Dez’ workshop builds- foot powered shrinker/stretcher stand.

I have now been quantity surveying this build.

For the steel framework, i.e. no drawer or door construction, with a 6mm steel over 36mm wood top and 3/4” ply backboard and sides, but no top shelf/lighting factored in, I’m already over 450kg and £700 in materials.

I was starting to wonder if that was a trifle excessive, but then 12 feet’s worth of stainless SGS cabinets with top boxes would be 350kg and £1600, and they’re rubbish in comparison.

Final figures will probably be about 600kg empty and the best part of a grand in materials.

As this is going to be a major undertaking I think I’m going to have to phase the construction to make it viable. I best end up with this as a bench for life, I wouldn’t have to make it again!

Art deco and storm proof with such a weight. Very cool!

Ciara and Dennis have nothing on you.

Funnily enough I was looking at something like this after seeing the retro style rollcab that one of the forumites bought himself. Well cool 😎

Well as this is retro rides, I can’t actually start the thing without backtracking and doing 3 other things first, can I? 😂

Part of my overall holistic workshop approach I’m taking this year is that if something is in the workshop, it has to pull its weight. So it has to work perfectly and be something I actually use often enough to justify.

First victim/beneficiary of that is this-


Its a hydraulic hacksaw. More specifically It’s a speedax 9”. Everyone who’s got 9 inches likes to show it off, right? Just be careful who you show it to or you’ll end up on a register.

Not sure why it’s a 9”, it must either be able to cut 9” or has a 9” stroke or something. It’ll do 4” square anyway so that’s all I really care about. For scale, the bit of blue box section in it is 50x50, so it’s a big ol’ lump.

I bought it a bit before the fire, tried it once, found a problem, every other job I needed to do was in a hurry so I didn’t get round to fixing the issues before using it properly. In the fire it just got a bit wet as it was in the unburnt corner, and it’s sat in the salvage storage area ever since.
But since I’m going to need to cut up a large amount of steel stock for this build, now would be an opportune time to sort it out.
It actually seems a fairly decent bit of kit, it’s doesn’t seem to have any discernible wear, and has a proper belt driven coolant feed setup.

It plugs in and works-ish, but the issue i’d identified was belt slip on the drive belts. I replaced the belts and it didn’t help much, but as you can see here the adjuster is maxed out.



So i decided the easiest thing to do was just cut that bit of angle off with the adjuster slots in, and let a bit of angle into it next to the back plate, so it resets the adjusters about halfway down the slots.

I took it off, stripped all the pulleys off and wire wheeled em all up and cleaned and regreased all the bearings.

Then I cut and ground the huge amount of weld off attaching the bit of angle. It looked like this has been messed around with at least twice before judging the old welds going on.


Cleaned up and location marked for the extension.


And in place. The angle was fractionally bigger than the bit on there so I just sloped the outer edges to meet up, you’ll see what I mean in a mo.


Other bit back on and ground up.


I then refitted it, did it up a bit tighter and the belts don’t seem to slip now. Not that I really got to try it properly, as the hydraulics had got loads of water in where they’d put the fire out, turning the fluid to emulsion-


Lovely. The hydraulics are odd on one of these in a couple of ways. One, it has an open hydraulic reservoir inches away from a swarf-creating blade. Hardly ideal but it seems to not effect it too much.

The other thing is the term ‘hydraulic hacksaw’ itself.
The name would suggest that the hydraulics would be in some way responsible for the cutting, wouldnt it? Well they’re not. The to-and-fro of the blade is created by nothing more exciting than an electric motor, a few pulleys and a crankshaft operating on a blade frame on a slide by means of a connecting rod.
What the hydraulics do is control the descent of the blade. If you look at the size of the counterweight above the blade, it weighs a ton. Under its own weight it just jams the blade into the workpiece way too hard, snags up and either breaks the blade or slips the pulleys.

I’m still struggling to understand exactly how the hydraulics work, but I’ve not fully stripped the valve block yet. What I think happens is this-
There is a small piston driven off a second crankshaft on the main driveshaft, that seems to pump oil into the bottom of the big piston that holds up the hacksaw arm. It has a knob with a needle valve that seems to go into the end of the smaller piston, acting as flow control. But then it’s not really a pressurised system as there is also a bypass hole on the bottom of the big cylinder that bleeds back into the reservoir. If the pump stops the arm would drop. So I guess it’s never fully capable of stopping the arm descending, it just slows it so it drops gracefully/gradually, and you can adjust that with the flow control valve.

This is the reservoir once removed from the saw and stripped down. Yes, absolutely everything is cast iron!
I’ve now got all the bits in the parts washer and will continue tomorrow once all the emulsified oil has been cleaned out.

Looking forward to the bench/cupboard build, if its anything like your vehicle builds it will be a work of art!

I won’t be putting doors in front of the shelves, I’ll be putting drawer fronts onto the swing out shelves, so that won’t be an issue.

I happy they’ll do what I want em to do.

Look, it works!



You will notice the pump does actually pump enough fluid to hold the blade up. It’s not until i open the valve a bit more the blade descends.
But you will also notice at the end it jams.
It took me a while fiddling and messing about to stop this, it turns out it just needed the slider for the frame adjusting and oiling, as well as the flow control on the hydraulics tweaking a bit.

This is the third cut I did, it takes 35 secs from blade contact to go through 50x50x3 box section, which I think is pretty good. That’s cutting dry, I still have the coolant pump to sort yet.



After that I dragged out some massive 120x60x6 RHS (that’s rectangular hollow section to the uninitiated, the technical term for non square box section), and had a go on that to see how it handled it.
It’s material I had saved for another workshop project, a massive chassis table I’m making, but more on that other time. You’ll see I manually fed some cutting oil here to help the blade on the thicker material.


And the good news is that not only did it go through the heavy material with no hassle, It produces a very nice cut-


I’d also taken some time to set set up the vice on the saw so it was perpendicular to the blade. I’m pretty happy with that degree of accuracy.


So, apart from recommissioning the coolant feed, and a bit of paint maybe, I’m good to go on the bench build really. I was going to make a couple go roller trestles to help with materials handling, but it turns out I have a pair of axle stands that are exactly the same height as the saw bed, so I don’t need to really. May still do it further down the line though.