I'm doing a lot of ripping of maple flooring scraps on my TS using a combination blade. The scraps are edge joined to make larger panels, but I currently need to run the ripped pieces through the planer to get the ripped edges clean enough for gluing. I'm ready to spring for a good ripping blade, but there are so many choices. Freud alone must have 6 or 8 blades they recommend for glue line ripping.
I searched the web and Fine Woodworking for rip saw blade reviews, but I didn't find anything. If you have nay personal recommendations for or against a particular blade, I'd love to hear them.
More teeth make better cuts if you have a good fence and a good arbor - and lots of power. Geometry of the much-revered Woodworker II or the less-touted Freud and Oldham (and others I haven't tried) is normally about
50 teeth. Should do 3/4 maple on a 1.5 HP saw, all things being equal. I'm such a dinosaur I automatically join a fresh edge, though the days of my
30-tooth all steel rip blade are long past. Still have one of the old steel hollow-ground blades, and it's top-notch, but getting tough to find sharpening service.
both the Forrest WWII and the Freud double melamine blades do super smooth cuts. those are the only two I can vouch for. I'm willing to bet there are a whole lot more blades out there up to the task. Since those 2 blades work so well for me, I'm not gonna try any others, at this point.
I've had great luck with CMT sawblades. They have a 10" 60 tooth "cabinetmakers" blade that I get great performance from for general use and has been to the sharpening shop twice and comes back for more. I have no reservation recommending it for glue joints. I do also have a Woodworker II but it's so expensive I tend to save it for only the most critical cuts, hands down the best blade I've got in the 10" collection. Here is also a review from shopnotes I found.
Eric, I must be a lot more lazy than you because I had every intention of putting in the WWII for the "special" cuts. No way can I do that; it stays in the TS unless I cut melamine and then I put in the Freud double sided melamine blade to avoid ALL chip out. I don't have the patience to keep changing blades. Besides, NOT using the WWII is kinda like putting plastic wrap on your sofa. :)
dave
Eric Johns> I've had great luck with CMT sawblades. They have a 10" 60 tooth
No doubt, I love it. Lock and key for 2 reasons. I have several thousand Bd ft of reclaimed walnut in the storage shed that came from an old barn that most of my projects have been made from lately. I do my best with the metal detector but... I have one of the more well equiped shops around and have frequent "can I quick do this" types stopping in. You know the folks I mean, the ones when the works done and equipment is shut down you hand 'em a bud light and save the Moosehead for yourself . EJ
For lots of ripping of hardwoods, I prefer a Freud Industrial or Systematic rip blade over my WWII.
The WWII rips fine, with a very occasional burn, usually due to me swapping hands or stopping for some other reason. I find the dedicated rip blades faster and easier to use if I've got a lot to do.
We sell the Freud line of blades, so you can take this for what it is worth.
The Freud LM74 Anti-Vibe Glue Line rip blade is as fine a rip blade as you are likely to find. Freud's anti-vibe technology and solid understanding of the cutting geometry required to obtain perfect cuts has made this my first choice. Rip blades have deep gullets and fewer teeth than cross cut blades so that the long stringy chips created don't end up getting cut and recut, or plugging in shallower gullets.
I haven't tried it myself, but Freud's demonstration of this blade involved ripping 1/8" thick strips off the edge of an oak board, then reassembling them. I was difficult to see where one piece started and the next one ended.
Feel free to talk to my Technical Director, Darin Lawrence at 1-800-443-7937 for additioal information.
I've got a Freud 30 tooth finish rip blade that does a marvelous job. IIRC< DeWalt has recently come out with a 40 tooth rip blade, but I've not used it. Any good 24 or 30 tooth 10" rip blade should work just fine.
Charlie Self "To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology." Mark Twain's Notebook
Read up on glue line ripping by doing a Google search. It's worth the time.
I use a Leuco Glue Line Blade (been using the same blade for ten years and never needed to do more than a tune up with a diamond hone) and, when doing repetitive cuts, I move the stock feeder from it's normal position on the shaper to the tablesaw, so as to eliminate the feed rate/direction/holddown variable.
It's important to set the blade up dead parallel to the fence and it's more important that the fence not move or flex under feed pressure.
Experiment with blade heights before doing your production run. The blade height/angle of attack has a lot to do with the result.
Once you are set up it is easy to get nearly jointer quality rips out of the tablesaur, providing that you ignore the people who say that the fence should be kicked out 1/64" (a huge amount) from front to back.
The fence shoulf be as parallel to the cutting plane of the blade as is humanly possible and your stock prep should have already taken care of bows and bellies.
Hoadley is good on the understanding of joint edge quality in relation to gluing. I don't have his current version but the old one is very informative on this.
Good Luck. Thomas J. Watson-Cabinetmaker (ret) Real Email is: tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet Website:
Oh I dunno Gudeo Guedo Geudo some such name and I have had several fingers of Rum so don't pin me arse to the blackboard for mispelling the blasted name. < Ayup blame it on Demon Rum, throw a nickle on the drum save < another drunken shipwright! :-))))))) >
nice dark Myers Rum, with a bit of Rose's Lime Juice and a piece of some kind of garbage, that was usually identified as a citrus of some sort - but it really didn't matter.
These were usually consumed in the shade of the mains'l, when the sun was over the yardarm - and all that good shit.
Given the fact that my largest sailing vessel is a board boat of indeterminate and unremarkable length, in theses dark and married days, and that I've no current use for gimballed drink holders, much to my regret, the whole friggin' thing don't serve no more than to make me cast a wondering eye onto what might have been - had I stayed single, and thus rich.
Ah well.
OBWW - I was just looking for a cheap sawblade to use in the place of these gottdamned 'spensive ones.
Thomas J. Watson-Cabinetmaker (ret) Real Email is: tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet Website:
I believe that Forrest recommends .005" if the fence is tight and 1/64th if there is any slop. When I moved my WWII from the contractors saw to the new cabinet saw I went with a measured .005" and it works fine.
Awww, Tawmmy, Tawmmy - Yee know as well as I that yee would'n have the k'board ta complain on if'n it had'n be'n for the fortuitous intersection of the Old Boiler and Yee resultin' in your handsome state of current prosperity.
Eh? More teeth would make it a good cross cut (miter/mitre David) blade. From all I've come to know and respect a good glue line rip blade is way down on number of teeth embedded in the wood at one time.
More teeth = slow feed rate while ripping and burning.
You are right about more teeth requiring more power.
Of course I could be wrong but given the myths stated here (PVC dust collection starts fires/band saw wheels and coplanar/tipping your rip fence out away from the back edge of the blade) lately I'm thinking maybe we should get back to quoting the text and not passing along links to The Lumber Car.
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