Drive Motor and Belt on the Grizzly G0555X Bandsaw

One side of the G0555X that you rarely see shown is the back.
In the photo at right you'll notice something that is perhaps unexpected; the motor. Not that you wouldn't expect a bandsaw to have a motor, but most cabinet-mounted bandsaws have the motor enclose within the base cabinet. This not only keeps the motor free of dust and debris, it also lowers the center of gravity. The good news is this saw has what is called a TEFC motor, which is an abbreviation for "Totally Enclosed Fan Cooled". That means that while dust and chips that slide off the table may fall onto the motor, the motor itself will not suck-in the dust.

The other thing that you'll observe it there is no belt shown running from the motor to the lower wheel. On the Delta 14" bandsaw (and most of it's clones) the belt runs from the motor in the base to a drive pulley on the back of the saw. This is then covered by some form of belt cover. Some of these are well done, but most appear to be flimsy afterthoughts.

The photo below is from the owners manual for the G0555X, though note that it shows the aluminum wheel found on the lighter 14" saws. This is fine with me because if they had shown the cast iron wheels we wouldn't be able to see all that we can see. What can we see? Well, quite a bit. We can see the integrated 4" dust port, the tension adjuster for belt tensioning and most importantly, hey, there's the drive belt! This doesn't concern me as long as the saw is ALWAYS attached to a dust collector, but it wouldn't take much debris build-up to cause problems between the belt and the pulleys.

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