Carter Bandsaw Guides

[Jeffrey Makiel]

I'm on a binge to do some upgrades to an old 18" JET bandsaw of the old cast iron c-frame type. My specific focus is on upgrading the blade guides from block to roller bearing. The existing guide assemblies are horribly casted of aluminum and typical of the old (circa 1990) vintage JET Taiwanese clone products of the era. The guide blocks are 3/4" square unlike Delta's 1/2" square block so I had to epoxy the cool blocks to them to help performance.

Anyway, I have an email into Carter to see if they have something to fit my saw. I also searched this forum, and another forum, and got confusing results. Some folks loved the Carter, and some folks were disappointed to the point of removing them. The primary complaint was poor stability for the smaller blades (1/4" width). A couple of complaints were on a whinning noise emitted from them which seems odd since they use ball bearings (assuming the bearing are not bad).

I predominantly keep a 1/4" blade on my machine, and occasionally install a 3/4" blade for thicker work and resawing. Would anyone share their opinion on the Carter as far as using smaller blades, ease of adjustment and smoothness of operation? Or another suggestion?

cheers, Jeff

[Per Swenson]

Hello Jeff,

We put the carters on our 18 inch jet and couldn't be happier.

Now, there was a issue with them sending the wrong

mounting bracket at first, but that was cleared up in a

very timely and professional manner. They are nice folks.

The only blade we run on this saw is a 1 inch carbide

timberwolf. So how they would work with a quarter inch blade,

I couldn't honestly say. We run cool blocks on the 14 inch delta'

and smaller blades.

Here is a couple of pics of the carters.

Works for us.

Per

[Dan Oliphant]

I use the Carter guides on my 14 inch Delta and have a 1/4 inch blade installed 90% of the time. Works great, just pay attention to the set up instructions and there should be no issues. (Making sure everything is lining up is the key)

[John Harris]

I put a Carter stabilizer on my Jet 18" when I use a 1/8" blade. I can do incredibly detailed work with this quick changeover.

[Jim Becker]

If you think about how roller guides work, you can start to visualize why they are less effective with narrow blades than other methods, such as cool blocks. You need to keep the rollers set back from the teeth enough so that any backward flex in the blade during cuts is accomodated...that leaves little of the blade supported by the guides. In a sense, the same is true with Euro guides. In many cases, it's relatively easy to change the guide type in a reasonable amount of time if you want to use narrow blades for some form of cutting. I made that decision with my MM16 and have the cool blocks setup for narrow blades (which I don't use that often) and the standard Euro guides for most work with 1/2" and larger blades.