Response from Simple Green about Cleaning Saw Blades

[Tom Walz]

1. Saw tips breaking or coming off can fly erratically. The last case I helped analyze was a broken tooth that lodged in an eye. The user had a finish blade and was using it to cut flooring. He was not wearing goggles. The blade hit a nail, the tip broke and parts flew out. Apparently one bounced and lodged in his eye causing permanent vision loss.

Not what you would expect to happen at all but it did.

Finish blades have a different grind and typically a different grade of carbide than nail cutting blades

2. Some of the data quoted here is accurate and presented fairly but it is a few years older or more. There have been huge advances in carbide performance in even the last five years.

3. If anyone wishes I will send them a few saw tips and a couple inches of braze alloy. You can soak it in whatever you wish as long as you wish.

Tom

[David Cefai]

The problem with ALL cleaners is caustic concentration. In a nutshell the hydroxide attacks the brazing. Caustic Soda is Sodium Hydroxide.

Note that most cleaners - and that includes the soap you wash with - have some "caustic" concentration. It is not necessarily due to added caustic soda. Other chemicals, including baking soda, can form small amounts of hydroxide ions (= caustic) in water.

For the non-chemists, a pH greater than 7.0 means hydroxide ions are present. Below 7.0, some acid is present.

Don't Panic! To go from pH8 to 9 needs 10 times the caustic needed to go from 7 to 8. Ditto with acid, going the other way. Your stomach contents have a pH of 0, that's a lot of acid!

Back to woodworking, any tools where Tungsten Carbide is brazed to steel is at risk from high alkalinity cleaners. Some say "cobalt is leached out", this is due to the brazing being attacked.

Dish Washer detergent is very caustic and should be kept on the other side of the house from the workshop . I don't have access to Simple Green but it appears that the different formulations have different alkalinities. Aeroplanes use aluminium which is attacked by caustic so if there is a aero grade SG, that seems to be the one to use.

Hope this helped.

[Larry Edgerton]

I have an old electric cooker I use with just plain tap water. I wait till I have 20 or so blades, put them in the pan, fill with water and bring to a boil for 20 minutes or so, let cool down slowly, pull them out of the water, and lightly brush any residue away. Mostly they are clean already. I dry them with compressed air and a terry towel, spray them with Top Cote and put them away. Has worked well for me for years.

I am having a problem however with the AZEK I have been working with lately. Haven't found a good way to clean it or stop it from sticking to the sides of the blade blank in the first place. In the shop I have found that the Freud industrial blades with the red coating and the larger kerf [more clearance] work well to stop buildup on the sides of the blade, but I have not found what works for the job site saws, particularly the slide saw where no heavy blade is available.

[rick carpenter]

I have an old electric cooker I use with just plain tap water. I wait till I have 20 or so blades, put them in the pan, fill with water and bring to a boil for 20 minutes or so, let cool down slowly,...

Yeah, I wondered about boiling them. Does 20 min in boiling water do anything to the blade itself? Seems like some manufacturing stresses might be unleashed. Oh well, I'll try this but with a much shorter soak time, take out and hit with kerosene and brass brush, then back in the water to cool.

Is there anything to put on the blades to lessen build-up? Maybe hitting them with WD40 every 5-10 min of cutting? If that would help, compare the time to do that with the downtime of a blade-off cleaning procedure. Thoughts on any of this?

[Dan Hintz]

Your stomach contents have a pH of 0, that's a lot of acid!

Minor correction... typical gastric acid is in the 2-3pH range. A pH of 0 would be quite fearsome indeed...




On the boiling. Boiling water doesn't get that hot, but I tend to shy away from heating metal in such a manner as I would hate to slowly remove the temper from anything. YMMV...

[Mike Davis NC]

I think the saw blade speed math was off a bit.

I come up with somewhere around 750 feet per second which is near the low end of a .22 bullet's speed. I would not want to get hit with that.

[John Lanciani]

I think the saw blade speed math was off a bit.

I come up with somewhere around 750 feet per second which is near the low end of a .22 bullet's speed. I would not want to get hit with that.

No. A 10" blade turning at 4000 rpm has a tip speed of 175 feet per second which is 119 mph. Considering the minimal mass of a broken carbide saw tooth, the only real chance for an injury would be a direct strike to the eye. I've had more than one blade shed a few teeth and it's just not that big of a deal, especially if the saw is properly guarded (I use a brett guard for virtually every cut).

I personally consider sticking my hand out of the car window on the highway much more dangerous; a rock thrown up by a passing truck will have much more kinetic energy than a saw tip, and judging by how many windshields I've had to have replaced it's much more likely that I'll be hit by a rock.

[Bert McMahan]

Poster above me is a spambot, copy/pasted working directly from this article:https://www.thespruce.com/cleaning-saw-blades-1398304

[Alex Zeller]

Back in my younger days I did commercial glass work. We used a 15" chop saw with a carbide tooth blade. We always had a couple spares because teeth would break off pretty often. We would use beeswax to help lubricate the blade, it helped some. At any given time we had at least one blade out getting new teeth brazed on. Sometimes they would fracture, other times the whole tooth would be gone. Aluminum is much harder on blades than wood so I would expect to loose more teeth. I don't ever recall actually knowing when a tooth broke off. The biggest issue was when hot aluminum shavings would land on your skin. Back then we didn't always wear hearing protection or safety glasses (with age comes wisdom).

I have a 40 gallon parts washer and I'm cheap so it has kerosine in it. A few minutes under the stream and they clean up just fine. I suppose if I had a woodworking store close by I might buy a specialty product. I have been tempted to try a citrus based cleaner that you can buy at the grocery store. The orange based hand cleaners seam to cut right through most anything I've gotten on my hands.

[Carl Hunsinger]

On the boiling. Boiling water doesn't get that hot, but I tend to shy away from heating metal in such a manner as I would hate to slowly remove the temper from anything. YMMV...

When a blade is burning wood in a cut, it's getting a lot hotter than 100C. So a quick boil should be safe.

Carl

[Frederick Skelly]

Poster above me is a spambot, copy/pasted working directly from this article: https://www.thespruce.com/cleaning-saw-blades-1398304]

This is certainly an interesting (5 star) thread. But it seems rather silly to have revived an 8 yr old thread just to tell us this. Just my opinion...