Table Saws - Good Carbide Blades Are Essentional For Top Quality Work
Replacing the steel blades on your saw with carbide blades will have a dramatic effect on your work. Once you use one, you’ll never want to work with a cheap blade again. The reasons?
Quality carbides are normally sharper than ordinary steel blades. And their teeth are so hard they stay sharp. A good carbide will probably go at least 10 times as long between sharpenings as a steel blade.
But sharpness is not the only key to a smooth cut. Quality blades are also more carefully made.
The blade blanks are ground dead true and flat, so there’s no wobble. Their holes are dead center. And the teeth are precisely ground.
All this sounds pretty basic, but it makes a huge difference, not just in smoothness of cut, but in smoothness of operation.
Good carbide blades run so smoothly they are more relaxing to use. They seem to slice rather than hack and chew their way through wood.
Carbide blades come in three general types:
Ripping blades. These are designed to make fast cuts along the grain of the wood. As a rule, some smoothness is usually sacrificed for cutting speed. They will cut across the grain, but very roughly. I would buy a ripping blade only if I had a lot of ripping to do on a regular basis.
Crosscuts blades. These are for cutting across the grain and for cutting plywood, particleboard and hardboard. They do this very smoothly. The best will produce cuts so smooth they almost seem polished. Crosscuts will also rip, but they’ll do so slowly, and they tend to get hot and burn the wood. A crosscut is a good choice if you do mostly crosscutting, and only rip an occasional piece of softwood, 3/4 of an inch or less thick.
Combination blades. These are probably the best bet for most home shops. They’ll do a very good (but not perfect) job of both ripping and crosscutting. I have one on my table saw and use it almost all the time. If I have to rip some thick hardwood, I’ll put on a special ripping blade, and if I need superfine crosscuts on something splinter-prone like oak veneer plywood, I may slip on a special fine crosscut blade.
Once you decide on the type of blade that’s best for you, make sure you get a good one. Good blades are easy to spot. They’ll have large carbide tips, neatly brazed into pockets cut in the steel teeth. Both the tips and the body or ”plate” of the blade will be smoothly ground.
Good blades are usually rated for use at high speeds (often as high as 7,000 rpm), while cheaper blades may be rated down around 3,000 rpm.
Tags: carbide blades, carbides, quality blades, saw, steel blade, table saws