Greetings all Whilst cleaning out yet another box/container marked "Stuff" I found that I have two "bits" of 1 inch band saw blade, about a foot and a half in length. Having seen videos on how to turn spade bits into router irons, I have two questions:
1) "What was I thinking?"
2) what can be done with a piece of band saw blade? It is not exactly stiff enough for use in plane, although it might work for a knife blade.
Any ideas for "alternative" uses?
------------------------- I mainly use thin hard steel from razor blades to car springs and flat pry bars for custom and replacement springs. The pry bar leaf spring cushions my sawmill's blade tensioner, which I set at 1000-1200 lbs. I forged a froe from a car spring.
Is this a wood or metal cutting blade?
Bandsaw blades for wood are soft enough to sharpen with a file and can be bent somewhat without breaking, as to set the teeth. When the one-man shop that resharpens my sawmill bands had trouble with his ageing equipment I made a roller filing guide and doubled the service life of my blades by touching up the 256 points. The custom spring in the guide indexes on the tooth gullet.
Metal cutting blades are much harder and difficult to rework, except by grinding or annealing and then hardening and tempering.
I ground the back edge of a long wood-cutting recip saw blade to a knife edge for a camping knife+saw but found it wasn't hard enough to stay sharp. As a saw it's been very useful, I even used it on the computer of an Apollo IC design workstation to allow a slightly larger replacement power supply to fit. Thus a hand-made tool helped me design a DRAM controller IC.