Glue Line with Diablo Home Depot Blade? 60 tooth - Cutting Board

[Patrick Irish]

The local wood store has closed near me leaving me with Home Depot as the closest and only Diablo Blades as a selection. I'm currently using my Bosch 4100 and the stock blade it came with and it's about 4 years old and has cut every kind of wood you can imagine.

I'm doing an End Grain cutting board for my mom's B-day thats next week. I need to split a 1 3/8" tall by 18" long by 13/16" wide piece of african mahogany. Once my board glued up, I'll then be cross cutting it into 14 strips 18" long. I'll be cutting through the 1 3/8" material of purple heart, walnut, maple, african mahogany.

Will the Diablo 10" 60 tooth blade make these cuts clean and glue ready? Some blades I ws reading don't do well in wood greater than an 1" thick. I don't have time to order a different blade online. I MIGHT be able to put it off until Saturday when I can drive 25min away and get a blade at Rockler, might be pushing it though time wise.

[Todd Burch]

If you are ripping you don't want a 60 tooth blade.

I used diablo blades all summer this last year. They are OK blades. As long as you have a jointer you will be fine. I did not have a jointer and I actually had to make a pull out cutting board. I used the rip blade, and it certainly wasn't a glue line rip.

Don't expect a glue line rip with a diablo blade. For high quality joints, you really need to joint the edges.

[Patrick Irish]

No jointer available. Or planer.

The rip cut will only be one pass and 18" long. All the other cuts will be a cross cuts and 14" through 1 3/8" material. I'm calling some shops 25min away. Might take a longer lunch to get a better blade.

[John Schweikert]

Use the Diablo blade. It will be fine. These are all small cuts length wise and technically finish cuts so no need to have specialized blades for different cuts. I use a Tenryu Gold 40 tooth for nearly everything except long rips.

I had a 4100 for years, great saw. Also it might be useful to make a simple and large table sled.

[Matt Day]

How do you plan to make the cutting board without a planer or jointer? Drum sander? Hand planes?

[Alan Schwabacher]

It's the right blade for the crosscuts, and as mentioned above, it will make the rips. It will work harder than needed for the rips and may burn. Burning does not help the glueups, so jointing the edge would be helpful if that happens. You may be able to get rid of bad burning by making a very shallow skim cut on the tablesaw, or (preferably) using a handplane. Sanding is possible, but riskier because you are likely to round the surface a bit so it no longer meets everywhere.

[scott spencer]

The Diablo 60T is a decent crosscut blade and can make some reasonable rip cuts. It's not ideal...the 40T would be better, but the 60T does rip more efficiently than a lot of 60T blades....if it's clean and sharp, and you raise the blade up quite high, it might just do the trick in a pinch. Worth a try IMO.

[Erik Christensen]

i have drum sander, jointer and hand planes but the best tools I have found to flatten end grain cutting boards is a belt sander (with vacuum pickup) and winding sticks - YMMV

[Mike Cutler]

I use the Diablo's from Home Depot. I have a dedicated rip and a crosscut blade, and they're actually not a bad blade at all.
The cross cut blade, when new will make a very nice cut, and so will the rip blade. ( I also have blades by CMT, Forrest and Amana, so I can compare the cut to "supposedly" better blades.) 60 teeth is too much for a rip blade. Drop down to the 40 tooth Combo, or the 24 tooth rip.
If you do not have the ability to joint the edges, then you may consider an epoxy glue-up. Epoxy needs the "gap" to work properly.

[Denis Kenzior]

60 tooth blades will likely burn since you can't feed the stock fast enough even with a powerful saw. There's a trick, if you're willing to do a bit more work. Simply rip the pieces a bit oversize (10-20 thousands) and trim them again a few thousands off each side. Doing it this way accomplishes two things: you straighten out your boards (think skip-planing) and you achieve a much better finished surface since the blade is not working so hard. With a well tuned saw, the higher tooth count blades will produce unbelievable surface quality.

For reference, last cutting board I made was with an 80 tooth Tenryu blade. Both rips and crosscuts. I sometimes get lazy about changing blades.

[Allan Speers]

To prevent burn, I'd take several shallow passes, working deeper each time.

With luck, you won't get any ridges.