This study provides yet another possible mechanism for instability of bandsaw blades during sawing, namely dynamic instability of a moving plate when subjected to non-conservative tangential edge loading. In previous publications, the effect of non-conservative edge loading has been neglected; only the divergent buckling and the parametric instability have been considered as causes of unstable bandsaw blade motion. However, the non-conservative loading due to sawing can excite a flutter-type instability, similar to flutter in aeroplane wings. The extended Galerkin method is used to discretize the equation of motion, and a non-self-adjoint eigenvalue solver is employed to find the solutions. (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited