So today I found out I could increase the resaw capacity of my Rikon
18" bandsaw from 12-1/4" to 13-3/4"...without removing the guide
bearings.
It
had always been *just* short of being able to resaw a slice off the
back of a 1-piece solid body for use as grain-matched cavity
covers. Now I can do it with room to spare.
These mods are specific to the Rikon, but you may find you can pull off similar shenanigans with your own bandsaw.
The first step was to remove the black blade guard from the guide
bearing elevator (big crank on the right), which keeps you from
touching the blade when you have the upper guide bearings down close to
the table (you just need to watch where the blade is!!!!). This
shot shows the upper guide bearing elevator with the guard off.
This doesn't do anything to the resaw capacity by itself, but the
guides won't go any higher if you leave it on.
This reveals a small phillips-head screw on the outside-side of the
elevator shaft that serves as a stop to the elevator when it runs into
the elevator gear box. Remove this and you have another 1-1/4" of
capacity already.
To get the last little bit, you can remove the allen head screw on the
back of the elevator shaft that screws into the square block which
holds the guide bearing assembly. But first test that this block
will remain FIRMLY attached without the screw...I couldn't budge mine.
At this point the distance from the bottoms of the bearings to the
table is 13-7/8" on my saw...leaves me with 13-3/4" comfortably.
The last thing you could do would be to remove the bent metal tab
hanging off the bottom of the upper wheelhouse, but if you did then the
blade guard would no longer work properly if you decided to replace it
(which is a good idea when you're not doing extreme resawing).
The bottom of mine is 13-7/8" off the table so its no big deal, and so
I left it on.
Final stage is to make sure your blade tension is tight with such a long free blade length.