Blood, Sweat, and Sawdust

After months of deliberation and daydreaming, I finally picked up my first bandsaw. I chose the Rikon 10-325 14″ bandsaw for several reasons. There is a dealer near by (Highland Hardware). It meets all of my current needs. It seems to be well liked by the community. And, it has a 5 year warranty. I spent much of the weekend assembling the saw, but haven’t yet been able to start her up. The instructions are somewhat lacking, but assembly was rather straight forward.

This is the box in which the saw arrives.

Here are the contents, after opening the box.

You first assemble the base, fastening the supplied bolts hand-tight. I choose to use a mobile base that I picked up from Wood Craft. I placed the assembled saw base on the mobile base before things got too heavy. Unfortunately, it slipped my mind to take photos of this step.

You’ll definitely need a friend to lift the saw onto the base. The instructions weren’t very clear on how to mount the saw to the base. Rikon supplies four bolts, each with a hex nut, nylon locking nut, two large washers and a small washer. After consulting Dr. Google, I decided to install the bolts from below the base in the following order: bolt, large washer, base, larger washer, hex nut, saw, small washer, nylon nut.

Here is a close up of the bolt installation.

The rest of the assembly is pretty simple. You simply install the table using four hex bolts, and then install all of the accessories. I still need to level the table and set the blade tracking. I plan to have a full review sometime in the following weeks.