Hello Vic,
Like many of us, I had been making do using my Asian Horiz-Vert bandsaw in vertical position for bandsawing jobs, a marginal proposition at best. A couple of years ago I chanced across a Delta 14" woodcutting bandsaw (USA-made, all cast iron) in superb condition for a very fair price and picked it up with the intention of converting it to metal cutting. Primarily this involved one thing, slowing the blade speed down. My mentor as a young man had done this same thing with a butcher's meat bandsaw and it made a superb metal saw which he used for the rest of his life.
To accomplish this I decided to look for a 90° reduction gearbox with a NEMA "C-Face" motor mount which would accept the very nice C-Face pump motor I already had on hand. I had to wait and watch for a while but eventually one (David Brown Ltd) came up on eBay for a pittance and I picked that up. The gearbox case was cast in a way that allowed me to position the motor vertically as well as horizontally and I opted to mount it vertically in order to keep the machine footprint as small as it could be. I reverse-computed a combination of final blade speed, motor rpm, and gearbox reduction to arrive at the required pulley sizes. Very fortunately I found that standard step pulley sizes, all of which I had on hand, would put me within my target speed range.
In surveying the gear case casting I realized that by carefully boring (and inserting sleeve bearings) I could make the gearbox assembly a "carriage" of sorts and mount it on bar bedways, which I fabricated of angle iron and steel bar. Thus belt changes, tension adjustments, and belt removal could be easily done by sliding the entire motor gearbox assembly on these ways. A couple of inches either way was all that was required. I further added a tensioning leadscrew so that belt tension could be very accurately adjusted. The photo, which should explain all, is of a preliminary trial fit and everything is now in place and running.
Now the only thing left to do is create a better blade guide arrangement. The stock upper guide has quite a bit of overhang, that is, the point of blade contact is some distance away from the nearest point of guide attachment and there needs to be more rigid support.
