I had planned to make the shopmade bandsaw tension gauge that was in the February 2001 Fine Woodworking magazine, but I decided to try something different. The article states that for every 6000 psi applied to 5" of blade, the steel stretches .001. Instead of making the gauge in FWW, I decided to clamp my inexpensive Harbor Freight dial caliper to the blade. I opened the caliper to 5", c-clamped the jaws to the blade and zeroed the dial. I tensioned the blade until the caliper read just shy of .003 attempting to approximate 15,000 psi, the minimum recommended tension of most blade manufacturers. As I suspected, the saw's tension gauge was not accurate. As far as I can tell, the tension seemed appropriate and I got good results in some resaw tests which was the point of checking the tension in the first place. Do you think this method is half way accurate to determine blade tension?

Kurt