Tannewitz bandsaws.. matched set

A couple of bandsaws I just saved from the scrap yard. Seem to be complete and hopefully will be relativey un-difficult ressurections.

They need some loving and I sent a note to Tannewitz to see what info and support they can offer.

My old guardless Crescent will stay on the job for now, but I look forward to putting these old girls back to work.

Interesting that they both are stamped with the same dates. The first in the little box, and the second, under the box in the margin of the tag.
Born on date and a purchase date?

Anybody have any insight from experiences with these models and years?
Anything I need to look out for? Be aware of?
The electric motors appear to be proprietary? Hope parts are available!

Found out the hard way why the big one was on blocks. The lower wheel protrudes 3 inches into the floor! Why would they not simply make the legs a little taller? I will make blocks instead of cutting the floor.

Thanks,
Mike
42 inch May 24 1926 Jul 6 1926 RH 3861

36 inch May 24 1926 Jul 6 1926 GH 3401

Nothing useful to offer , only envy .
Probably some of the finest band saws ever made - Yates owners may differ on that , though ;~)

A question - Does the bottom wheel on the 42" clear the floor , or are you going to have to keep it blocked up ?

If they have the "modern" type of solid wheels , and you need new tires , prepare for sticker shock if you elect to replace them with the factory rims .........

42" - what's the vertical clearance on that?
I also have only wonderment at them - and wonder when a 42" saw (for wood, yes?) would be needed? Were they used as cutoff saws as well the normal modern uses?

By the way - the design for the bottom wheel dropping into a slot might arise from table height issues - but 3" would only drop it from 42" to 39" ?!?!?

Tom, thanks for the heads up on the factory rims.

No, the wheel is a permanant fit three inches below floor level. Seems to me that would hurt sales.
Maybe not. Tannewitz is still in business, and this is their reply to my enquiry.

Yes we still have parts for your saws I do not have manuals, or motor
parts we have tires, guides, bearings, shafts, etc. Let me know what you
need when you begin the rebuilding process and I will get you pricing. Thank
you, Kevin Tannewitz Inc. 1-800-458-0590

Mike

There are some manuals available , over on the VM site
Don't know if they apply to your saws , but maybe a place to start :

Tannewitz Works - Publication Reprints - Wood Cutting Band Saws, High Speed | VintageMachinery.org

Tannewitz Works - Publication Reprints - Tannewitz Band Saw Operators Manual - Machines Prior to 1973 | VintageMachinery.org

The deal with the tire replacement , is that on some of the wheels , you didn't just replace the tires , but swapped out the whole wheel rim .
These rims came with bonded-on tires , and I believe even needed a special tool (or some creativity) to change .
I don't know if you have that style of wheel , but I guess you'll know soon enough ;~)

For the 42" saw - If it were me , and I had the room , I might build a raised platform for it , large enough to stand and work on .
The alternative is to just jackhammer a little trench in the floor for the wheel , I guess .
The 39-40" table height is kind of standard for these big saws , I think - Even my 32" Crescent is 40" .

Tom

Mike very cool score , do you have three phase if not now is the time to start looking for a big roto . It is very nice that they both have the original motors . Do not let any one convince you to do a retrofit , these motors are probably somewhere around 800 RPM . Disassemble them and clean them up and check resistance across the legs if you need to have one rewound make sure the motor shop understands these units . As you know the 42" unit is designed to have the wheel in a cutout the floor so your table is at comfortable working Height . definitely set it up this way it is so cool and if you get the table heights to match it is a big bonus.
If these units have the(Carter Style ) Wheels with the locking ring as mine does sit down and have a couple of cocktails before pricing tires they are not glue on like the crescent probably has .
any way these are very nice machines one of the best band saws made set them up and watch the Delta boys tuck there tails and run.
Good Luck Herb

HCF said:

Mike very cool score , do you have three phase if not now is the time to start looking for a big roto . It is very nice that they both have the original motors . Do not let any one convince you to do a retrofit , these motors are probably somewhere around 800 RPM . Disassemble them and clean them up and check resistance across the legs if you need to have one rewound make sure the motor shop understands these units . Good Luck Herb

Click to expand...

Nice saws Mike and Good Luck,

I have to agree with Herb on the motors. The spec sheets above showed 900rpm motors with an option of 720 rpm for certain woodworking applications. I've seen some big Cresent's with 575rpm motors. I don't know what you application will be but IMO some of those big old bandsaws are way to fast for normal woodworking. I have a 20" Cresent that originally had a 1200rpm motor. I had to use a 900 rpm motor to tame it down for woodworking.

Assuming they are direct drive 42" wheel 900 rpm = 9900 fpm, 720 rpm = 7920 fpm, 600rpm = 6600 fpm.
Depending on your application, whether or not you have 3 phase, you may want to consider a VFD to slow down the motor if necessary.

My .02 cents,

Joe

I have a G size Tanny, one size below these, and selected it to avoid the wheel in the floor thing.

The wheel in the floor deal is to keep the table at a reasonable working hight for those of us who are of normal stature.

I went through my saw completely before putting it in service.
Things to keep in mind

1) If you remove the motor from the frame you have to re align it to get the wheels running true to eachother.
Find some way to install taper or dowel pins to return it to the original zero before removing or be ready for a headache. This was the one component that was not removed from my saw during the rebuild.

2) Those big wheels have a lot of inertia, it takes a full minute for my 10 hp converter to bring the 5 hp saw up to speed. You also need breaks to stop them in a reasonable time frame. Dont discount the need to rebuild or repair the breaks.

3) Blade speed - Many of these saws were bought to cut down pallets or other abusive work, rather than fine woodworking and the blade speed can be a bit high for resawing and other activities. This has been pointed out a few places.
Mine spins a bit faster than recomended, but I live with it. With a good sharp blade and approprate curves, burning is not an issue. VFD's have been used with limited success because they affect torque as well as speed. On saws with burned up motors two options are commonly seen. Rewind to a sutable RPM or remove the windings and armature, make a new shaft that extends through the motor frame and install a belt drive on the back side to give you the desired RPM.


4) The G has a well thought out dust collection system, I assume the larger frames do as well. Note if it has two knotches in the blade channel to slip in ply wood dust deflectors around the blade. Mine does.

5) Safety - The guards are good, and its easy to add a microswitch above the blade tension indicator that will shut the coil off in the motor starter should a blade break. Think about the doors opening when you place the saw. You dont want to hit hanging lights or other things when you change blades.

6) Some saws have mechanical breaks, others electric over hydraulic. The break shoes and calipers are different. Regardless, Mine can resaw a foot or more after loosing power and takes quite some time to coast to a stop. . Its hard to see if the blade is stoped and the saw is a lot quieter than the dust collector so its easy to miss the moving blade and stick something you dont want cut into it. The breaks get her stopped before you walk away.

7) The wheels can be pulled with a wheel puller, but the are not a lot of fun to reinstall. If you pull them off, consider drilling and tapping the motor shaft and upper shaft so you can pull them back on with all thread rather than beating against the bearings.

8) The cable for cable drive breaks goes through a tube in the frame. Its not a lot of fun to get that tube back in through the cruved frame. My cable drive break also trips the stop switch, and with the big frame its nice not have to take a step over to stop the saw. If yours lacks this, consider installing some kind of foot switch to stop the unit if it does not have one.

9) If you need an RPC for 3 phase, assume you will need a RPC considerably larger than the saws stated motor HP. I certanly do for mine.

Bryan
The vertical distance is about 21 inches. What to use a huge saw for? I don't know! But, if I ever figure it out, I will be ready! But, I have tried swinging sheets in a cut-out and my 36 Crescent was.. too small....
I once worked a place where they used a tannewitz friction saw that zinged at high speed and threw sparks as it sliced through sheet metal. Mostly scrap hoods and door panels from mis-hits in punch presses.

Tom, thanks for the manual links. I will look them over later.
I think I will live with a higher table rather than make a permanant spot in the floor.

Herb and Joe,
Fear Not! Its mostly a struggle, but I live for unusual and exotic. I am mostly a metal guy, branching into wood, but electricity still confounds me. I have been making calls to local motor shops to see who can give two of my 5 hp motors, from 1918, the care they deserve. Anybody can rerplace bearings and slop paint on. Already ruled out a couple places that don't seem to understand the historical significance of using what WAS in todays world.

I will probably pull the motors apart, clean everything, reassemble and have it all checked out. No doubt, I'll be pouring my own babbit, as I doubt any motor shop trying to pay the bills will tackle that.

I have a small RPC in another building, but, planning on having the larger stuff in this barn. Was thinking of a 10 hp American Rotary, but, I need to see what size the 42 tannewitz is now........

I will have to study what a VFD is...........

Thanks
Mike

ahall
Thats good stuff to think about! Thanks for that. Motor alignment did not occur to me.
They both have foot levers to pull cables for mechanical brakes.
Plenty of time to figure out what size converter to get while the funds build back up.

Herb, you mentioned the tables at the same height. Interesting idea,if I could sacrifice that floor space. The wood shop where I work has two big much newer Tannewitz saws. A right and left. I understand the left hand saws are not very common.

Mike

I bet you could build a nice 4" riser about 4'x4' to set these on and not have to worry about cutting into the floor. That way it keeps the nice working hieght for you. can even make it ramped so its not a trip hazard when youre cutting whatever it is a 4" saw is supposed to cut

rustyironism said:

Tom, thanks for the heads up on the factory rims.

No, the wheel is a permanant fit three inches below floor level. Seems to me that would hurt sales.
Maybe not. Tannewitz is still in business, and this is their reply to my enquiry.

Yes we still have parts for your saws I do not have manuals, or motor
parts we have tires, guides, bearings, shafts, etc. Let me know what you
need when you begin the rebuilding process and I will get you pricing. Thank
you, Kevin Tannewitz Inc. 1-800-458-0590

Mike

Click to expand...

Try to download the manual they have Bandsawmanuals.com

Scrap yard envy.

rustyironism said:

A couple of bandsaws I just saved from the scrap yard...


View attachment 86982View attachment 86983

Click to expand...

If you show me your scrap yard, I'll show you mine...

~TW~

"Try to download the manual they have Bandsawmanuals.com"

I signed up at that site and got spammed by people wanting to sell me bandsaw blades. Glad I didn't give my phone #.
Been over a year now and I still get emails.

thanks for the link, fabitfast, but thanks more to Nick for relaying his bad experience with it!
I didn't sign up anyway,
since I don't like registering unknown websites.
But it looks like i should register at the vintage machinery site. Lots of good info there.
The serail number list there puts both these machines at 1928.
The dates stamped on the machines turned out to be patent dates.
I found the July 6 1926 date to be a Tannewitz patent for the brake, but could not find the may 24 1926 date.

The 36 incher has a 5 hp 220 3 phase 15 amp motor at 900 rpm

The 42 incher has a 5 hp 440 3 phase 8 amp motor at 720 rpm

So, not really a matched set, like I presumed, but, betting they were bought at the same time by the same place, way back in 1928, and have been together for 85 years.

I have a direct drive band saw. (not a Tanny, and not so large as the subject of this post)

The 860 rpm motor base is pinned with taper pins. Seems close enough.

I "re tired" with leather belting and contact cement. That was over 20 years ago.
Shaped the crowns with a sanding block in about 15 minutes.

The saw runs off a VFD,

It was made for the wood shop, but I cut anything but iron and steel. Might try steel some day if the need to contour comes up. No flood coolant though. That would be a mess!
The new VFD's put out a lot of grunt at low RPM!

Interesting make-do that lasted 20 years!
I pulled the iron covers off to get the motor info and see long slots to adjust motor position.
When I tear into the ressurection, I will note the position, but, don't care to pin in current position, not knowing if it is indeed correct.

The manual from Tom in post #5 says soft steel can be cut up to 3/16 thick! I know a high speed wood saw and blade slices aluminum like butter. But, with a blade change, does the high speed of these saws become a friction saw when cutting steel?

Mike

It does if you feed into it at the wrong speed, and the teeth don't self-clean...

When cutting steel, the same rules of cutting feeds and speeds, as well as tooth contact and cutting power... apply as they would with any other material, it's just that the material's tensile strength warrant operation in a substantially different ratio.

You're running wood at 1200+fpm, steel would be more like 120fpm... and instead of 2-4tpi, you're running 10-15 tpi... and instead of 2-10" thick, you're running 0.1-0.2" thick.

With high-strength material, you NEVER want to run a blade that has less than two teeth in contact with the cutting surface at any given time (snagged tooth).

In all cases, the concept of mechanical material cutting still applies- when the speed and feeds are appropriate, the HEAT generated from ripping tiny pieces off a parent material, gets carried away in the chip, not passed into the parent metal, or the cutting tool.

AND... in order to make it do this all properly, the incoming parent must be fed fast enough for it to cut and shed, which means that if you chose to run the blade really fast, you need to feed it really fast, and have a whole lotta horsepower behind it. If you do the first two at say... 10x, you'd need to apply the third at say... 10x...

I've converted a very stout (but not rare or exotic, and much smaller) bandsaw to metal cutting by putting a gear reduction housing on a belt-drive, and chain-driving the lower wheel... cuts at about 100fpm with an 18t blade, but it's a small table, and I just use it for making vertical cuts in something that requires odd angle cuts... like fitting up small parts. Extremely handy, because I'll invariably be working on something and then Dangit... I wish this here, had a notch over this way... and then I remember the old Frankenstein saw...

The Variable Frequency Drive is a wonderful thing... I have VFDs on all but a scant few of my machine tools. If you pick the right one, you can feed 240v single phase to it, and get 3 phase out... at any speed (including zero, and well over 2x the original speed), and with proper planning, you can get well above the motor's original design power if necessary. They're small, quiet, and provide two other features- Soft start (bringing up the machine slow, and limiting current draw while doing so) and Dynamic Braking... using the motor as a braking system... to stop it rapidly.

The soft-start feature speaks for itself in terms of electrical consumption. If the machine has a very high operating inertia, and takes a minute to get up to speed, you program the VFD to go from start to full speed in 1 minute... and it'll do it to faster, and use a small fraction of the current while doing so. This may not seem very impressive, but the side effect is, that if you have a 5hp motor driving a high-inertia machine, and you never make more than a 2hp cut, you can start-and-run your 5hp machine off a 2hp electrical service. A 120v/20A receptacle is 2400w... which is 3.2hp. Next... while doing so, the VFD is a motor controller- it monitors the motor status, and will operate as an overload protection system.

Next... dynamic braking. Most VFDs have external terminals for a braking resistor. In the programming, is a dynamic braking function... such that when you set the VFD to STOP, the motor becomes a generator, and the VFD directs the motor's energy into the braking resistors. By doing so, it stops the machine rapidly, smoothly, and best yet... saves wear-and-tear on the machine's mechanical braking surfaces. I have this set up in high-caliber mode on my Johannsen radial drill... with a footswitch to control the motor, so if my hands are working with spindle and workpiece, I can step on the pedal to start the spindle, remove my foot to stop it, and (since the spindle is low-inertia) it stops right-danged-now. Same for my Bridgeport mill. Eventually, I'll have a VFD on my table-saw... because table saws give me a serious case'a the willies...

By the way... the relief in the floor... could it be that they designed it with the intention of an in-floor conveyor or chute for the recovery of sawing spoils? If it were me, in the twenties, I'd probably build the whole building around the concept of handling raw materials in, with product out one way, and waste another... perhaps even send the sawdust waste to a boiler as fuel...

Mike,

I have been a member of vintagemachinery.org for a long time and am personally acquainted with the founder of the site. I highly recommend it as a source of historical information about Tanny bandsaws.
I also belong to owwm.org which is the discussion board for old woodworking machines.
I own a Tannewitz PH, 30" direct drive bandsaw. 36" Tanny saws were the predominate bandsaw in American furniture plants. I have visited about a dozen plants while they were being auctioned off and I have seen as many as 13 Tanny bandsaws in one plant. I put them equal to the Yates American Y series but they are not as attractive as the Yates American with snowflake doors. The doors do not add to the saws ability to cut wood. Tanny had the best guides on the market and the Yates was very close behind. Please attemt to restore the orginal Tanny guides as they are very good.
My Tanny has the quick change tires (thin metal rim with rubber bonded (vulcanized?) to the thin metal. You remove these by carefully cutting through the rubber and thin metal with a hacksaw then install new ones with special tools to press the new tires in place. A skilled mechanic could change tires while the operator was on lunch break and have the saw ready for use when he returned. I have a set of the tools for pressing the tires onto the wheels and I have some extras but not enough for a 42". They would not be too hard to reproduce in a machine shop. Look around the wheel rims for tapped holes then count these holes to know how many you would need.
The wheels are VERY HARD to pull off the shafts. Do not even start with a simpe two jaw gear puller. I have one of the Tanny orginal pullers if you need but I would need dimensions of your hub and groove to know if it will fit your saw. Mine is for a 36" but I think the 42" used the same tool. I have been thinking of building a hydraulic puller as it would work much better. I am thinking of something similar to an automotive power steering pulley puller.
As to the saw with a 440 volt motor, you can get lots of help from the transformer, phase converter and VFD forum here. Just check carefully to be certain it is 440 volt only. All the Tannys I have seen have had dual voltage motors (9 wires in the terminal box).
If you want to talk, drop me a PM and I will send my phone number. I work so much that I have little time on the forums but can talk about any night.

Bruce

I found a link to machinejunkie which shows the tire tools being used on a 30" tanny. There is also lots of information about the rebuild of a 30" tanny and this might be of interest also.
MachineJunkie :: View topic - Want to borrow: Tannewitz bandsaw tire changing clamps

I think the brake shoes were automotive shoes fo the period. I also believe I have the Car Quest part numbers for shoes that will fit a 42" saw. A friend, in Utah, rebuilt one of these some years back.

Bruce