First Bandsaw Buying Advice

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The 350 Record Bandsaw is a wonderful piece of kit, BUT the wheel kit is useless at that weight of machine, the casters and fixed wheels are only supported on the flat face, eventually the wheels will keel over and become almost impossible to use, OK if you have your own welding gear to reinforce the lower fixings, but a better bet would be locking casters on a purpose built cupboard.
 
One further piece of advice, don't be afraid to use a coarse blade. They don't need to be flashy, just sharp 3tpi skip tooth blades. They don't tend to drift like finer blades, this is due to gullets filling with dust on fine blades.
If you are getting drifting with a fine blade you need to set up your machine differently, also if your gullets are filling with dust you'r using the wrong blade for that operation.
 
The 350 Record Bandsaw is a wonderful piece of kit, BUT the wheel kit is useless at that weight of machine, the casters and fixed wheels are only supported on the flat face, eventually the wheels will keel over and become almost impossible to use, OK if you have your own welding gear to reinforce the lower fixings, but a better bet would be locking casters on a purpose built cupboard.
I had no idea the wheels would become useless, If I was going to use a purpose built cupboard with casters I'd probably start looking at the hammer n2-35.
 
That’s reassuring, i’m definitely gonna need all the customer support i can get. Wow 16 years is a long time, you got any tips for helping to keep it going strong for that many years?
No maintenance tips really other than hoovering out the dust accumulation under the table,even though I use dust extraction. Steve Maskery has some useful tips on dust extraction for bandsaws. Other than that don't expect to feed 150mm timber through at the same rate as 50mm wood. As another poster has said use a 3tpi blade for thick timber. I have not had much trouble with straight cuts even though I usually use a 3/8 blade. Problems usually arise because the blade is blunt.
When you assemble the saw make sure the grooves in the table are parallel to the blade otherwise you will not get square cuts when crosscutting with the mitre guide.
 
For any future persons of interest I ended going with a Baileigh Industrial WBS-12 Bandsaw and it's been great to me.
 

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