There have been quite a few posts on here over the years singing the praises of the Burgess three wheel bandsaw, or its equivalents from B&D, DeWalt or Record Power. I've contributed quite a few, saying how well it lasts etc. So imagine my disappointment recently when it made a funny noise I'd not heard before and stopped cutting!
This was the source of the problem: the red nylon drive pulley has had its teeth melted away:
I think this must have happened because the belt started to disintegrate, slipped, and got hot through friction.
It's not surprising really; I bought this saw secondhand about 25 years ago and have never replaced the original belt. I think the symptoms are the same as were described by wineprovider in this thread. He managed to buy some spare drive pulleys but noted that they were probably the last. I asked Jimi about it, knowing that he is another Burgess owner, and he pointed out that the tooth design and pitch are standard, used for timing belts and now popular among builders of CNC machinery and robots, and so easily available on eBay.
Indeed they are, and so are the belts, but after a while searching through a lot of nearly right parts I decided a little bit of work would be necessary. The only 14 tooth pulley I could find was shorter and not bored out centrally. I ordered one, for about a fiver, and a belt for the same sort of price.
They looked like this:
so the challenge is to drill a 3/8" hole, properly centred and square. This could probably be done on a drill press, but an antique treadle powered lathe is just the job!
I clamped the pulley onto a face plate, lined it up on a tailstock centre to get it central, and tightened up the clamping bolts.
and then drilled a series of holes, going up through the sizes from 1/8" to 3/8"
That worked well. Because the new pulley is shorter, it can't hold on like the old one does, with a pair of slots sitting across a roll pin. I decided to drill and tap for a couple of M4 grub screws, so it was out with the drill press
clamp the pulley, centre punch by eye, drill
and tap
and repeat for luck.
It worked!
Here it is installed
so it's all good for another 30 years, for about a tenner.
The real point of this long rambling post is partly to stress that even if 'official' parts are unavailable, there are replacements that can work, but mostly it's to say that other owners could do well to buy a new belt a bit sooner than I did, and prevent the problem from occurring at all!
For reference, the belt is described as 120XL037 where 120 is the number of teeth, XL is the tooth form, which has a pitch of 0.2" (so the length is actually 12") and 37 is the breadth of the belt in mm. The pulley is described as 14XL37, ie 14 tooth 37 mm width between the flanges, and in this case was 'pilot bored' only to 0.2" meaning that there was a short, blind hole of that diameter behind a useful size countersinking.
This was the source of the problem: the red nylon drive pulley has had its teeth melted away:
I think this must have happened because the belt started to disintegrate, slipped, and got hot through friction.
It's not surprising really; I bought this saw secondhand about 25 years ago and have never replaced the original belt. I think the symptoms are the same as were described by wineprovider in this thread. He managed to buy some spare drive pulleys but noted that they were probably the last. I asked Jimi about it, knowing that he is another Burgess owner, and he pointed out that the tooth design and pitch are standard, used for timing belts and now popular among builders of CNC machinery and robots, and so easily available on eBay.
Indeed they are, and so are the belts, but after a while searching through a lot of nearly right parts I decided a little bit of work would be necessary. The only 14 tooth pulley I could find was shorter and not bored out centrally. I ordered one, for about a fiver, and a belt for the same sort of price.
They looked like this:
so the challenge is to drill a 3/8" hole, properly centred and square. This could probably be done on a drill press, but an antique treadle powered lathe is just the job!
I clamped the pulley onto a face plate, lined it up on a tailstock centre to get it central, and tightened up the clamping bolts.
and then drilled a series of holes, going up through the sizes from 1/8" to 3/8"
That worked well. Because the new pulley is shorter, it can't hold on like the old one does, with a pair of slots sitting across a roll pin. I decided to drill and tap for a couple of M4 grub screws, so it was out with the drill press
clamp the pulley, centre punch by eye, drill
and tap
and repeat for luck.
It worked!
Here it is installed
so it's all good for another 30 years, for about a tenner.
The real point of this long rambling post is partly to stress that even if 'official' parts are unavailable, there are replacements that can work, but mostly it's to say that other owners could do well to buy a new belt a bit sooner than I did, and prevent the problem from occurring at all!
For reference, the belt is described as 120XL037 where 120 is the number of teeth, XL is the tooth form, which has a pitch of 0.2" (so the length is actually 12") and 37 is the breadth of the belt in mm. The pulley is described as 14XL37, ie 14 tooth 37 mm width between the flanges, and in this case was 'pilot bored' only to 0.2" meaning that there was a short, blind hole of that diameter behind a useful size countersinking.
