it is the locking one. The caster on the right is a free rolling caster. I wanted to be able to lock the wheels in place without having to walk around the machine.

all_casters.jpg (29594 bytes) There really wasn't much to mounting the wheels, once I got it figured out. I took a piece of angle iron that I had laying around the shop (in fact it was in the garage when I bought my house) and cut it to length, as measuring from inside to inside of the base of the saw.

I lined up the angle iron to match up with the holes already in the base of the saw and marked matching holes. After drilling these holes, I mounted one side of the caster and marked the other hole for drilling. Note that there are four mounting holes in the base of the caster, but I elected to only use two of the diagonal holes.

free_rolling_caster.jpg (17701 bytes) After drilling the second set of holes, I mounted the angle iron on the very top of the upside-down base. I probably should have also used the angled foot pieces (came with the saw) for reinforcement, but truth to be told, these somehow ended up on the floor and I didn't find them until I was cleaning up. However, I put a "lot" of sideways pressure on the wheels with my hands and didn't have any problems with it.

Update May 2008

Adding the casters seemed like such a good idea at the time, but I've had a few problems with them. I've listed them below, along with the fixes to the problems.

Casters move during resawing. There were actually two different contributors to this problem. The first is that the locking casters didn't lock properly. When you locked them down, the wheels could still roll. They were much harder to roll, but if you pushed hard enough, they would move. During resawing operations, the force exerted was enough to walk the bandsaw around. The second problem was that the casters swiveled even when the wheel was locked in place. This allowed the bandsaw to move slightly, but if you had a really long piece, sometimes it was enough to point the bandsaw in the wrong direction, causing the wood you were cutting to catch on something else in the shop. (Yeah, I know, symptom of a messy shop as well).

Fix 1: Tighten down the locking nuts. I know this sounds obvious, but you have to tip the bandsaw over to do it, and it was something I overlooked when I first added the casters. Wow, I lived with that problem for 8 years!

Fix 2: Take two pieces of 1x6, about 6 inches long each, and make a V cut in them. Place these on the floor and jam them into the wheels to help lock the casters in place. You can easily remove these when you want to move the bandsaw. If you were really clever, you could just use one longer piece of wood and space the two V notches so they align with the two wheels, but apparently I wasn't that clever when I came up with my solution...

Bandsaw tilts in various directions, especially side to side. Looking closer, I could see that the entire piece of angle iron was tipping because the thin sheet metal was bending. Here's a picture of the the problem:

Obviously the base needed some support. I have some additional angle iron that I could easily have added, but with the price of iron getting so high, I decided to look for another solution. Of course, the fact that my metal chopsaw is buried on a bench really helped with that decision.

Above is a photo of one of the reinforcing pieces I cut. (Total of two were needed). This is just a piece of 2x4 sitting in the scrap bin. In a previous life it was part of a clamp rack that was bolted to the wall. I lined it up with the bandsaw, marked it, and cut it to length on the miter saw. Then I took it to the tablesaw and cut notches on each end so it would clear the angle iron.

Here the piece is added to the bandsaw, with the notches pointed towards the bottom of the base. I attached it with 1.5" #8 screws, which you can see better if you click on the picture.

I added the wheels back on (including the original angle iron) and used some 1.5" x 1/4" lag screws to fasten them to the 2x4 reinforcement. The angle iron is now locked in securely and cannot budge. Furthermore, the sheet metal is reinforced and doesn't bend. Now to tip it back up....

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