See part 1 here and part 2 here. YES, THE RENOVATION of my bandsaw took me three blog entries to complete, longer than anticipated. But in the middle of it, I decided to add a shop made fence; something I always wanted for my bandsaw and a project which does nothing to renovate the saw itself. There is a lesson learned from all of this which I’ll get to in a minute, so whipping my bandsaw into shape has been a good experience. As I began to think about wrapping up this renovation, I went to YouTube to see how others have dealt with the vibration which can occur with such a tool. I looked at a video by Matthias Wandel (here) and one by Gunflint Designs (here). Both good videos – the Wandel video focused on better balanced wheels and with the Gunflint video, I paid special attention to how he replaced the belt (see at 2:33 into the video). In both cases, vibration was too high; seems to be a common problem with …

In part one, I added new tires to my bandsaw and fixed a problem which prevented tensioning the blade against the wheels. In this post I’ll build a new bandsaw fence. ogic would dictate that a tune-up would be the next step in the renovation of my Jet JWBS-14DX bandsaw, but at this point I’d rather build something. So I am going straight to building a proper fence for it. To my knowledge, this saw was offered in three versions: the standard JWBS-14, the deluxe model JWBS-14DX which I own and then the previously unknown to me pro version, the JWBS-14DXPRO. I remember the deluxe model having heavier wheels among a few other upgrades. The professional version seems to add a fence only. All the cool bandsaws I see at Woodcraft have a fence meaning that non-fence models are nice, but a nice tall fence just completes the saw. For my bandsaw fence, I could have purchased the Jet JRF-14R ($88.99 via eBay; it seems to be a discontinued item from Jet) designed as an …

f my bandsaw were a human being, I’d owe him an apology. My bandsaw is a tool which I have frowned on for many years. I have a drill press which I call Elvis because it shakes, rattles and rolls like no other tool I own. While my bandsaw isn’t as offensive as Elvis, it still shakes and has been a disappointing purchase. For some, the bandsaw is the center of their power tool universe; the most versatile power tool in their workshop. My table saw gets this honor while my bandsaw receives the ultimate put down. It stands in a remote area of my workshop and collects dust, or rather the sawdust from the other tools I regularly use. But, whenever I contemplate using this tool, there is always this thought: I need to work on it; give it a tune-up. But my bandsaw is a tool which doesn’t make sense to me. I once saw a blog post where the woodworker viewed his bandsaw in much the same way and a tune up …