Bandsaw blade question, can you confirm or deny

[Scott Brandstetter]

I happened to be at my local Woodcrafter Store today, looking for a 143 inch blade for the new 19 inch grizzly. They didn't have any in stock and got to talking with Charlie. I asked him about carbide tipped blades (a fellow member told me to go all in with the carbide tipped blade) and he said they are great with "wet" wood but stink with kiln dried wood. Does this make sense...kind of new to high end blades and re-sawing. I had planned to buy a few wood slicers but it got me thinking. Any thoughts appreciated.

[Andrew Hughes]

Scott he must of got it mixed up,My experience has been the opposite green wood needs lots of set and big gullets.I have a woodmaster Ct it will do it but it gets gummed up pretty quick.And I'm sure it's shortining its life.

[glenn bradley]

Its always painful when a clerk has heard and misunderstood something (or perhaps just has a very different opinion) and passes it along as fact. You are right to get a second read on anything that sounds off.

[Julie Moriarty]

My personal experience does not enable me to confirm the clerk's claims. I don't cut green wood but I do use carbide blades on dried wood all the time and they work fine. I also have a few Woodslicer blades and when sharp work well but they dull quickly.

[Mike Cutler]

Scott

Agree with the rest. He either didn't understand your question, or did not listen to it completely, when he answered it.

Kiln dried wood, and hard dense tropicals, are the bread and butter of carbide tooth blades. They're the reason, along with life of blade and quality of cut, that you spend 4 or 5 times as much for a single blade.

As a tip;
You're probably looking at spending $200+ dollars for a carbide tipped blade for your saw to do resawing with. Do not use that blade for anything else, no matter how convenient it is. Especially do not cut a curve with that blade. ;)

[Erik Loza]

I can confirm that I once snapped a brand-new Lenox Tri-master by cutting green wood with it. I can also confirm that I have never had a problem with carbide-tipped blades on kiln-dried lumber. I can likewise confirm that I have had guys insist to my face that such-and-such blade was "carbide", even though I knew for a fact it was not. Just like I can confirm that I talk to many, many folks who assume that just because "it's carbide" and "it's expensive", that is must be better for their particular application than, say, an inexpensive carbon steel blade.

Erik

[John TenEyck]

If you have never tried a bimetal blade, something like the Lennox Diemaster or similar, I suggest you give them a whirl before jumping to a carbide tipped blade. Unless you are cutting tropical hardwoods I think you'll find bimetal blades to represent a great combination of quality and life vs. cost. And if you do something stupid (I know you won't, but just in case.) then you won't have trashed a $200 blade. Also, you can resharpen bimetal blades yourself w/o a great deal of effort; not so with carbide.

John

[Jim Finn]

I resaw a lot of cedar and maple and I use 1/2" Supercut carbide blades and they work very well and outlast a Woodslicer blade by a factor of ten.

[Phillip Gregory]

I mainly work on very well-dried old oak but I have cut some relatively wet pine with my bandsaw as well. BTW, mine is the OP's little brother, the Grizzly G0513X2.

Wet stuff does much better with as coarse of a tooth pitch as is appropriate for the thickness of the wood. Pine and cedar also have a TON of pitch, especially if they are wet. Do not use a really nice blade on them, you will just gum/burn it up. "Regular" carbon steel is the best bet here as they among the least expensive and have reasonable durability for this kind of work.

You want at least three teeth in the wood but not all that many more. The G0514X2 will handle up to 1 1/4" blades, which will let him use the real coarse pitch blades like 1.3 and 7/8 TPI. However, he probably wants to use one size narrower than the max his saw will run as the wider blades are a real PITA to get mounted on the saw. The max for my saw is a 1" blade, and it will tension it, but it is a real PITA to get it on and off the saw. A 3/4" unit is much easier to put on and take off the saw and both cut dead on straight and square. Nearly all steel-framed saws are plenty strong to give enough tension and cut with no drift so you don't have to use the absolute widest blade the saw will fit.

The part about using a coarser blade pitch when cutting soft and wet woods is actually true for all saws. I can easily rip 3" thick hard old bone-dry oak with a 50 tooth combination blade on my cabinet saw. Ripping a wet pine 2x4 with the same blade will cause scorching as the gullets can't handle the voluminous amount of wet stringy sawdust (really, saw-mush.) I switch to a 24T rip blade and all is well.


I resaw a lot of cedar and maple and I use 1/2" Supercut carbide blades and they work very well and outlast a Woodslicer blade by a factor of ten.

I have one of the Supercut "carbide embedded" 1/2" x 3 tpi blades and it is one of my favorites for resawing the ~7" wide old oak boards I use in many of my projects. I had a 1" x 2 tpi carbon steel blade on before than cut okay but a few hundred feet of cuts dulled it, and it was not fun to put on and take off the saw. I haven't quite run as many BF through the Supercut blade but it seems to be holding up much better. The Woodslicer is a spring steel blade so pretty well any blade will outlast it by a wide margin as spring steel is the softest stuff bandsaw blades are made out of.

[Wade Lippman]

I thought it must be my local Woodcraft, but I see it isn't. Perhaps they all give great advice like that.

Highland sells a Woodturner blade with "significant tooth set of this blade provides ample room to keep the blade zipping along through dripping wet, kerf-closing, growth-tensioned logs".