Rikon bandsaw striatech DVR smart motor upgrade

[redknife]

Rikon has announced a variable speed replacement motor upgrade to their 10-325/326 14" bandsaw line. The idea is to speed match material and also provide better torque where needed. 10-325 1.5hp>1.75hp. Upgrade retail $629. They will offer a new model equipped with the DVR.
Here is their web blurb:
https://www.rikontools.com/new-rikon...r-model-13-926
Here is the manual:
https://www.rikontools.com/manuals/13-926.pdf

I’m interested in thoughts on the upgrade. I like my 10-325 but this new motor appears to offer an upgrade path without the sell and replace hassle. Of course if there is not much functional difference at the wood blade interface it would be a waste.

[Mike Davis]

The only real advantage I see is for people doing brass inlay. You could switch blades and turn down the speed to cut sheet brass.

[redknife]

Thanks, Mike. I was trying to figure out how the variable speed would benefit the woodworker. Maybe this is more for the multi-material user.

[Pop Golden]

I can see the DVR motor on a lathe or a Shopsmith were a variable speed is really needed, but not on a woodworking bandsaw.

Pop

[chris_goris]

The only real advantage I see is for people doing brass inlay. You could switch blades and turn down the speed to cut sheet brass.

Step pulleys can accomplish the same thing a whole lot cheaper!

[ehpoole]

The only real advantage I see is for people doing brass inlay. You could switch blades and turn down the speed to cut sheet brass.

Variable speed is also very useful when cutting plastics and aluminum so that you can avoid overheating and melting the cutting edge.

However, in woodworking selecting the correct blade type for the cut you are making is generally far more important than the speed of the blade (within reason, of course) — unless you are making very slow and intricate cuts in a wood that is really prone burning/smearing of the resins (Purpleheart, for instance). But the long length of bandsaw blades tends to go a long ways to helping keep them much cooler than most of the other saws in our shop, so I don’t really see a lot of value in variable speed from the perspective of sawing wood.

Some bandsaws also ship from the factory with a pair of stepped pulleys that give you a fast and slow speed, so one may already have the option of slowing down their bandsaw if need be. My 18” Rikon, for example, has two selectable speeds, with the faster being your normal woodworking preference, but it can be slowed down considerable with a simple shifting of the belt if need be — I’ve never had to use the slower setting, however.

[Jay Kepley]

I've got a Jet 14" bandsaw which I've been tweaking to improve performance. It's a bit like putting lipstick on a pig. The Iturra Design catalog has a page on "turbocharging" a bandsaw by changing the pulleys. If you believe a speed increase would be useful, you can probably do that less expensively by buying one or more additional pulleys that you could change for a specific task. You could use a link belt that could be adjusted. This is clearly more cumbersome than having an auto-adjust feature, but the cost would be manageable. It seems to me that a faster blade speed would work for resawing.

http://vintagemachinery.org/math/sfpm.aspx