Metal-cutting bandsaw blade adjustment

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I’ve got an Axminster 4″ MCB100A metal cutting bandsaw, and a wonderful bit of kit it is too! However the blade started coming off and it wasn’t obvious how to adjust it.

I took both of the wheels off – they just unbolt. The driven wheel isn’t adjustable, so it is important to ensure the back of the spigot is really clean so the wheel is correctly aligned.

The idler wheel is adjustable, but I didn’t realise this until I took it off. This is what it looks like:

The two grub screws sit on the marks on the aluminium casting between the springs. You can adjust them without removing the wheel through the two holes in the wheel, although you will need to slacken the centre fixing bolt first.

In my case I wanted the blade to sit slightly further back on the wheels, so I tightened both screws by about 1/4 turn. The blade now runs perfectly with no more jumping off.

Focusser

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Time to start on the last major component – the focuser! This will be a Crayford Focuser using some 3x3x8 ball bearings, some aluminium tubes and bits and pieces lying around.

The first part to be constructed is the base-plate that will attach the focuser body to the telescope. This is threaded to take the bottom of the focuser tube; this will then be secured with locktite.

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Telescope dovetail mount

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I’m building a telescope, of which more anon. I don’t want to build a mount for it, so I’m going to use my existing Mead GOTO mount. This means that:

  • I want to be able to attach the new telescope to the existing mount
  • The telescope needs to be able to slide in the mount to get the right balance. This is particularly important as the new telescope will be heavier than the 90mm Mead telescope.
  • I want to be able to attach the Mead telescope to the GOTO mount too.

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Windows Update with PowerShell

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We generally connect to backend servers via a jump-box or bastion host. On Windows this means RDP into the jump-box, then RDP from the jump-box to the backend server. However, recently a Windows update meant that the jump-box (which had the update) couldn’t RDP to the backend server (which hadn’t got the update). No RDP => no access to update the VM to restore RDP. Lots of fun!

In that case I managed to use Remmina from a Linux box to access the backend directly; however since we are going to hit this issue again we needed a better fix.

Cue PowerShell; this is deployed via Octopus so will work when RDP doesn’t. As an additional perk it means updating becomes much easier.
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