A few days ago I was cutting a small length of 1" square stock with my bandsaw.? I supported the piece on a sacrificial strip of aluminum to make sure it wouldn't tip down while being sawn.? The sacrificial piece was a bit narrower than the stock so I could grip it with the vise.? The mistake I made was to turn the saw on and then I left for a "quick" errand.? But that turned into a much longer interval -- so the saw was unattended.? Well, when I finally came back the saw had stopped, but that's because the cutoff piece had jammed the saw.? Probably because the sacrificial piece prevented the saw from immediately turning off.? The scrap got sucked into the bearing guides and jammed.
I didn't smell a burnt odor coming from the motor and the breaker for that outlet had tripped so I was hopeful that the saw was OK, but that turned out to not be the case.? With power restored and the jam cleared, the motor clearly was dead.? My ohmmeter showed an open connection.? It wasn't the switch which only left the motor as the location of the open circuit.
I found that Harbor Freight claims to have replacement bandsaw motors but they're about $150 so I thought it was worth my time to see if I could fix the motor.? I found an online forum where someone had repaired theirs by replacing a thermal cutout located inside the motor housing so......maybe I might get lucky.
I removed the motor and took off the end nearest the power cord connection but unfortunately my model had no thermal cutout.? Still no bad burnt odor and the windings looked OK so I used my ohmmeter some more to see if I could locate the open connection.? I had to remove the heat-shrink tubing from the power cord-to-windings connections and noticed that the hot and ground return wires were stuck together.? More examination revealed that they were melted.? ?They had been tied very tightly by some kind of string so when the motor got hot enough to soften the insulation the wires came in contact, blew out and tripped the breaker.
Long story short, I replaced the power cord connections, re-assembled the motor and tested it.? It ran with no noises, tripped breakers or any obvious complaint.
I got lucky and learned a lesson.? Don't walk away from a running bandsaw.
