Saw piercing

i had a vietnamese assistant that told me they saw this way in
most of southeast asia.

does the water go down the drain counter clockwise in the
southern hemisphere?

best regards,
geo fox

I recently purchased an electric scroll saw, Cuti Pi and have
been practicing for a month. I can do intricate cuts and curves
faster than with the hand saw. Where I save a lot of time is in
the filing - the sawed edges are so smooth that they appear to
have been filed and sanded - all that with a 3/0 blade on 22 ga.
sterling. The speed control is infinate and can be adjusted
while cutting. The drawback is that 3/0 is the smallest
recommended blade size.

Donna in WY

One cheap and easy way of making a motor speed controller is to
use a (variac type) incandescent lamp dimmer switches wired in
series to a duplex receptacle. Any handyman should be able to
fix one up with a insulated extension cable to a regular three
pin male plug on one end and a female plug on the other. Dimmer
switches come in 200 watt and 400 watt models. A 400 watt one
is more useful and you can use it to vary the current for many
applications - motors, soldering irons, heaters, etc. and maybe
even your table lamp.

Kelvin Mok (klmok@shaw.wave.ca)
Home: (403) 463-4099 | Home FAX: (403) 430-7120

Actually, there IS a saw sold for this purpose. Rio Grande
Sells it. or at least used to. Called the Princeton Power Saw,
if I recall. Lots of cash. Great for those using the saw to cut
out RT blanking dies, or cutting out lots of shapes from sheet
metal. It has a foot pedal to regulate speed, which generally is
about the same or only slightly faster than you’d use if running
a saw frame by hand. Faster than that and you loose control of
where the line is going…

This last is also part of why power saws aren’t much used.
Simply put, there’s little gain in productivity, and only some
fatigue in the arm and hand to avoid. Sure, it’s a nice tool for
some stuff, but most jewelers who’ve been at it for a while
prefer the precise control a hand saw frame gives. And can do a
lot more variety of work with it than a power saw can do, as
well, even if at only hand powered speeds. If all we did were to
be cutting out jigsaw shapes in the metal, then the power saw
would be a great advantage. But for so much of our work, the saw
is not only used to cut a line, it’s also used to smooth small
areas as a very fine file might be, or trim things at odd
constantly varying angles, (such as when azuring out a stone
setting, for example). And the saw blades we use, in addition to
being very fine, are also just variable enough that to really
control where the cut goes, you simply cannot move along at
breakneck speeds…

Peter Rowe

My first scroll saw was also a Dremel which I consider a very
poor design. It’s underpowered, unbalanced (vibrates enough to
keep the work table free from sawdust and everything else not
nailed down) and the stroke is only 1/4 inch which means it
could hardly cut anything harder or thicker than 1/4 " balsa
wood. I couldn’t even give my saw away.

What I eventually bought is a sturdier one, probably made in
Taiwan or China but given a Canadian house brand - MasterCraft.
Its powerful (1/3 HP), quiet/balanced, has a cut of 3/4 inch and
has one of those puffers to clear the debris. Its solidly built
and has a cast aluminium saw table.

Since my last post I gave some thought as to adapting jeweler’s
saw blades for this saw and came up with this solution. Saw
blades for this type of saw come with cross pins on either end
of the blade so that it can hang from a slot at the end of each
saw arm. Welding a bead or a similar pin to the jeweler’s plain
blade is probably too much work… The solution is to use a
small hard metal tube and tap a screw thread right through the
tube. Cut a saw kerf halfway into the tube. Use set screws
from either end to hold the saw blade end firmly into this kerf
to form a ‘T’. This should allow the saw blade to be hung from
the scroll saw blade holders. And when the cutting section is
blunt moving the tubes to a new position should expose a new
section of cutting teeth. I’ll try out this idea as soon as I
can.

Kelvin Mok (klmok@shaw.wave.ca)

Home: (403) 463-4099 | Home FAX: (403) 430-7120

One cheap and easy way of making a motor speed controller is to
use a (variac type) incandescent lamp dimmer switches wired in
series to a duplex receptacle.  

G’day; This works fine for most electrical gadgets - I use
mine for everything from a pyrograph to electro plating to a
vibro polisher (via a battery charger for the latter as it has a
DC motor). It works well on motors which have brushes such as
sewing machine motors and mains electric drills. It will not
work at all on any squirrel-cage type motor. Unfortunately my
scroll saw has that type. Cheers,

       / \
     /  /
   /  /                                
 /  /__| \      @John_Burgess2
(______)       

At sunny Nelson NZ

    A decent electrical bench type scroll saw can be bought
for $100 to $150 from any hardware store and the only
difference I can see is that the saw baldes are thicker and
coarser than jeweler's type saw blades and they have cross
pins near the ends 

Well, in my experience of working with a cheap scroll saw for
cutting thin sheet metals, the saw tends to pull the metal up and
down and jerk it around, bending it horribly out of shape. (Cheap
scroll saws always have pins on the ends of the blades.) I did,
however, find a wonderful scroll saw that will cut thin sheet
metal. That saw is made by RB Industries and runs about $1400. I
can cut metal, wood and even stained glass with it. (And the
blades don’t have pins on the ends either. So use your jeweler’s
blades…) One can also stack cut the metal, so several
identical pieces can be cut at one time. It is a good idea to
sandwich the metal between thin plywood with double stick tape to
hold the layers together. But one can also cut only one sheet at
a time as well.

Cat Dancing, In Texas, where it’s finally cooling down!