Fail Of The Week: A Bigger Hacksaw Isn’t A Better Hacksaw

February 14, 2022 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

If we’re being honest, the main reason to buy a power tool is to avoid the pain of using one’s muscles. Oh sure, we dress it up with claims that a power tool will make us more productive, or give better results, but more often than not it’s the memory of how your forearm feels after a day of twisting a screwdriver that makes you buy a cordless driver.

It appears that [Artisan Makes] has a high tolerance for pain, seeing how the main prep tool in his metal shop is a plain old hacksaw. So in an effort to speed up his stock prep, he turned not to a bandsaw or cutoff saw, but instead built the world’s silliest hacksaw. It’s the metalworking equivalent of the two-man bucksaws that lumberjacks used to fell trees before chainsaws came along, and at a meter and half in length, it’s about the size of one too. Modifying the frame of his trusty hacksaw was easy — he just popped the end pieces off and attached them to an extra-long piece of tube stock. Finding a 1.5-meter hacksaw blade was the main challenge; not exactly a big-box store item, that. So a section of metal-cutting bandsaw blade was modified to fit the frame, and it was off to the races.

Or not. The video below tells the tale of woe, which starts with the fact that [Artisan]’s shop is too small for the hilariously long hacksaw. Solving the fixturing problems didn’t soo much to help, though — there was no way to tension the blade enough to get it to stop wobbling during cutting. It was also clear that the huge saw wasn’t able to apply enough downforce on the stock to get good cuts. Maybe with a second set of hands, though…

There are plenty of ways to improve hacksawing in the shop, and while this isn’t one of them, we sure appreciate the chuckle we got out of it. And you really should check out [Artisan Makes]’ channel — his more serious stuff is really good.

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Handheld Bandsaw Gets Standup Conversion With Scrap Lumber

October 11, 2021 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

Handheld band saws exist, and can be highly useful tools. However, they lack some of the finesse and precision of the more traditional upright units, particularly for with smaller workpieces. [Honus] set about rectifying this, building a stand for their DeWalt handheld bandsaw out of scrap lumber.

The stand consists of some hefty wooden beams sawn to length and screwed together to make a support for the bandsaw. A nice 1/4″ thick aluminium plate is installed as a baseplate for cutting.

Then, the handheld bandsaw itself is attached to the rig, held in place with a bolt and a large zip tie. The zip tie is fastened around the trigger, holding it down all the time. Then, a switched powerboard is used to turn the saw on and off as needed. Importantly, simply cutting a ziptie and removing a bolt is enough to restore the handheld saw to its original purpose.

It’s a tidy build and one that makes an existing tool more useful for minimal extra cost. We’ve actually seen bandsaws built from scratch, too. If you’re cooking up your own great hacks in the home shop, be sure to let us know!

3D Printing Restores Bandsaw

May 13, 2021 by Al Williams 24 Comments

A great addition to a home shop is a bandsaw, but when [Design Prototype Test] got a well-used one, he found it wasn’t in very good shape. The previous owner put in an underpowered motor and made some modifications to accommodate the odd-sized blade. Luckily, 3D printing allowed him to restore the old saw to good working order.

There were several 3D printed additions. A pulley, a strain relief, and even an emergency stop switch. Honestly, none of this stuff was something you couldn’t buy, but as he points out, it was cheaper and faster than shipping things in from China. He did wind up replacing the initial pulley with a commercial variant and he explains why.

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Illuminated Bread For A Cookie Cutter World

June 6, 2018 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

Just in case you thought your eyes were playing tricks on you, we’d like to confirm right from the start that what you are looking at is a loaf of bread with internal LED lighting. Why has this bread been internally lit? We can’t really say. But what we can do is pass on the fascinating process that took an unremarkable piece of stale bread and turned it into an exceptional piece of stale bread.

As demonstrated by [The Maker Monster], working with stale bread is basically like working with wood. Wood that you can dip in soup, granted, but wood nonetheless. The process of electrifying the loaf starts with cutting it down the length on a bandsaw, and then hollowing it out with a rotary tool. This creates a fairly translucent shell that’s basically just crust.

You’re probably wondering how you keep a bread-light from getting moldy, and thankfully [The Maker Monster] does address that issue. The bread shell is completely coated with shellac, which creates a hard protective layer that will not only prevent decay but should give it some added strength. In the video it looks like only one coat is applied, but if we had to guess, a few coats would be necessary to really seal it up. Coating it with epoxy wouldn’t be a terrible idea either.

While the shellac dries on the bread, he gets to work on the lighted base (bet you never imagined you’d read a sentence like that), which is really just a sanded piece of wood with a standard LED strip stuck too it. It’s very understated, but of course the glowing loaf really draws the eye anyway. All that’s left is to glue the bread down to the base, and proudly display your creation at your next dinner party.

We can’t say that an electric ciabatta is in the cards for Hackaday HQ; but we know that baking good bread is a science in itself, and turning the failed attempts into works of art does have a certain appeal to it.

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The Tachometer Inside Your Smartphone

February 8, 2018 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

It’s the latest in instrumentation for the well-appointed shop — an acoustically coupled fast Fourier transform tachometer. Sounds expensive, but it’s really just using a smartphone spectrum analyzer app to indirectly measure tool speeds. And it looks like it could be incredibly handy.

Normally, non-contact tachometers are optically coupled, using photoreceptors to measure light flashing off of a shaft or a tool. But that requires a clear view of the machine, often putting hands far too close to the danger zone. [Matthias Wandel]’s method doesn’t require line of sight because it relies on a cheap spectrum analyzer app to listen to a machine’s sound. The software displays peaks at various frequencies, and with a little analysis and some simple math, the shaft speed of the machine can be determined. [Matthias] explains how to exclude harmonics, where to find power line hum, isolating commutator artifacts, and how to do all the calculations. You’ll need to know a little about your tooling to get the right RPM, and obviously you’ll be limited by the audio frequency response of your phone or tablet. But we think this is a great tip.

[Matthias] is no stranger to shop innovations and putting technology to work in simple but elegant ways. We wonder if spectrum analysis could be used to find harmonics and help with his vibration damping solution for a contractor table saw.

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Bandsaw Tension Gauge Uses Raspberry Pi And Load Cell

January 28, 2017 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

No matter what material you’re cutting, getting the blade tension right is one of the keys to quality cuts on the bandsaw. Unfortunately, most bandsaws come with only a rudimentary tension gauge, and while there are plenty of tricks for measuring blade tension indirectly, nothing beats a digital blade tension gauge for repeatable results.

Despite being an aftermarket accessory for his beefy Hitachi CB-75F bandsaw, [Stephen B. Kirby]’s Pi-based tension guide looks like an OEM product. Housed in a sturdy case and sporting a sealed membrane keypad and four-line LCD display, the interface electronics are pretty straightforward. The tricky bit is sensing the amount of tension on the bandsaw blade. For that task, [Stephen] mounted a load cell in place of the original tensioning spring. A few adapters helped that job, and with a little calibration, the gauge is capable of displaying the tension by measuring the force over the cross-sectional area of the current blade.

We really like it when electronics can bring a new level of precision to old-school hardware, whether it’s a simple DRO for a manual lathe or a more accomplished build like [Stephen]’s. Sometimes adding new silicon can make old iron a little easier to use.

Hackaday Links: December 11, 2016

December 11, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 31 Comments

We have a contest going on right now challenging you to do the most with 1 kB of data. If you want to get into this, here’s how you do it for a dollar. Use the PIC12C508A. It’s an 8-pin DIP, has 768 bytes of program ROM and 25 bytes of data RAM. [Shaos] is trying to generate NTSC on this thing.

Remember that Internet of Cookie Oven Kickstarter from the links post a few weeks ago? It was funded. It has a heating element that is ‘more energy efficient than traditional electric elements’, and there’s still no consensus over how a resistive heating element can be more efficient. It’s either 100% efficient, or 0% efficient, depending on how you look at it.

[Matthias Wandell], master of wood gears recently built a 20″ bandsaw from scratch. It’s a wood frame, wood wheels, a (currently) underpowered motor, and a few bits of metal and rubber. The video build log is fantastic, so start here and work your way forward.

Way back in the day, Sparkfun sold a Bluetooth rotary phone. Yes, at some point in the past, phones didn’t have touchscreens or even buttons. In any event, Sparkfun hasn’t sold these phones for quite a long time. Now there’s a new hotness: giving these rotary phones a GSM module.

Here’s a little Hackaday Events housekeeping. On January 23rd, we’re going to have a meetup in NYC. We’ll also have a meetup in LA sometime in January as well. Also in January I’ll be attending CES, reporting on the latest Internet of Toasters. A week later, Hackaday will be at ShmooCon in Washington, DC. At ShmooCon last year, we had a breakfast meetup in the DC Hilton. This year, I want to do something similar. If you have an idea of what to do, leave a note in the comments.