CharleyL

.Dianna Thompson Has two Ghosts in her book "3D Patterns For The Scroll Saw" I like the one that's standing on a tomb stone. The other one is under "Trick or Treat" and has legs and shoes plus a separate compound cut treat bag. Charley

Sycamore67 - (Larry), How about posting some photos of your above and below dust collection. I am very interested, and I'm sure that others would be as well.. Right now I'm just collecting the dust from below the table of my saws (DeWalt 788 and Delta Q3) by just positioning the end of my vacuum cleaner hose near the bottom of the saw blade and holding it in place with tie wraps. I'm mostly looking for a way to collect the dust from above the table. I've tried a few of my own ideas, but only had limited success with them. I've been considering the purchase of the Scrollnado system. Has anyone else bought one of these? https://smile.amazon.com/SCROLLNADO-collection-scroll-Dewalt-40-690/dp/B01KCNI77C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1475931763&sr=8-1&keywords=scroll+saw+dust+collection I seems like too much money for just a few pieces of plastic hose, and the long run to the right side of the saw blade looks like it might sag over time or vibrate and loose the correct collection position easily. I've tried similar designs and had these problems with my own designs, which were very similar. I still might invest in one of these, in the hopes that it would be better than my own home made versions. Charley

I have a solution for your "lost drill bits". Stick one or two magnets (the rare earth super magnets work best) on your drill press or near where you drill your holes. Every time you remove a drill bit that you will be using again, just let the magnet hold it for you. I have several drill bits of different commonly used sizes on my magnets so I can quickly and easily find the one that I need for just the right sized hole. They will even hold a mini chuck for you if the magnet is large.. Charley

I use a Dremel with their plunge base when doing flat work, my Delta VS drill press when doing compound cut work. I also have a small old hand crank drill that I have occasionally used if not needing many holes drilled. I also have a small battery powered drill that I take with me when doing classes or demonstrations. Charley

Looking great so far. Are you going to round the inside too? Charley

Things go better if you do everything based on a single center point in a scrap piece of plywood, like I suggested. I hope you can keep it round and the hub centered well doing it this way. It never worked well this way for me. It was never perfectly round when I finished. I hope you can prove that it can be done this way. Charley

You can rough cut the excess off with a band saw, but the best way to finish cut it is with a router on a circle jig, with the wheel attached to a piece of sacrificial plywood. Determine the exact center for attaching the circle jig, and then go from there. Cut the outside first, followed by reduced diameter interior cuts, but don't through cut the plywood, or you will loose the center reference for everything that needs to be round and symmetrical. When you have finally cut and shaped one side (don't forget to make the center hub with the same center point), and you have router bits with guide bearings, then you can remove the plywood, flip the wheel over, and use same bits, the bearings to shape the back side, running the bearing along the finished cut from the first side. It all has to be done in the right sequence. Skip a step and you will make firewood. Think it through very well before starting. Even write the steps down and check them off as you do them. It sure is looking good so far. Charley

That's a very good start. You have been very busy. Now the question is: Are you going to rout it round, or leave it like the original? Charley

Have you tried to quickly turn the power on and back off when it "locks up"? Your descriptions are a bit too short and confusing. Please explain your problem more completely. I still am not convinced that you need a new motor. Charley

I've never given it much thought, but tend to favor the scrap side of the line. Any errors can be sanded off, or just go back and cut it off. For larger work I tend to cut on the line. Better, shadow free, lighting makes a huge difference in your ability to see where you are cutting. That's why I went to the two LED gooseneck lights from Lowes, one on each side of the saw blade, shining down at the cut point at about 45 deg. The results are bright white shadow free light and they don't get more than mildly warm with hours of use, so there's no chance of burning your face or hands when accidentally touching them. I make many less errors when there are no blade shadows to confuse my eyes. I've been a bit tardy with my plans to post a drawing of the two pieces that need to be made to complete this bracket, but I will do so if anyone wants to make one and needs a drawing to add the lights to their 788. A few tips. Buy the lights from Lowes with the spring clip base - the weighted base version isn't the same inside, will be more difficult to modify, and won't fit my bracket design. The lights presently cost $19.95 each. The gooseneck light must be removed from the spring clip, which will require removal of the wires from inside of the lamp - unsoldering them from a PC board inside the top end of the light. Polarity is important - notice the line along one of the wires and the + and - symbols near the solder points on the PC board. Don't get them switched when you re-assemble the lights. Re-assembly goes easy after the gooseneck of each light is attached to the new bracket. Just re-thread the wires up through the gooseneck and solder them to the PC board in the correct positions. Then replace the PC board and the lamp bezel with the three small screws to hold everything together. The bracket is easy to make. See the picture below of the un-mounted bracket by itself with the two bolts to hold the upper and lower pieces together.. I added some non skid tape inside the bracket (black stuff) to make it hold tighter to the upper saw arm. If the bracket fits tight, you don't need it. I made the upper piece of the bracket from 1/16" thick aluminum for easy bending. I used the upper arm of the saw to form the aluminum around it by hand, leaving the ends long and then cutting them off after I bent the two 90 deg bends at the bottom using my vice. These bends should be just above the bottom edge of the scroll saw upper arm, so bolts through the holes in the ends and through the bottom part of the bracket will pull the two pieces of the bracket tight around the upper saw arm. This ability to tighten up the bracket around the arm is the only important dimension of this bracket. The rest can be almost any way you want to make it. The bottom piece is just flat 1/8" aluminum with two bolt holes to attach the top piece and two holes to attach the light goosenecks as can be seen in the pictures. Notice that one side of the bracket is longer than the other. This is because of the shape of the saw, and the need to mount the gooseneck part of LED light further away from one side of the saw arm. I used tie-wraps to hold the wires along the left side of the upper saw arm. The original power switches ended up next to the rear casting of the saw, so I just tie-wrapped them there. I have a power strip mounted to the left side of my rear saw leg and the foot pedal and saw are plugged into it, so I plugged the wall wort power supplies for the LED lights into it, and I only have the one power cord from the outlet strip to plug into the wall. I made a post about these lights last December, but when I searched for a link so I could add it here I couldn't find anything older than Jan 2016, So here is a bit of a shortened kind of re-post plus the pictures of the lights in use on my DeWalt 788. Charley

Why buy a new motor? Read the posts again. We didn't say you needed a new motor, but lubrication may reduce the frequency of the problem. We said just tap the power switch or foot pedal on and back off quickly, and your problem will go away. It's not the motor. It's just a bit of a machine design quirk that's easy to get around. Any machine that has a cam type motion that gets converted into a linear back and forth motion (or up and down), has this problem. Don't buy a new motor, because the new motor will work the same way. Charley

For the wheel, the angle on the ends of each piece, in this case 8 pieces, needs to be calculated in the following manner. 360 degrees, divided by the number of pieces, in this case 8 which equals 45 deg, but then divided by 2 because the end of each piece is 1/2 of the angle formed by each two intersecting pieces, So set your miter saw for 22.5 degrees and cut both ends of each piece, one end left, and the other end right. Be very careful to use a stop, so each piece is "exactly the same length". The layer with the spokes will require shorter pieces between the spokes, but the angles should be the same. The third layer (back side) should be identical to the first layer, so make pieces for both of these layers at the same time. If you want a smooth round edge inside and out, you need to fasten each glued together layer "one at a time" to a piece of plywood with a hole in the exact center of the wheel piece, or to a completely glued up rim assembly minus the spokes. Then use a router with the bit of choice and a circle jig to trim both the inside and outside of each layer of the wheel, or to the glued up assembly minus the rails. In either case, if putting a shaped edge on the wheel, you will need to flip the wheel over and re-attach it to the plywood, exactly centered. The wheel center needs to be made from pieces and routed in a similar manner, or turned on a lathe. Everything requires careful centering to avoid an egg shaped wheel and tight straight joints. I have made several ships wheels, usually from solid mahogany, but mine were intended for sea duty. You will still need to be very careful with the angles and dimensions to make the pieces fit together well. It can be fun, if you can control the dimensions and angles well. Charley

This was made from red oak pallet wood. It's two very similarly grained pieces about 1/2" thick that I joined edge to edge. The seam runs horizontally through the clock area. It's sometimes difficult to figure out what the wood is in a pallet, but I have found red oak, poplar, hard and soft maple, black walnut, ash, cherry, hickory, hornbeam, beech, birch, and a whole bunch that I can't identify. Pallets and crates from Japan are usually made from mahogany plywood and can be great sources of thin plywood, but be extremely careful about possible chemical treatments of wood in pallets from a foreign country. The more desirable kinds of wood typically found in American and Canadian pallets seem to have more wild grain and knots in them when these woods are incorporated into pallets as they are the less desirable pieces for making furniture, but if your projects are thin and/or small, there can be some very interesting hard woods in pallets. Usually you will need to sand it or run it through a planer before you can tell what it is. You will typically need to just break them down by your method of choice, and then bring the pieces home and sand or skip plane them to try to identify what they are. Some will be easy to identify if the pallets haven't been left out in the rain and have taken on the gray aged look. Don't use good blades in your planer for pallet wood for the first cuts. You will likely miss small nail pieces and there will certainly be gravel and tiny stones and concrete chips embedded in them that a metal detector won't see, but get yourself a metal detector to pre-examine these boards before you go putting them through any expensive equipment. Once you have taken the crud off the top and bottom surfaces and removed all of the metal you can then clean them up with old planer blades, Coarse sand paper, or whatever way works best for you. Then decide what you have, and use your better quality tools will bring them to the dimensions that you want. I once worked for a printing press manufacturer, and the paper pallets that they, and their customers received, were very heavy duty and about 1/2 the size of standard pallets. Frequently the top boards were a full 1" plus thick and the legs were 3" X 5". Some of my best pieces of rough sawn red oak and cherry pallet wood came from these pallets, and there was no need to worry about chemicals in them. Again, be very careful about your pallet sources. If you see any spills or funny colored wood in them, leave them where you found them. I always tried to pick pallets that were visibly clean, so chemical spills were easy to see. I also avoided painted pallets, since many of them have a large deposit on them and the source wants them returned. Charley

That's how I have done it. I'm not interested in saving the areas with the nail holes, but it's been many years since I've used pallet wood. Be careful what pallets you use. Some are treated with bug killing chemicals and some have chemicals spilled on them. Choose your sources wisely. Charley

My most often used form of sanding media for scroll sawing is "fingernail file boards". I buy 4-6 bundles of them at a time at the local drug store. If doing very small areas, I cut the ends of them down narrower at the ends with a pair of scissors. Every one of these sanding sticks comes with two grades of sanding grit, a coarse (about like 150) on one side and a fine (about like 220) on the other side, so you can choose the side that works best for what you are doing. I never use them in a machine. They are for hand sanding only, but I'm usually just trying to remove the fuzzies (tiny splinters) on the cut edges and sanding the edge lightly at a 45 degree angle takes them off with just a couple of strokes. Sometimes just sliding the sanding board sideways along the edge takes the fuzzies off quickly. The saw cuts themselves never need sanding or shaping, if you can steer the saw well when cutting the pattern and you use the right blade. Only experience and the right blade choice can achieve this and reduce your sanding requirements to just dealing with the fuzzies. Charley

In most cases, the general area that he is pointing to in that picture above (before running the video) is your most likely source of the noise. The cam bearing on the motor is one possibility, and the pivot bolt in the center of that vertical rocker arm slightly above and to the right of where he is pointing is another. The bolt will frequently loosen and wiggle back and forth when the saw runs. It cannot be fully tight because that arm needs to pivot on this bolt, but It should be less than about 1/2 turn from being tight. This pivot bolt frequently breaks too. I installed a grade 8 replacement in mine and have had no more problems with it. The bearing that he is pointing to can also be a source of noise. It will need to be pressed out and a new replacement pressed into that arm if it has any play at all in it. Many of the smaller bearings in the arms out toward the blade can be greased, by removing the center bolt, sliding the sleeve out of the center (it's actually the center race of the bearing) with a small stick, apply a tiny amount of synthetic grease to the needle bearings around the inside of the hole, replace the sleeve, followed by the bolt. Try to turn the sleeve about 180 degrees so a new surface. gets the reciprocating forces than where they had been before. This will also reduce the noise in your saw. New bearings can be purchased very reasonably from a bearing distributor in any large city, or on the internet. The number etched in the bearing race is all you need for an identical replacement. Putting the piece with the bearing in it into the freezer for 20 minutes just before you press the bearing out will make this job easier. Charley

I had bought a few packages when I first saw them at a show years ago. Last year I decided to use them on my DeWalt 788 and discovered that the sanding surface faced the front of the saw and rubbed the blade opening in the table. Since they didn't work on my DeWalt, I put them on my Delta Q3, which has a table insert. I made an insert with a slot from side to side instead of the usual front to back and it worked fine with these sanders. My point is, if you want to use these, make certain which way they face when you clamp them into your saw. If the sanding media is on one side then you can use it on a 788 with the front to back blade slot. If the sanding media faces you when clamped in the blade clamps, it may not fit the blade hole in the table. If your saw has a table insert, like a band saw has, you can make an insert with the slot cross wise instead of front to back and then use them. They may make these for the DeWalt and similar saws now. I don't know. I'm just relating my experience. I never tried to buy any more. In use, the ones that I had bought worked OK once I figured out a way to use them, but in my opinion, they were not worth buying more of them because they didn't work that good to make me want more of them, even if they faced sideways so I could use them in my DeWalt.. Charley

That's good speculation DW, but it could also be a slightly increased amount of friction at that point and the motor coasts very easily, but stops when the friction at this point increases. Check the motor brush length often on these variable speed motors and replace them when they begin wearing down to anywhere near the springs. If the spring touches the commutator (electrical contacts on the spinning part of the motor), it's almost instant death for the motor. As the brushes wear, the electrically conductive carbon wearing away from the brushes settles to the bottom of the motor it and can build up enough to short the motor windings, so blowing this carbon dust out of the motor every once in a while (at least when the brushes are replaced) is a good idea too, but make sure the brushes have been removed from the motor before you open the the motor case to do this. If you don't, you can damage both the brushes and the motor. If you can get the end cover on the opposite end of the motor from the brush location off, you will disturb less of the electrical wiring inside the motor. It's always best to disturb the wiring as little as possible to avoid breaking anything. Charley

I'm reading all of this and I'm wondering why you are running the saw so fast. Ok, get the EX if you can, but you should never need to run the saw that fast for cutting wood. 1. You can't control the cut very well when trying to go that fast. 2. you will likely be burning the wood in the cuts because of the increased blade friction. 3. You will be overheating the blade, causing it to loose it's strength, which will result in blade dulling and increased breakage. 4. You will wear out your saw much faster than need be. I run my saw as fast as I can without it burning the cut. A frequent wax application to the sides of the blade reduces burning too. This is different for each kind and thickness of wood and also the tightness of the turns you will be making in the pattern. It also varies as the blade begins to dull. If your blade is changing color in the cutting area, you are overheating the blade, and you haven't payed attention to my previous posts about blade speed. Charley

After doing photo retouch work from a Flea Market booth (after my commercial customer business was drying up with the bad economy), I quickly learned that any custom work that is done for the general public required that you get at least 60% of the money "up front", because many of them will either forget that they ordered it, won't have the money when it's ready, or have changed their minds and don't want it anymore, but won't come back and tell you. At least, if you get the 60% up front and have priced the job correctly, you have roughly covered the materials costs and your labor costs, but you haven't made a profit. When they didn't come back for their work, I just used their photos as advertising by printing a "before" to display with the "after" and wrote it off as a "break even". I made sure that I never "lost money" doing work for anyone. No money in advance = no work, and I looked for the next paying customer. Charley

If the saw stops at it's full down stroke, the cam action of the mechanism at the motor will cause this. It is just at the point on the cam motion (bottom dead center) where lifting the arm manually won't allow the mechanism to coast forward or backward to move it to it's full up position. The next time that it does this, try turning the motor shaft about 15 degrees in either direction by using a flat blade screwdriver in the slot in the back end of the motor shaft and turning it a just bit either way. Then try to lift the upper arm. The motor shaft will turn about 1/2 revolution in the same direction that you turned it with the screwdriver, as the upper arm of the saw is lifted to it's full up position. Any machine that uses a rotating cam action to convert the motion into an alternating back and forth motion will have this problem, but if you understand what is happening, it's easy to get around it. The piston arms that drive the wheels of a steam locomotive (now why did I think of this analogy?) are not positioned so both arms (one on each side of the engine) move forward and backward together, One of them is set to about 30 degrees of wheel rotation ahead of the other. This is so one of the arms can move the wheel if the other arm is at the full end of it's stroke and at this dead spot where it can't go either way, Since we don't have this "double rod power source" design in our scroll saws, we have to manually work around this "dead spot" by turning the motor (wheel) a few degrees either way, and it's easiest to just bump the power and hope the motor stops somewhere other than it's "full down position". (actually there is another dead spot like this at the full up position too, but we are always running the motor to get past this one as a normal part of using the saw, so we don't even realize that it exists). Now that you know what causes this, you also know how to get around it by turning the motor shaft slightly, but it's easier and faster to just tap the pedal or power switch and hope the motor stops somewhere else to allow the upper arm to then be lifted all the way up. There's nothing wrong with your saw. Just move the motor a little bit manually or with power when it does this and everything will be fine. Charley

Kevin, Attach a tall board to your saw fence. It can be as high as you need it. If really high, add some brackets behind the fence to keep it vertical. Don't risk your fingers doing any woodworking. Make a push block to keep your fingers away from the blade. When I was first taught to use a power saw (table saw, band saw, etc). I was taught the 6" rule. To never allow my hands and fingers to come within 6" of the spinning blade and never to reach over the saw blade when it was running. To always stop and find a safer way. I was taught this at age 8. I'm 74 now and I have never cut, or even nicked, myself with a power saw. In fact, it took me a long time to be able to mentally get myself to accept using a Grripper, because using it put my hand less than 2" above the spinning blade, but I've managed to get past this and have mentally modified the rule to allow using the Grripper as a safe pushing method when used properly. For added safety, a Grripper is made from a plastic that gives off a very unusual and strong odor the instant that the blade begins cutting into it. After the first time that this happens, your nose will stop you from going further. Charley

Tony, you must have a small leak. When I had the 5 gallon bucket under my Dust Deputy and hooked to my shop vac I could get at least 4 gallons of sawdust in the bucket before emptying it, and I never could find any dust in the shop vac filter. The same is true with my 25 gallon drum and my central vacuum unit. Nothing seems to build up on the filter in the vacuum or the inside of the filter chamber of the vacuum. If you have a leak below the Dust Deputy, the air coming through the leak will stir up the saw dust in the bucket, and some of it will get past the Dust Deputy and into the vacuum filter. Make sure there is no vacuum leak, either in the Dust Deputy attachment point to the bucket lid or the the lid-to-bucket connection. Carefully holding a smoking cigarette near these areas will help you find even a very tiny vacuum leak. The smoke will be drawn into the leak, creating a visible trail for you to follow to find and plug the leak. Charley

I initially had my Dust Deputy on a 5 gallon plastic bucket like that, hooked up to my shop vac, and it worked quite well. When I went from the shop vac to a re-purposed whole house vacuum unit, the vacuum level was so great that I collapsed the 5 gal plastic bucket almost instantly. I then began looking for a 20-25 gallon steel drum, but in the mean time, I needed a better temporary way to use the vacuum system. Since the buckets have ribs around them near the top to make the top area stronger, I had an idea to stack three buckets together with the Dust Deputy and it's bucket lid attached to the top bucket. With my particular buckets (Firehouse Subs pickle buckets) this put ribs all the way down the length of the top bucket and tripled the effective thickness of the bucket walls. This idea worked very well and I no longer had any collapsing bucket issues. If your bucket tries to collapse, just stack another bucket of the same type under it. This is a cheap, quick, and easy fix. My son found me a steel drum about 8 months after I started using the whole house vacuum, so I now have the Dust Deputy mounted on a double layer 3/4 plywood lid on top of a 25 gallon steel drum. I used 2 of the O-Ring seals from the 5 gal bucket lids to seal the plywood lid to the steel drum. The bottom layer of plywood just fits inside the steel drum and the top layer is 2 1/2 inches larger in diameter to cover the top of the drum. They are glued and screwed together, with clear ALEX caulking around the plywood edges to seal the voids in the plywood and also under the Dust Deputy to seal it to the top layer of plywood. The O-Rings wedge tightly around the small diameter plywood piece and up against the top plywood piece, making a great seal between the plywood and the rolled top edge of the metal drum. Vacuum and gravity hold the plywood lid on, so no clamps are needed. The Dust Deputy on the stacked 5 gal buckets was working just as good, but it did fill up much quicker. If all I used the Dust Deputy and Central Vacuum unit for was scroll sawing, it would likely take me over 6 months to fill a 5 gal bucket, but I also vacuum my shop machines and clean the floor of the shop with this vacuum system, as well as vacuum the inside of my cars and trucks with it, since I put a vacuum inlet port on the outside of my shop to make doing this easy. I just drag the hose and attachments out of the shop, plug it in, and I can vacuum two vehicles before I have to move them to get the other vehicles close enough. I used to use a small one gallon shop vac on the vehicles and it was a real pain to use. It also didn't pick up near as much as this new system does. Charley

My only advice is to suggest that you take the time to learn which saws are of the better quality and available in Australia, and then search for a used one, so the price is more reasonable. Also try to find someone nearby who is willing to spend a day, or just a few hours, with you and their saw to help you get started with some "hands on type training". Even just an hour of "on the saw" training will make a huge difference when you are just starting out. Both will help you get started with the best saw for what you can afford. Don't buy a cheap saw. They will ruin your interest in scroll sawing very quickly, unless you love self punishment and want to suffer through it no matter what . If you buy a better quality saw used, you can always sell it for about what you paid for it, if you should decide later that scrolling really isn't for you. If you buy a cheap saw, you may have to give it away. Welcome to Scrollsaw Village. The more dedicated scrollers like this place and stay here, and you will quickly see why. We are very eager to help each other when problems arise, and free sharing of ideas makes us all better scrollers. Those who ask for help are sometimes almost buried in helpful replies and suggestions of alternative ways to try for fixing a problem. At least one is certainly the best answer. Charley