The Grizzly Industrial G0555 14″ Band Saw

The band saw is one tool that I think every home wood shop needs to have. It is an extremely versatile tool that can allow you to create intricately curved cuts, rip length of lumber, cross cuts and even re-sawing smaller logs into boards. While you might want to use other tools for some of these types of cuts for high precision the band saw is a great first step. Its small footprint means it can fit in almost any shop regardless of the space you have available. If you need to keep it mobile you can also get a caster attachment kit for the base. This allows you to roll it around and put it away when not in use.

Our shop leans on two versions of this saw. We have a Grizzly green version (Identical to the image) with a 6″ riser block kit and we also have a black anniversary edition without the riser block attachment. Both have a 1HP motor and a 14″x14″ deck. The riser block allows us to cut wood up to 12″ in height. This doesn’t come up often but the extra space is nice when working with larger sized pieces. For most users the riser block wouldn’t be an accessory that I would recommend simply because the extra $100 could be spent on additional blades or other accessories.

On the rear of the band saw is a 4″ dust collection port. You will never be able to suck up all of the dust a band saw creates but this port will allow you to buy a reduction fitting and attach a normal shop vac. I promise you that doing so will help keep things far cleaner than without. This is especially important when you’re cutting large numbers of pieces at once like the “snow” decoration shown here. During the initial production run of this piece we made just shy of 30 total units. That is almost 120  sections of 2×4 that needed to be milled to shape. The Grizzly G0555 does a good job of forcing the dust down towards the lower drive wheel and to the port for cleanup. When cutting thicker pieces you will still see some dust following the blade and appear to come from above as it cycles around. This is common and hard to prevent.