Found it! Well part of it.

My Unisaw has started making a funny noise a few weeks ago. I couldn't figure out what it was. I figured it would either quit or get worse. When it got worse I could find it.

Today I was changing the blade to a dado stack. With the blade off, I raised the shaft up to make it easier to reach when I noticed a spiral pattern in the dust on the elevating shaft. A quick look and I saw the noise maker. The pulley on the motor was rubbing on the shaft.

That meant I had to take the top off but the fix was simple enough. What I found was that set screw was missing in the pulley. Probably laying somewhere in the sawdust. I ran a HUGE old TV magnet in there but found nothing but the metal cabinet. Luckily I had a set screw in my parts. Put it back together, aligned it and no noise!

Doesn't sound too bad, it's nice when things go that easy.

Isn't it nice when a plan comes together?

Nice to see it was a straight forward fix, unlike your tractor eh

Jeff I am laughing, not at you but the situation. I had something similar on my bandsaw. With a very low amount of shop time, when I do get in my shop, I go, go,go...

So stopping to fix a rubbing noise is not something that I want to do. When my bandsaw broke a blade, I finally tore it down to find the pulley had moved and was hitting the guard around the bandsaw. It was a 5 minute fix and yet I let it go one for a few months.

I am hoping that maybe this fall I can go through my shop and adjust and reset all my tools to straight, square, level and flat. I used to do this once a month but ever since the baby came along, I just have not had the time.

Travis Johnson said:

Jeff I am laughing, not at you but the situation. I had something similar on my bandsaw. With a very low amount of shop time, when I do get in my shop, I go, go,go...

So stopping to fix a rubbing noise is not something that I want to do. When my bandsaw broke a blade, I finally tore it down to find the pulley had moved and was hitting the guard around the bandsaw. It was a 5 minute fix and yet I let it go one for a few months.

I am hoping that maybe this fall I can go through my shop and adjust and reset all my tools to straight, square, level and flat. I used to do this once a month but ever since the baby came along, I just have not had the time.

Click to expand...

Travis you don't have to adjust all the tools at the same time. Just do 1 each time you go out to the shop or one a week.

Jeff, I had a similar problem recently with my Delta midi lathe. It's a little over 5 years old, and it had been making a light "clack-clack-clack-clack" sound, especially when spinning down after I turned it off.

I assumed the problem was in one of the headstock bearings. I had heard that it was a good idea to replace the stock bearings; they could almost be counted on to fail, etc.

So ... I pulled the whole spindle assembly apart and figured out how to get the bearings off. When I spun each bearing by hand I couldn't hear anything like a "clack" but I could discern a slight dragging noise in one of them. I got out my digital calipers, measured the width, the outer diameters, the inner diameters, and then went online to discover the wonderful world of bearings.

A couple hours of research later, I had blazed a torturous web path from very expensive industrial bearings to the run-of-the-mill kind I really needed ... at an eBay store! I ordered 'em ... they arrived in a few days.

I reassembled the headstock spindle assembly with the new bearing set, turned the machine on ... and still got the light "clack-clack-clack-clack". Huh?

"Duh!" I said to myself, "I didn't even think about the bearings on the lower pulley shaft." (Shows what a noob I am ... that would be the shaft turned by the motor. Exactly where bearings don't belong! ) In the process of learning that the motor shaft didn't have external bearings, I noticed ... that ... I could turn the pulley a short distance back-and-forth on the motor shaft!

I removed the setscrew, saw where it had dug a widened divot into the shaft, spun the pulley halfway around the shaft, tightened the setscrew ... and the light "clack-clack-clack-clack" disappeared!

One of the things I do is used locktite when I am assembling a tool it sure helps take care of things in the future that could cause problems.

Or drive a set-screw on top of a set screw to hold it in. I've done that before.