Fiery Friday - Power Hacksaw

Yeah that's right, I said power hacksaw. Most people are familiar with a band saw, but this is a hacksaw that is powered by an electric motor. I was fortunate enough to find this 1930's Miller Knuth power hacksaw at a used tools dealer down near the city. I got it for pretty cheap since it had more than a few problems. The dealer told me he took it out of an old warehouse that used to make shopping carts and this power hacksaw used to cut the tubing for them. That is so cool! After I got it home (wow is this little thing heavy), I took it entirely apart (I'm a guy, it's what I do best with my new toys) and cleaned the many years of oily grime off of it. To keap it looking "old" I decided not to paint it and instead rubbed a light coating of oil over the whole thing.

Here it is after about 30 minutes of being home. Every piece of this thing has an old feel to it. All of the screws and bolts have no markings like you would find with the ones at the hardware store. Most everything is made of cast iron. One thing that really concerned me was a tooth missing off of the large drive gear. I ended up drilling and taping two small holes where the tooth once was, bottoming out a couple of screws in the holes and filling in the entire tooth with brazing rod. It then looked like three teeth were one large one.

 After about an hour of filing out a new tooth from the block of brass, I got the two gears to mesh together smoothly again. The arm that connected the drive gear to the blade holder was busted in two so I had to braze it back together. Whoever had been using it before had too tight of a belt and ran the pulleys loose on the shafts. This wore the holes in the pulleys and the keyway on the shafts. I was able to use a ball peen hammer to push the keyway back into place and decrease the oversized hole in the pulleys. It's not an absolute perfect fix, but it should be fine for many years as long as I replace that tight belt with a larger one.

This picture was taken right after I finished putting it back together, lubed everything up and let it cut it's first piece of steel in years. I still have a few things to fix and adjust, but as of right now it cuts smooth ans straight even with the old partially bent blade it came with. Once I get it working a bit better I'll get some video of it running and post it here for you to see. If you have any appreciation of old tools, you'll really get a kick out of seeing one of these run. 

Thanks again for stopping by!