Selecting a Sliding Miter Saw Blade

You just can't beat the quality of cuts that you can get from a good sliding miter saw set up with a good blade. So that's what I wanna talk to you about today is what characteristics to look for when you're shopping for a blade for your sliding saw. Make sure you get the right one hung in there. A couple of things now I wanna point out for you to look for when you're shopping for a blade to get on your sliding miter saw. First is let's talk about tooth count. So this 80 right here tells me 80 teeth around the rim of this 10 inch blade. I'd like to see that number at least 60, 80 is better. That's part of what works to give you that nice, smooth cut. Like I just saw on the end grain of that piece of red Oak. The other thing that's really, really important is what's called the hook angle on the teeth shown right here on the blade. It's a negative five. Now what that means is that, when you look at the teeth themselves, that tooth is leaning back away from the cut at a negative degree. What we wanna do is make sure that you don't get a real strong, positive hook on this. That could be grabby on the material that you're trying to cut. So negative five is good up to positive seven. As far as acceptable hook angle goes for your blade. That grabby idea also affects our tooth count. You don't wanna just grab any blade you have for your tables on, get it on your sliding miter saw if this tooth count is too aggressive meaning the number is too small. It's gonna be very, very grabby and a little bit dangerous when you bring it over here and try to cut wood with it. So again, fine tooth count negative hook angle up to about seven degrees positive. The other thing that we can see here on the blade if you go back to our hook angle, call-out right there. It says TCG. What that stands for is the tooth geometry itself. That means triple chip grind. And for that, if we look at the tooth, so if we look at this tooth right here, it's got kind of a tombstone look to at the top of it is flat. This corner has been ground off. The opposite corners has been ground off. That's the triple chip part one, two, three that triple chip grind is a great tooth geometry to have for a sliding miter saw where you're gonna be cutting slightly abrasive materials. So if you commonly cross cut on your miter saw anything in the particle board family, non-ferrous metals like I'm about to show you in a second. Triple chip grind is a great choice for that. If you're primarily working with salad, wood and alternate top bevel tooth pattern will work fine for that. So a bunch of characteristics here make sure you're shopping the right characteristics. I'm gonna get this blade back on the saw and show you just how well it does cross cut and even something non-ferrous like piece of aluminum. I've got the blade back on the miter saw here. I'm set up to cut this piece of aluminum. Now, one thing to notice about this approach is that I've got a wooden block behind the aluminum angle iron to support it. That's gonna help make sure we don't get a lot of burrs on the inside of the cut watch. Just how well this works. So there we are. That's nice and clean on the inside. Just a second or two with a piece of sandpaper a file's gonna take off the tiny bit of burr we've got there. So a couple of reminders about getting the right blade on your sliding saw. We want negative hook up to about 70 degrees positive high tooth count 60 to 80 teeth on a 10 inch blade. I really liked that triple chip grind which gives me the ability to get into these more abrasive materials like non-ferrous metal, MDF, particle board, plastic laminate, plexiglass. So it's a really, really good blade to hang on the side and make sure you're getting the best possible cut out of your slider.