Carbide bandsaw blades

Steve I get regular bandsaw blades from

and find both the blades and the service excellent. They also have silicon steel blades similar to the Timber Wolf and these are excellent as well. I sharpen my blades a la Steve Russell and find that i get about three sharpenings per blade before metal fatigue sets in on my 72" blade. If you do go the carbide route it would be nice to know how it works out.

I concur with Darrell. The problem with me is when I am not careful I break the blade when I get around blanks. I soon learned that (with my band saw) the base of the blank has to be square with the blade. Otherwise the blade binds and breaks. Replacing a broken carbide blade is more expensive than a metal one. When selecting a carbide blade I would inquire about the teeth configuration to cut green wood. For the average band saw a 4 skip tooth works good. That is 4 teeth per inch with one racker. A large band saw work fine with a

3 teeth per inch with one racker. Let us know how you make out with the carbide blade.

I am lucky to have a Lennox blade dealer here in town, and can get anything that I need from him. For general bowl blank roughing a bimetal blade works best. They last a lot longer than other blades. While I haven't used anything else, I have several friends who have switched to them and this is what they have told me. They are a utility blade and good for rough work. I do have a carbide tipped blade that costs about double what a bimetal blade does (150 inch by 1 1/4 blade $75 to $180). I did use one for bowl blanks for a while just to see how they did. They work fine, but don't seem to last any longer. They are made for resawing board stock, and the dealer said that they are a must have if you are planning to resaw your own veneers. I can get a surface that needs almost no sanding with them, but are overkill for bowls. robo hippy

snipped-for-privacy@nb.sympatico.ca wrote:

Note that the blade will be square with any flat base. It's tip and pinch that get you. Suggestions for flattening if you're not the best with a chainsaw include scrub/jack/block planes, or perhaps you might want to lay the piece flat on its broad face on the drillpress table and make stopped, overlapping Forstner bores for parallel, it that's what you're after.

I find a circle cutting jig to be an excellent way to do round things, as it keeps you from the other blade-destroyer, turning the blank/blade while not cutting. No choice but to cut with the jig.

Steve, I know you asked about carbide bandsaw blades, but for green wood how often do you need to interpose a bandsaw between your chain saw and a tool that's made for making wood round ...the lathe?

Turn to Safety, Arch Fortiter

Thanks for all the help. My main need to is to get bigger logs round so that i can put them on my limited Jet 1236. It doesnt do well with large octagons blanks.

I will look into resharpening and also staying with timberwolf blades.

Steve

Hi Steve

But if you want to make larger turnings, you should maybe get a larger lathe, or saw the corners of the octagonal blanks one more time with your chain saw while you are at it anyway, ;-)))))

But seriously, if the above isn't in the cards, ( I seldom use my band saw for making bowl blanks, but I do sometimes), use the silicon steel bands, that are thicker than normal .032" 4 TPI 1/2" wide, the blades have a wider set and they are called the "turner/carver bands" by the makers,(where I get them from) but you need wheels that are larger than

12" I think it is, I was paying something like 15 cents an inch, and for that price it is pretty hard to do better with carbide teeth bands IMO.

Have fun and take care Leo Van Der Loo

massmans wrote:

I have used the carbide blades for resawing and cutting blanks. I will only use it on something that I know for sure doesn't have rocks in it. I was making venier from a madrona burl and had the misfortune to find a rock in it, or rather the blade did and as it was a 3/4 it could not be resharpened. They are costly. Stick with the bimetals.

Brian

I spent a lot of time in front of industrial bandsaws over the years, and the conclusion I came to was the same as above- the Lennox bi-metal blades will cut almost as long and just as well as carbide tipped, and cost less. They're just plain tough, and if they can cut steel 24 hours a day for a week or better, I can't imagine that there are many woods that are going to hurt them much!

Hi Prometheus

The problem with the bi-metal blades is to many TPI and not enough set on them for sawing wet wood, they'll bind up and do just not work well sawing wet wood I found, the once or twice I tried sawing wood on my saw with the Bi-metal in place, also most BI-metal bands are wider than thicker than the wood bands, they need more power and bigger wheel sizes. One other thing that does make a big difference is the saw speed in metal sawing or wood sawing, where the wood sawing blades feed at approx. 10X the speed of steel blades, as speed goes up so does the friction and heat, but if you can find some bi-metal bands that do have the 3 or 4 TPI with a good wide set than it might be more economical to use one of those.

Have fun and take care Leo Van Der Loo

Prometheus wrote:

Speed may be a big factor, now that you mention it- but TPI doesn't really need to be.

There were two common tooth sets that I've used in steel fabrication-

2-3 and 3-4. Each used an alternating tooth count, as I'm sure you can guess by the designation, 2 tpi on one inch, and 3 on the next. The 2-3s gave a fairly rough finish on metal, but would be pretty good for wood, and IIRC, they had a fairly good set to them- I do recall turning off the coolant and sawing large oak beams a couple of times for things like rebuilding the loading dock after a careless truck driver managed to rip off the bumpers, and building heavy shop stands. It was a mess to clean the chips out of a saw with a coolant tray, but it ripped through those massive beams like they were paper.

That being said, they *were* wide and thick- you've got a point there. The ones I've used had a kerf of .063", and were 1.25" wide. That

1/16" kerf did not reflect the simple thickness of the blade- it was due to the set of the teeth. The blades themselves were .032" thick, and the rest was set. Just for comparison, the carbide toothed blades had a kerf of over .125" Even if they were sharper, that's still quite a lot more material to remove.

But you've got to have some pretty big wheels in the bandsaw to run those suckers- perhaps my thinking was incorrect when I assumed that Lennox makes smaller versions for other saws. I think, but do not recall for certain, that they do make similar blades with a thinner band for the smaller cut-off saws, which are not that different from a vertical wood bandsaw. Then again, my somewhat hazy recollection (the smaller cutoffs were secondary only) is of 3/4" wide bands with a slightly finer tooth count- perhaps 5-6. If that's the biggest bite they've got, they may not work for resawing- but in any case, I'd still go for the bi-metals over carbide bandsaw blades in a heartbeat!

Thinking back on this made me recall one other thing about bandsaw blades I never really considered in the wood shop. The Lennox bi-metal blades were "self sharpening"- that isn't to say that they stayed perpetually sharp, but rather that they required a much lighter feed pressure and slower band speed when they were installed new for the first 10 cubic inches (in steel) of the material cut. Ignoring that break-in procedure reduced the life of the blade by almost %75. I don't know if the same logic applies to wood bandsaws, but it may be worth a little investigation. Hard to say how a guy might slow down the band speed with a saw that has only one speed, but it's certainly not difficult to reduce the feed rate for the first (100?) cubic inches of hardwood cut, and it might help the blades last longer and cut better.

I have used the 3-4 carbide on wood and the finish was outstanding. I did a bunch of fine boxes that required very little sanding.

Brian

Some even recommend such a procedure. Notably the ones I purchased from Woodworkers' Supply when they had a deal on 'em. Never seen it elsewhere.

The only place I ever even thought about it was on industrial metal bandsaws, but I don't imagine it would hurt anything to apply the same practice to the woodworking blades. I'll have to remember that the next time I swap blades out myself.

A slow cut for the first while does make sense. (muse, muse, muse). When a blade is new or newly sharpened, it cuts faster than the old, dull one. Hense the temptation is to move the wood through quickly. However, a band saw blade like all other saws, is designed to clear sawdust from the cut. The gullets act as dust carriers to move the dust through the cut and then deposit it at the other end. I presume that a fast push through with a sharp blade would generate a lot of sawdust but not sufficient time to clear it all. This would generate heat that would shorten the effective time of the sharpening. I think that blades tend to have a good sharp time, a much longer effective time (sharp enought) and a sudden "sharpen me" time or at least a period where we sit back and say "I should do something about that blade before it breaks."

Remember: the time to replace the blade is 15 minutes of cutting before you did.

You are probably right about the metal and wood bi-metal blades, and I should have maybe been more specific in that I was talking about the metal sawing bi-metal blades, that I use on my band saw, I have hung a second motor plus a jack shaft on my band saw, to bring the speed of the blade down to be able to saw metal on my band saw. And those metal sawing blades need more beam strength and are thicker as well, TPI are many more than 3 or 4, however I would expect that there are blades with that number of TPI, but the Idea that there be at least 3 teeth in the piece that is cut, would indicate the piece to be at more than 1" thick, seems slow going with that few cutting edges, but there are of course exceptions. The metal sawing blades have mostly 12 or many more TPI. The silicon steel instead of bi-metal is I think a result of the use of smaller wheels and less HP, bi-metal are normally made with just the front edge of the band being harder, the rest just more flexible steel, making thus the name BI-METAL, however that harder edge is still vulnerable to breaking, shortening the life of the band, silicon steel has added wear resistance build in and is less likely to break, making it the better choice for smaller saws IMO. And as almost always there are exceptions, like very abrasive wood etc., just my 2cents

My setup for saw> This is a real head scratcher for me Leo, all I have ever used are bi

Ah, now I see what you're talking about- those hacksaw-type blades you can get for the bandsaw. As far as I know, those are for making nicer cuts in things like sheet metal. What I was referring to are blades for cutting off pipe or solid stock on a horizontal hydraulic or gravity-fed bandsaw. In the case I was referring to, a higher tooth count will give a nicer edge, but takes forever to cut anything- the standard is a much lower TPI, and they can rip right though most metals very quickly compared to what you're describing- though I am thinking that if you were to put on on a vertical bandsaw and tried to use it to cut thin metal, it would be a dangerous situation. Not bad if you're resawing wood, though.

You may certainly be right there- a small woodshop bandsaw is not the same thing as a big saw in a metal shop. Despite what I've said about it in this thread, I just use the cheap bands they sell at Farm and Fleet- they hold up well enough for the price, and I only have to change them once or twice a year in any case. *But* I do not do any resawing with my little 10" delta.