Wood to metal bandsaw conversion

[astroracer]

I bought a used Taiwaneze wood/metal cutting bandsaw off eBay a few years ago. It ran fine but it was 20 years old so I decided to do a major servicing while I had it broke down.
I pulled the gearbox off (all of the cover bolts where loose to begin with which is what prompted me to open it up) and I'm glad I did. The 20 year old grease was like wax and most of it wasn't even in contact with the gears anymore... I took a couple of pics after I opened it, check 'em out... I scraped out about a cups worth of old grease...


I also noticed some growling in the gearbox when it was running and I found a couple of bad bearings. Not super bad but one was installed backwards with the seal towards the inside of the box so it was pretty much running dry from day one. I will be replacing both bearings on the input shaft with double sealed bearings. The others are fine and run nice and smooth.
I ordered new bearings from this place...
https://bearingsdirect.com
I pulled the part no. off the bearing and plugged it into their search engine and I had them ordered in less then 5 minutes. $5.85 apiece and exactly what I need.
I ordered bi-metal blades from Enco. If you need blades check them out. I also ordered a couple for my H/V saw. The 64 1/2" blades are less then 13 bucks for bi-metal... Not to bad.
Mark

[astroracer]

Getting the gearbox back together it ran nice and quiet, now I had to find some oversized pulleys and a new belt. Being that the saw is metric I couldn't find any pulleys with a 15mm bore so I picked up a couple 6" and 7" pulleys with 1/2" bores. I'll had to drill and ream them to fit the 15mm input shaft on the gearbox. The 6" pulley will get the blade down to about 105 FPM and the 7" will be around 90' FPM. Should be good enough for my needs.
It cuts steel like a champ and I have less than 200 bucks into it.