Band saw blades

[stumpy]

I was aproaached by a guy who sells metal cutting bandsaw blades.  He tried selling me a metal cutting blade that he said would have a "deep enough" gullet that I could use for sawing logs or beams that I know have nails in them.  Have any of you tried this?

[Tom]

Don't believe him.  If he wants to give it to you to try, it would be worth a try.  Metal cutting blades generally have too many teeth per inch to make cutting wood economical.

Think of this scenario:

Woodcutting blades have tall teeth, deep gullets and few tpi so that they can cut faster and use fewer horsepower.  If you are zipping along at a pretty good clip, a nail will probably be contacted by the face of the tooth rather than the tip.  Rather than cutting the nail, the tooth breaks and so does the nail ...maybe.  If not, the next tooth hits it even deeper in the gullet on the face and it breaks too.  Then the next tooth.....

If you are cutting slow enough, some of the hard teeth on modern woodcutting bands may survive the contact because you stand a better chance of them contacting the nail with the tooth's point and small niblets may actually cut the nail in two.  You would be cutting so slowly in anticipation of hitting a nail that your production would be nil.  Then the tooth might not stand up anyway.

The only way to protect a blade and saw decent production is to remove the metal from the logs/beams.

[stumpy]

Thanks Tom!!

[mike_van]

I bought one of those cobalt tip blades from Suffolk just for one job [actually the customer bought it] Anyway, he had beams to saw, they needed a 1" board off three sides of several old beams to box in I beams.  They didn't want to chew the beams up digging out nails. That blade must have cut about 75 -100 nails, it was 3/4 pitch. Cost about 60.00 if I remember.  Well worth it.  Thing I was worried about most was all the sparks getting sucked into my dust system. I had an extinguisher and a few 5 gal pails of water, but didn't need them.

[logwalker]

So Mike, what was the production like? Joe

[mike_van]

It was good Joe, the blade has a large gullet, looks the same as their regular line. The tooth is super hard, when it cut a nail off, you didn't get the small chips stuck to the tooth face as the regular blades.  Way back then I didn't have a good sharpener, but after the job the blade was mine, I touched it up & used it some more, it finally cracked in a gullet like all the rest.