Workshop Tooling – Page 5 – Woody's Workshop

July 25, 2022July 25, 2022

Rotating Baseplate for BK3 Bandsaw

Lazy Susan Does Something Useful

I was watching a YouTube video of the renovation of a BK2 bandsaw which appeared to have a rotating baseplate. (I have to say I was not sure if it was a fixture on the BK2 or just a video accessory to allow easy rotational viewing). That aside the idea struck home as my BK3 Bandsaw is squeezed in on a bench and often I have to physically rotate it to accommodate the size and shape of the material being cut.

The hot weather we are currently experiencing meant the barbeque and patio furniture were both getting well used. Our circular patio table has a central hole for the parasol and round this hole is a Lazy Susan ball race. This has a glass ring that rests on top which allows the various delicacies my wife provides (to mask my charcoal blackened offerings) to be easily rotated and accessed by all sitting round the table. The Lazy Susan ball race ring looked like a good candidate for the BK3 rotating base.

Checking on Amazon you can buy the rings in various diameters and from various sources. The 8″ version sits neatly inside the BK3 flanged baseplate but some careful thought was needed as to how this could be mounted on a wooden baseplate. The solution was to use M5 countersink screws to mount the inner ring to the underside of the baseplate and to use M6 screws to mount the outer ring to the wooden baseplate.

Here is a brief run down of how to implement this idea.

Remove the white bungs that come fitted to the rings and mark, drill and tap (M5) the inner ring holes into the BK3 baseplate. I mounted the ring centrally within the cavity. If you are worried about your accuracy then once the baseplate is marked and drilled, you can open up the inner ring holes to say 5.5mm.

Bottom View with the Lazy Susan ring in place

Tap the holes in the outer ring M6. These are already 5mm clearance so they can be tapped without drilling out.

Cut the baseboard to size. This can be rectangular or circular and from whatever material you have to hand. Offer the ring to the baseboard so it sits centrally and spot through the four M6 tapped holes. Drill these through at 6.5mm and countersink the lower side. Note that in theory you could do away with the wooden baseboard but the BK3 then tends to tip forward when you press on the BK3 cutting table.

Assembly is a juggling act. The two rings need to be spaced off from the BK3 baseplate and from the new baseboard. I used M6 nuts over the M5 screws as the spacers for the inner ring. I used a single M6 washer on each screw to space off outer ring on the baseboard. Fitting these washer is the main juggling act. To make life easier I dab glued the washers in place on the inside face of the baseboard. Here is a simple sketch of the construction.

That completes what is a simple modification using a Lazy Susan ring and from my point of view it dramatically adds to the usability of the BK3.

I have added this modification to my compendium write up of my BK3 modifications. The new version 3 can be downloaded on this link.

All things Burgess BK3 v3 Download

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June 24, 2022June 24, 2022

Femi NG120ABS bandsaw failure and support from Stakesy’s

Last week we had the hottest day in the year so far and I had a couple of jobs to complete in the workshop. Not ideal but with the doors open I had a little through breeze. I had lots of aluminium to chop to length and my Femi NG120 bandsaw was doing sterling service.

A few days later when I needed to use the Femi again it was dead. Not a spark of life. I buzzed out the electrics and the trigger switch, emergency stop and end of cut switches were all working fine.

My conclusion was the motor controller had failed. This is a potted electronic assembly that sits on the end of the motor assembly inside the top of the motor housing. I measured various voltages with and without the trigger switch in action and sent the details off to Stakesy’s who is the UK distributor of Femi (the saws are made in Italy). As bad luck would have it my bandsaw was a few months outside of a 12 month warranty.

Stakesy’s sent off the details to Femi and after some email interchanges Femi agreed to supply a new motor controller module free of charge. This arrived in the post a few days later. It was an easy fit, just four wires into a chocolate block and the bandsaw sprung back into life. My hacksawing arm muscles breathed a sigh of relief.

As mentioned earlier, the motor controller module is a plastic moulding that has the electronics potted into the moulding. There are some parts proud of the potting compound but in the main all is submerged. With hindsight I wonder if something failed with the high ambient heat it was subjected to on my hottest day activity.

Great service from both Stakesy’s and Femi. A big thank you to Matt and Alex for getting my NG120 up and running again.

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March 2, 2022October 19, 2024

BK3 Burgess Bandsaw Fence Assembly

BK3 Table Fence

Having mentioned the BK3 fence in the Quorn bracket post I realised that I had not posted the details of my fence design for the BK3. The fence and the two sets of bearing based guides make the BK3 a very accurate and dramatically more useful tool for the workshop. The fence as supplied with the BK3 was tending towards a chocolate fireguard in its usefulness. Here is a Fusion 360 pictorial of my design together with a dimensioned drawing. Both can be downloaded by clicking on the associated PDF file link.

Dimensioned drawing of the BK3 fence assembly

Here is the link to the Fence Assembly Drawing v4 which has both these views in better detail.

BK3 Angle Setting Fence

This is a further addition to the BK3 in the form of an angular setting fence. This uses an inset protractor scale liberated from one of the readily available workshop protractors as shown below. These are roughly 92mm diameter.

The body is made from three separately printed 3D parts, the sliding bar, the protractor holder and the pointer block. The sliding bar has been tweaked in dimensions to snuggly fit the slot in the BK3 table. It has printed nut retaining cavities on the lower surface. For this reason it should be printed upside down. Likewise the pointer block has two locating ribs on the lower surface and debatably should also be printed upside down. This does distort the pointer a little and so might need a clean up post printing. Customise all the retaining screw lengths to ensure they do not protrude below the lower surface of the bar. The rotational locking screw could be made a bit more elegant by making a knurled knob item. The three STEP files and the Fusion 360 file are in this ZIP file. A full listing of my BK3 modifications can be downloaded as a ZIP file here Similar or related subjects : –

February 27, 2022March 13, 2022

Quorn cutter grinder tool holder support

I am slowly getting to understand how to manipulate and use my recently purchased Quorn tool cutter grinder. One frustration that kept cropping up was the workhead assembly slip rotating on the bed bar. This usually happens when there is a need to slide the tool holder head back after a referencing action. This messes up the reference setting.

I chanced upon a thread on the MEW forum where a John P had solved this problem with a parallel support bar assembly. This utilised the 1/4″unused hole in the toolholder side wall. There are a number of ways to fabricate this fixture but the important aspects are that it should be robust and must ensure a parallel motion along the support rod.

quorn cutter grinder tool head support bar — The cutter grinder tool head support bar mounted on my Quorn

I opted to model the bracket in Fusion 360. As there will be little stress on the bracket in use I opted to mill it from 15mm cast aluminium to give a 12mm finishing depth. Here is the pictorial view from the Fusion desktop.

Fusion 360 model of the Quorn cutter grinder tool head bracket. The bracket measures around 90mm end to end.

The bracket has a 5/8″ hole to match the Quorn table slider rod and a 10mm hole for the new parallel support rod (sorry about the mixed dimensions but my Quorn is an Imperial model and most of my stock is metric).

Side #1 CAM operations are to clean up skim the stock top surface followed by profiling the two holes and the outside shape. Side #2 is to invert the model and deck the excess material. The clamping slots, the flat adjacent to the 5/8″ hole and the M4 tapped holes are all supressed in the CAM and manually cut post CNC operations.

The model has two tabs adjacent to the 10mm hole. These have no relevance to the use of the bracket but are there to make the width of the model equal. This negates the need to use soft jaws to hold the model when undertaking side 2 operations to deck off the excess stock material. The decking brings the model to 10mm finishing depth. These two tabs could be ground off afterwards if desired.

I did consider grub screw clamping of both bars but there was a danger of deforming the associated bars. It was easier and more elegant to design slot clamps into the Fusion model. The clamping slits were cut post CNC machining on my BK3 bandsaw. (Try cutting straight slots on a BK3 without a decent fence and support bearings.) The parallel nature of the finished model width as mentioned above makes this a simple process against the bandsaw fence.

The two M4 clamping screw holes are drilled prior to the slots being cut. The holes are drilled 3.3mm through and then M4 through threaded. After the slots are cut one half of each hole is clearance drilled to M4.

The flat adjacent to the 5/8″ hole is the last ‘after CNC’ machining operation. This flat gives the clearance needed to allow the bracket to slide under the Quorn toolholder referencing dial.

The gliding bar is mounted in the spare hole in the tool holder side wall. This hole in my Quorn had been drilled 1/4″. The rod profile was turned with a centre from 10mm silver steel to have the 1/4″ section and then a short section threaded M6. Note that I also made a brass washer profiled to match the rear face of the through hole in the body. Like most of the Quorn casting holes this had a step segmented surface aimed at stopping bolt head rotations.

Fusion 360 pictorial view of the assembly

Quorn cutter grinder tool head support components – this shows the bracket with support bar in place, supporting rod and profiled washer.

Mounted on the Quorn, the assembly sat nicely parallel, is very solid and stable and does an excellent job of stopping the head drooping. My frustrations over this aspect of the Quorn are eased for the time being.

If any readers want the Fusion file or dimensioned drawings then add a comment below.

UPDATE : – The bracket should be rigid enough when 3D printed instead of machined from solid. Here is a ZIP file containing the support bar clamp version v5 as a STEP file. All the other parts are straightforward lathe operations.

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February 19, 2022February 20, 2022

A 3D Printed Passive Demagnetiser using Neodymium magnets

I saw a recent post on the HomeMadeTools.net site from Tony Foale about using Neodymium magnets in a rotating holder to act as a demagnetiser.

Tony made the holder from aluminium but from my point of view with Fusion and 3D printing facilities the idea lent itself to be run as a 3D print. The finished device can be held in a lathe or drill press chuck using the central boss. The boss does not have to be rigidly clamped as the magnets will grab and locate the assembly up to the chuck. The magnets are very strong so be very careful as you bring the object to be demagnetised up to the lower surface or it will also get ‘grabbed’.

Attached is a ZIP file containing the Fusion 360 file. This is designed to take 10mm diameter magnets which will be a tight push into the mounting holes. I used 10mm long magnets but smaller ones will probably work just as well. The magnet mounting holes have a 1mm thickness bottom surface. The magnets need to be inserted with the alternating orientation as shown. Tony made a circular ‘keeper’ for the bottom surface from a steel disc. This reduces the attraction to swarf. The ZIP file also contains a simple lid to fit over the top side to protect the holes from accumulating magnetic swarf.

Screen shot of the demagnetiser fusion file — Pictorial screenshot view from Fusion 360 of the demagnetiser 3D model

ZIP file download is on the link below and contains the body and lid as a Fusion file and as separate STEP files – demagnetiser disc body and lid

A closing thought (which I haven’t tried …) but if all the magnets were in the disc the same way round would this act as a magnetiser to save having to stroke the item with a magnet ?

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