Choosing the Right Table Saw Blades

Woodworkers agree that a table saw is at the heart of a woodworking shop. Good question. What's then at the heart of the table saw? Blade selection. And that's what I wanna talk about today is helping you understand what it takes to make sure you've got the best possible blade on your table saw for any operation that you're doing. Now, before we talk about the blade specifically, let me give you a little blade tip. Notice that I've got the blades up here on top of my rip fence, and I'm fine with that. I'm also fine with setting the blades off over here on my side table, which is covered in plastic laminate. I'm not fine with setting the blades down on the cast iron. And the reason for that is that just that incidental contact with a metal surface, like my cast iron table saw table, can have the effect of some damage to the teeth on my blade. Once we've got a great quality blade in the shop wanna make sure we protect the integrity of that blade. I grabbed onto this blade first. This is a good general purpose blade for you to have on your table saw, meaning it's good at ripping and at cross cutting. Now I can tell by looking at it that this gonna do a good job in a rip and the blades I set aside earlier are not designated rip blades. Here's how I can tell. It's by looking at the valleys in between the teeth. Those valleys to be more technical, are called gullets. And when we do ripping operations we wanna be sure we have big gullets in the blade. Let me point out why. Got a piece of Walnut here and a pocket knife and what I wanna show you is that when we rip, what that means is that we're cutting in the same direction as the grain, just like me taking this knife and doing this. Now, when I use the knife in the same direction as the grain I get big chips that come off. Alternatively, when I use the pocket knife and I come across the end grain, look at what I get there. I get these little fibers, tiny, tiny little chunks of wood. When we rip with the table saw blade this is also what's happening with the blade which is we're getting these larger pieces of wood. That's why we need a larger gullet in our blade in order to carry those larger particles away. If you don't have a big gullet, it's not gonna be able to excavate the material out of the cut. As a result, we could get some overheating. It's not good for the blade. So we wanna make sure we've got a 40 tooth or less blade in the saw when we're doing ripping. I wanna talk about the tooth geometry. This is an ATB and what that stands for is alternate top bevel. And looking closely at the blade, it provides a tooth pattern that has a tooth to the left, tooth to the right, tooth to the left, tooth to the right stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight. But what we wanna do is stick with table saw blades here. What we have is a very distinct point on each tooth. That tooth is gonna do a great job of cutting its path through the wood, providing a really, really excellent surface finish on the edge of the material. What I'm gonna do next is get this mounted in my saw. Of course the is unplugged for that. Then we can have a look at a test cut. With that 40 tooth alternate top bevel blade, get a couple things. We can rip the material, feed it, at a reasonably good rate. Fed through there at a pretty good clip. The other thing I wanna look at , is the quality of cut here on the edge. Like I said that 40 tooth ATB is a good blade for you to pick to have in your saw for both ripping and cross cutting. Next thing we'll have a look at is blades that have a more dedicated purpose in your shop, such as this blade. This blade is an 80 tooth blade. So as always the tooth count defines how many teeth are around the rim. This is a blade that we could dedicate for cross cutting and also for working with sheet goods. In addition to looking at the tooth count itself, let's talk again about the tooth geometry. On this blade, if we look at the hook angle, what that means is that we can see it right here, it's 10 degrees. That number defines how steeply the tooth leans into the cut. So if we drew a line right up the center axis of the blade and could measure from the face of the tooth to that line, it would be pitched forward at 10 degrees. It's a little bit less aggressive cut than what we just made, then the blade that we just set up, that 40 tooth ATB. The other thing about this blade, when we look at it this way, it's, what's called a triple chip grind, which is designated as TCG, triple chip grind. We've got a tooth that's flat, then one that's kinda tombstone shaped. It's flat on the top, the corners are ground off, then flat, corners off, flat, corners off. When it comes to blade selection on a triple chip grind as a general rule, it's gonna be longer between sharpenings from this blade, comparatively, to the alternate top bevel. Let's have a look next at the cut quality we can get from this blade using it as a cross-cut blade in our solid wood. I'll get my saw unplugged, do a blade swap, we'll come back and have a look at the cut. Now that we're set up with that 80 tooth blade I'll get the saw plugged back in and we'll have a look at cut quality when cross cutting solid wood like this piece of walnut. What am I checking here? I'm looking across that end grain, seeing if I've got any big dramatic saw marks left behind. 'Cause what that's gonna affect is how much sanding I have to do later to clean up that end grain. So we're looking for the cut quality we have here. Very, very, very few saw marks on the end grain, really good cut quality in cross cutting solids and that 80 tooth triple chip grind blade. Now we've got one more blade over here. What's the dealio with that? Similar to the blade we just looked at, but this one instead of an 80 tooth is a 60 tooth. And if we look here at the hook angle, it's a 15 degree hook. It's a little bit more aggressive cut, still a triple chip grind. This is a blade that's designated really for particle board products. I love using the triple chip grind on anything. that's an abrasive material like particle board. MDF, melamine, because the triple chip tooth pattern really stands up well to those products. So once again, we'll get the saw unplugged, do a blade swap here, and have a look at a cut. Melamine really provides quite the acid test for cut quality. It's got a plasticized surface on both faces and as a result, a lotta times as the blade is exiting on the bottom side, it can have a tendency to chip a little bit. So with our 60 tooth, triple chip grind blade, 15 degree positive hook, let's have a look at cut quality on our melamine. So we've got a couple of things I wanna check. One is the cut quality right there along that top edge. And the other thing we wanna have a look at is cut quality along the bottom edge. Look at that nice sharp corner we have on both the top and the bottom of the cut. It's the kinda cut quality I'm looking for from a blade when I'm using it in a material like this, that's hard to cut and melamine. If it does a good job in melamine, it's gonna do a real good job in typical veneered materials, like plywoods that have a hardwood veneer on it. So let's go back and revisit some of what we talked about here. Here at the heart of the shop the table saw you wanna make sure that the table saw has got a good blade in it, it's a blade that's designed to do the cut you're asking it to do, so make sure you've got the right tooth count for the operation, the right tooth geometry for the operation, and by investing right from the get go in a good quality blade, you're gonna have a blade that's gonna work in your shop, just as hard as you do.