About Bandsaw Blades......

[Dennis McDonaugh]

I've always been kind fuzzy about how to tension bandsaw blades. Suffolk claims their Timberwolf blades are low tension and have their own method of tensioning, some blades come with instructions to tension to a certain number of pounds and some don't come with any instructions at all. It was all very confusing and contradictory. I finally ordered the Iturra tension meter and can correctly tension blades that come with a recommenation. What do you do about those that don't come with tensioning instructions?

Here's somethings I learned playing with the meter.

My MM16 can put a lot of tension on a 1" blade. I quit at 20,000 lbs

The built-in meter is way off.

When I adjust a timberwolfe blade as per their instructions, the tension is right around 8000 lbs. The meter on the saw is quite a bit above the 1" blade mark.

This makes me think the meter is off more than it appears since a Timberwolfe blade is low tension, a regular tension blade (15000 lbs) would be even higher above the 1" mark.

Has anyone used the Lennox bimetal blade? It claims a blade life up to 10X a regular blade.

[Ken Garlock]

Dennis, When I got my MM16 I messed with it for a couple weeks and for the most part was afraid to crank in too much tension. I was using the blade that came with the saw.

Then I got to thinking, if I spend big money for a quality saw, I should have the instruments to set it up for correct usage. I called the folks at Ittura Design and ordered their tension gauge, and their catalog. To me the catalog is every bit as important as the gauge.

The catalog is about 70% tutorial on band saws and band saw blades. And to me, it dispels the claims about "low tension" blades. The short story is that steel manufacturing is a well know science and there are no secrets. Hence, if a specific type of steel made better blades, everyone would be making them the same. Conclusion, steel is steel and it has a tensile strength around 60,000 psi. Louis Ittura, who wrote the catalog, recommends running your blades in the 20,000 to 30,000 psi range. I strongly recommend your calling for an Ittura Designs catalog, it is an education in itself

Ittura Designs does not have a website, but they can be reached at 1-888-722-7078.

Just a happy user of their products.

[Steven Wilson]

The guage on the Minimax bandsaws is designed for .019" thick blades; the blades most of us run are significantly thicker than that (.035" for a Lennox Carbide, say .025" for a Timberwolf) and thus it's no surprise that the stock guage is off. IIRC you can adjust the guage to compensate. I called Suffolk and they recommended between 6000 to 9000 psi for the Timberwolf blades I use in my saw, so your 8000 psi number agree's pretty closely with the numbers I received as well as my own experience. If you want you can run the Timberwolf's at much higher tension but I doubt that you would see a significant improvement in cut quality, you're more likely to experience earlier blade failure. The only case that the cut might be better is if you're experiencing bowing while resawing; then the higher tennsion would help.