Bandsaw Material Support

This is a simple material support for use when cutting long bars in the bandsaw. It is constructed mainly out of 20 mm × 20 mm × 2 mm box section steel. It makes it much easier to manage long and heavy long bars when cutting them up in the bandsaw.

This photo (click for a better view) shows all the parts that were used to make the material support. Four of the five lengths of box section were cut on the bandsaw with square ends. The other piece was cut with an angle grinder to add the two 60° edges onto one end.

The three circular components at the top of the photo are 16 mm diameter EN8 with an M8 hole all the way through. These were welded into the holes in the three base legs and the off-the-shelf M8 feet shown in the top-right of the photo screw into the tapped holes. The M8 feet came in a pack of four; the fourth one was used for my vertical saw table.

The threaded rod is M16. I mounted this in the lathe and skimmed the outer surface down slightly to ensure that it would slide past the weld bead in the long length of box section. The two square blocks with (M16) threaded holes in that are resting on the box section in the photo above are used for the threaded rod. One is welded to the cross-beam that goes underneath the roller (visible in the photo at the top of the page; the other is welded onto the end of the long length of box section. The threaded bar is held in the one in the cross-beam with some thread locking compound; it moves in the one in the upright to allow the height of the roller to be adjusted.

The roller is made out of some 31.75 mm (1.25") 303 bar that I found in a skip at work. Each end has been bored out 22 mm to a depth of 7 mm and a skateboard bearing (608 2RS, 8 mm × 22 mm × 7 mm) inserted. The hex bolts you can see in the photo screw into the EN3B uprights and the 8 mm section on the end of the bolts goes into the bearing bore. Using bearings for this application was arguably unnecessary, but skateboard bearings are cheap (I bought a big bag of them a few years ago) and I figured it was good practice for accurate machining.

At the height shown in the photos, the top of the roller is at the same height as the machined surface on the top of the lower bandsaw casting (about 640 mm off the ground). The threaded rod is about 500 mm long and hence there is a lot of scope for adjustment if support is needed at a higher level.

This website is free, but costs me money to run. If you'd like to support this site, please consider making a small donation or sending me a message to let me know what you liked or found useful.