Bent a tooth on my bandsaw blade

[David Wong]

Today I did something stupid while I was in a rush, and ended up bending a single tooth on my Kerf King (Laguna) 1" wide bandsaw blade. The tooth appears to be bent less than 1mm. The blade itself appears to be straight and true. The blade rotates in the guides without any interference. I tried a test cut through some plywood, and the resulting kerf is definitely wider by a bit. You can also hear the "ticking" sound of the tooth hitting the wood.

Question is should I attempt to bend the tooth back, use the blade as is (with the wider kerf), or send it back to Laguna for repair? It is a 167" blade, so it will not be cheap to replace.

Thanks,
David

[Tim Janssen]

Carefully bend it back!

Tim

[Van Huskey]

The carbide tipped tooth is going to be hard to bend back without damaging the tooth. If it were mine I wouldn't be concerned about it I would bend it back in AND break the tooth off so it doesn't shatter at some later time, just make sure the tooth is back within the kerf of the rest of the teeth. You will NEVER know the tooth is missing.

[David Wong]

I straightened the tooth with some careful pounding with a hammer on an anvil surface. It is difficult to tell if the tooth is completely within the kerf created by the other teeth, but the cut is definitely better. The problem now is whether I really trust the cut of the blade. I can't remember if the cut is suppose to be as rough as it is. I guess more playing with it today. Thanks for the advice.

[Van Huskey]

You could test it with a magnetic base, a dial indicator and a wide tip on the indicator like you use to find TDC on a jointer for example. I am betting you have al of this except the tip, you can buy sets of them from Shars et al for a few bucks and they can be very useful.

The problem with a carbide tipped BS blade is there is no set, the width of the inserts is the full kerf. Any small deviation of the one tooth will cause it to be out of line and produce stripes on the workpiece. I am surprised the carbide didn't shatter leaving you with just the band gauge to keep in the "shadow" of the rest of the blade. I would work on that one tooth with a Dremel or something to make sure that tooth didn't sit proud on either side, the negative to missing one tooth compared to having it sit proud just makes effectively getting rid of it a no brainer.

[David Wong]

Thanks for the advice. The tooth was out a small fraction of a millimeter, but like you said, enough to cause stripes on one side of the cut. While the blade was mounted and tensioned, I used two pliers, to "persuade" the tooth over a little. I resawed a piece of 10" walnut, and managed to get an acceptable cut with smaller stripes on both sides of the cut. I have not used this blade much, so I don't know if this is normal. My cut was a little "off", regarding the bottom and top widths - by almost a tenth of an inch in some places. I will have to try another blade to see if it is the blade or I need to do more bandsaw tuning. The blade is a less than 2 TPI, so it works great at resawing wide stock. I have a try-master, but is is a 3 TPI and while it leaves a great surface, it smokes while resawing walnut.