Understanding Sawmill bandsaw blade numbers and applications for each

hey everybody Thomas here today we've got an interesting video we're going to go over blades and as you see I have a pile of five saw blades here and these are five saw blades from five different manufacturers and there's a lot of differences between each of these blades you get a little close up here so you can see so we're gonna go over just kind of the differences in blades and what all those crazy numbers mean a lot of people when they buy a sawmill and everything they stick with one blade and they don't really Venture off from that very often that was me a couple years ago now with this YouTube channel it allows me to continually continually learn about Sawmills bandsaw blades and looking and meeting new people and trying to you know put out the information that I learned from there so I figured this would be a good time to go over different blades what they what those numbers mean and with the applications for each type of Blade and also some tools and stuff that you can use to help you you know choose the right blade for you so let's begin first things first we're going to look at these two blades I've got like I said I had five blades I've actually put a total of six up here I've got I brought one more up here just so I can have two different sets of blades for each section of the video first things first these blades right here um are wood Miser double hard blades these are essentially their premium blades and I've been extremely impressed with the performance of these blades the name double hard we're going to get into what that means here in a little bit and we're gonna go over some pros and cons with this blade this is a 55 000 Blade the bottom blade here is a 737 the top blade here's a 747. we're gonna go over what those numbers are as well in just a second but first things first we're going to talk about when you first open a box of blades what should you see what should you expect in a quality blade well first things first if you go and look at the weld you'll see some discoloration and stuff here but even before that you want to make sure there's no Burrs and that your weld material so the area is welded feels about the same as the rest of the blade there's no dip in thickness or anything like that everything seems consistent feel on the back side feel on the gullet if the gullet has any Burrs and stuff in there if you're sharpening or setting your own blades the Burr in there can cause your Center or sharpener to either do a short throw or a long throw for your next movement probably give me a short throw because the pushing arm will catch on paper and instead of going the full tooth spacing which is 7 8 on this blade you could get like a half that almost like a half of a inch to spacing and then the next time your Stone comes down you could take off teeth if it's sharpening so again inspect your weld make sure your welds look good you should never have your blade breakages at your weld if you consistently are getting blade breakages at your weld contact the manufacturer where you got the blades from they might have a bad batch or something like that there could be an issue and their annealing process all sorts of stuff like that but if you're getting failures at the weld that's something you should definitely reach out to the company where you bought your blades and I would say most companies out there would probably if you sent them pictures where it's breaking at the weld they'd probably say okay sorry for that we'll send you some blades and replacement okay again the weld process is really neat and here in the next couple weeks I'll be heading down to Georgia to go check out some blades from Southeast metals and possibly some other blade manufacturers down there and seeing their process so stay tuned for that video in the future and we'll have a little more I guess explanation then too but first thing again we have this this discoloring there the discoloring here is from the annealing process the annealing process is an important step in the blade if you're not seeing discoloration here or something like that maybe they don't do annealing or maybe it's just not as uh uh Pro uh I guess pronounced in the type of material and I'll show you another blade that it's not as pronounced because the whole blade is essentially heat treated so again the annealing process you could I guess do it with a torch but really the most common way that most manufacturers do it is with uh induction or current going through the blade through a small section and what that does is it heats up there it allows the blade to cool at a controlled rate which makes sure that this weld section here is not going to be brittle but rather has almost the same value building and same properties as the metal out here if you have just a hard Brita weld right here it will fill out the weld every single time so a nailing process is very important now these are called double hard blades I am not actually sure if this is the reason but I can kind of see this on the blades themselves you can almost see two distinctive lines of heat treatment so where these tips are you can see the tips are a different color that is actually due to a heat treatment process I see two distinct lines on there so that leads me to believe that these are double hardened so there could be a low heat and then a high heat or a high heat then a low heat whatever that may be but again hardening of the tooth tip and everything allows that tooth tip to be harder therefore hold an edge a lot longer than a blade that is not hardened at the tip and there are blades out there that are not hardened at the tip and they they cut just fine but there are issues again there's always pros and cons to everything you do to improve a blade in any performance there's a I guess a performance ratio and everything but anything that you do to improve some performance is going to degradate some other type of performance Mr Robert my buddy down in Mississippi does not care for double hard blades and the reason is because when you go to set these you have to be very careful that you're setting low enough on the tooth not high on the tooth if you set up here in the portion where it's been hardened everything you'll snap it every time you try to set it so you got to set a little bit lower and if you're setting lower means you have to set a little bit less than if you were setting a higher up in a blade I think maybe I got that backwards anyways long story short if you are setting your own blades and if they're double hard blades take caution if you start hearing click click click that means you're popping teeth off be very cautious everything again though I double hard tooth will hold its sharpness a lot longer so there's a there's pros and cons to that okay so there's that we were also talking about the numbers behind the blade so there's a couple interesting numbers on these blades these are inch and a half blades 55 thousands this is a 737 that's a 747 and they're 7 8 2 spacing I'm sorry not inch and a half they're inch and a quarter my bad so inch and a quarter is measured from the tip of the tooth down and you can see that is an inch and a quarter like on the spot this one right here inch and a quarter on the spot so that's the top of your tooth down to the back side of your blade that is your blade width the 55 thousands that is your thickness so I can't really angle the blade because and I'm going to talk about the pros and cons as well a 55 000 that's the thickness of the material from from where my thumb is to where my index finger is on the back side that's the thickness of the material this is a thick blade this is a stiff blade you I can't really Bend this blade that well and there are definite Pros to that if you're cutting really really hard material if you're cutting Frozen logs if you're cutting material that goes from soft to hard AKA Knotty Pine or something like that a blade like this is less likely to travel on you because you have that added backbone strength of that blade it will not really want to uh you know travel through the wood in such a way that'll cause waves it's it's harder to do that okay that's a pro you could also push this blade a little bit harder because you have so much more material here in the back on the back side of this again your teeth are hard your backbone based on the material there are different types there are also bi-metal blades we're going to get into that in a different video but for a blade like this your backbone here should have a little Flex to it whereas your teeth do not because they're hardened if you had a a bi-metal blade that could be okay you have one type of metal here at the tooth that has a property of say uh hard or something like that but you have a a less flexible or more rigid um backbone here if you will there's all sorts of different types everything bi-metal blades have a special purpose or anything I don't use them I have some friends of mine who do but that'll be again another video Okay so we've talked about the tooth spacing toothpaste no we haven't talked about the width of the blade that's an inch and a quarter two spacing is from tip to tip now it's going to be hard to show that on here you're going to kind of take my word for it well maybe it's actually easier than I thought so you could see from tip to tip there uh I'm reading 7 8 on the dot so that is your spacing you have to be careful whenever you're using a Setter whenever you're using a sharpener using the correct cam to go with that on a Cook's cat claw sharpener they have a whole lot of different cams that switch out on the wood Miser they do have two cams that they typically use and there's a range that that cam can work for typically it's like a half inch all the way up to an inch and then you have another one that's like three quarters of an inch all the way up to an inch and a half or something like that but in here or there that's just the measurement you need to know so you know your width which is inch and a quarter you know your two spacing seven eighths you know your thickness is 55 000. now we're going to talk about your tooth angles and stuff like that so this is a 747 that's a 737. you can see the teeth on the 747 they look like they're taller and that they look like they're taller but they're actually not taller what makes them look like that is because you don't have as much material behind here that back angle here is a 47 degrees so it's a steeper approach on the back side and the front face is a seven degrees so perpendicular would be zero seven degrees forward and then if you go to the back side here again it's 47 degrees off the back so that's that's kind of your measurements there on the bottom one here again you have a little more material back here because this is a 37 degrees these are kind of unique uh hook angles and stuff like that if you will to wooden Mizer wood Miser is really big on those seven degrees and a seven degree blade will cut pretty much anything you want to cut it's a very middle of the road hook angle on the blade and everything and I've cut a lot with it I've been very impressed with the how a seven degree works I have not tried a 747 yet I would think this would be more of like a soft wood type blade if you're cutting a lot of pine stuff like that because you again have less material on your teeth you don't want to cut something super hard with that because there's less material there it's going to fatigue on you a little bit sooner another blade which is one I have on The Sawmill currently is a four degree blade so that means it's a I guess it's a probably a it's probably a 4 30 so it's a four degree face angle 30 degree back angle so that again four degrees off of Center um off of perpendicular off the front face Okay so we've gone over those blades these ones here again wood mice are double hard quality braids blades very very thick very very strong long lasting blades but also they are premium blades and premium blades do have a premium price tag with them now now I'll go ahead and show you these blades right here a little bit okay so not the best example because the bottom blade here is is a used Blade the top blade is a monkford's blade and it is a 10 30. the bottom blade here is a ripper s blade it is also a 10 30 and both these blades are either 41 or 42 000. so these as you can see are a lot more uh flexible if you will than that 55 000 splade um really all I want to show on this these are both the same hook angle so if you match these two up I mean I can't get the blades exactly straight but yeah you can't really see anything any difference between them they are the same exact tooth profile they're 7 8 2 spacing they are a 10 degree off-center or off that perpendicular uh front face and a 30 degree back a 10 30 blade is your most common blade profile out there it's lasted it's been out there for a long time a lot of people have cut pretty much anything with it you can cut hardwood you can cut soft once you can cut anything you want with this however there are some differences in these two blades now it's hard to tell because this blade right here I ran displayed hard this is a blade I use during my testing and everything and I pretty much ran it past I ran it to the point where it was done I'll say that you can't really see any heat treatment left in that that tip and that means I was heating up the tips or anything probably because the set was coming out of it and that's something I haven't shown yet either too you can see on this one a nice solid heat treatment in the tip there and it goes down pretty far into the actual tooth tip almost goes down to the gullet whereas on the wood Miser one again that heat treatment is only the tip but it's a pretty pronounced double treatment it looks like so probably the woodmeister tips are a tad bit harder but this tip right here probably is going to be a lot easier to do just because it it hasn't been hardened that that second time or whatever um set so let's go ahead and measure this set on these blades I don't remember what the Blade Set is but oh I got a dog in my face nope get down Lucy thank you get down all right so right here we have dial indicator and everything first things first I'm going to zero it out this is hard to do in my angle but I'll get it right yet try to do it where you see it on film so let's move this around all right so first things first we're going to go ahead and zero out on a flat spot on the blade I like to do in the bottom of the tooth if you will Zero it out so there's a difference here because I last zeroed it on my other blade open Zoom or and film here so yep she's zeroed out right there now we're going to measure the tooth facing the dial indicator it's right there so what is that about 19 000 or so double check another one seems that that's a little bit low I might have to re adjust how I have this on here I missed it okay so I'm reading two nineteen thousands again it's hard to tell from my angle I might have to zero this thing out again one more go I thought these were around twenty one twenty two thousands okay reading zero there okay so nineteen twenty thousand something like that that's that's your set on the two so you have an uptooth a straight tooth a down tooth up tooth straight tooth down tooth you have that all the way around the blade however you have to be careful around any welds the welds it could change on you so let's go ahead and rotate this around to the Weld and see if we can see they're changing that or not and that's based on the length of your blade I mean it it's not a big deal it's just something you have to watch for and the whole process of you know sharpening and setting your blades now this is actually a good example let me move it back around this way this is a good example right here of something you have to watch for especially if you're setting your own blades see that little tip right there in the gullet of the weld before you set or sharpen this blade you need to take that down take your angle grinder to that and take it down also I don't see any annealing into this blade there might not be based on the material they're using here but I'm not seeing annealing on this blade but the weld quality looks good it's nice and flush against the back there so and I have run this blade not this blade specifically but I have run a box of these blades I got nothing bad to say about these These are again this monkford soccer monk for blades excuse me very good quality material um blade I've run a lot of wood through these but again there is that little nib a little nub right there you want to make sure you take that that nub off or anything because that can cause a a short throw on your Setter or your sharpener okay so we found the weld we're going to look I'm just going to look from the side here and I'll kind of give you what I see okay that is a uh that goes this way I'm going to call this way as an up tooth and this weighs it down too so up tooth down tooth straight tooth up tooth straight tooth up tooth down tooth straight tooth so you can see the pattern changed right past the weld because I'm on track until here and then it changes on me and goes to a different direction so this section right here will throw you off especially if you're setting it doesn't affect it on sharpening but if you're setting this is where you need to be careful of so always Mark your weld when you're using your sharpener setter okay so again that shows those now let's move over to this last set of blades we have over here these are the funky blades there's a lot of interesting things going on here you've got this blade here which is a weird color what is going on well this is a new blade that we've been testing everything it's a blade where the blade stock comes from Germany this blade didn't have any camber in it and stuff beforehand but the new ones that are coming out due however I have run this blade it doesn't look like this I've actually run this blade for two logs worth and it stays nice and clean and I can see a little bit of you know Decay and stuff on there and see some scratch marks on here so whatever this looks like a bluing material which shows I think this is that the the back side of this blade has been heated in such a way so you get that Bluing and don't really see the annealing colors in here because it looks like the whole back side of the blades been annealed there's been heat added to this entire blade but you can definitely see there is heat added to the tips as well this blade is also interesting because the set on this blade is set extremely high up compared to our normal blade and I don't know if I can show this on film let's take it out of the holder for that and I gotta do a side-by-side comparison so I'll have to grab another blade but anyways we're gonna take a look right here again hard to show on film here you'll just have to kind of take my word for it right now but the set on this you can see the actual crease of the tooth is what an eighth and a eighth inch or so above the actual gullet if we look at one of these teeth over here without my dog get in my face one of these teeth over here I hope she's all in my place let me move my dog out the way give me one say it okay so move the dog now these ones here again hard to show on film everything but the crease of the actual tooth where it folds up is closer to the gullet these ones again they're high up so again the crease occurs about where the the number that the nail of my thumb is hard to focus on that whereas on this one the crease is where my thumb is there so it's it's about I don't know less than an eighth of an inch difference but these ones are set higher that being said when Mr Robert sharpened or set blades like this for me he didn't have any issues with that you just have to kind of look at it and you might have to adjust the height in your setter uh this blade here again is a new blade that we're testing so more to fall on this blade but you can actually see kind of how heat was added all the way through the backbone of the blade interesting and then oh and this is also the standard seven oh should we 10 30. so 10 degree front face 30 degree back angle okay and then this next blade where we have right here this is a chip sweep so you can see a piece of the tooth looks like it's missing there's a lot of good reasons to have a blade like this a lot of the pallet manufacturers like to use blades like this because it clears out um a little bit better with that rake or tooth you don't get as much sawdust remaining on your wood now we're going to be testing this blade here shortly to see how that theory holds up but also what they found out is this blade design here is really good for cutting Frozen logs because it chips that ice out first if you will and it allows uh just a a better blade performance in Frozen wooden Frozen wood if you've ever cut it it's very hard to cut it can do some weird things your Sawmill can sound atrocious when you're cutting through it I've been testing out four degree double hard blades and Frozen wood it's done a very good job because it's a thick you know again backbone of the blade and everything and it's a blade that has a lot of set I didn't talk about that but these these 55 000 splades here they're set at 25 thousands they will hold that set a lot longer because you've got thicker material there uh this blade right here feels like a 45 thousands this blade right here feels like a 41 to 42 thousands and same with this blade right here it's a 41 thousands and you can do that just by feeling it over time you'll kind of feel that but I can definitely feel it this this Center blade here this this chip sweep has a little more mass to it than the other ones but again unique blades the only drawback with these blades I don't know if you can you know quote unquote properly sharpen these These are essentially a one-time use blade and a lot of times in the pallet manufacturing world they don't really care about blade life per se or sharpening blade they run the blade until it's done they swap on a new blade and they just continue on because it's all about how many boards can you cut up in the span of time and these blades right here again keep the surface of the wood cleaner so therefore they don't have to worry about sweeping the wood because the blade actually is sweeping it for them um yeah so this blade right here I believe it's actually a Casco blade but I got this from Southeast Metals it is a uh I believe they sell almost primarily to the pallet manufacturers out there but also to those who are cutting Frozen logs so stay tuned to the channel and you'll see some testing of this blade at some point as well as when we're cutting Frozen logs which we are continually cutting Frozen logs all throughout the winter so again just to recap before I show one last thing when looking at blades there's a lot of different numbers to go into there's a lot of different options out there and I'm going to put up a screenshot here that shows what each of those degrees of blades and what I feel they're good for and what you know some of the companies say they're good for [Music] lasting I got a show hopefully I put that up on the screen so you can see kind of what what's best last thing I want to talk about is um how to measure a blade because if you're going to measure if you're gonna if you're gonna get blades from a manufacturer other than your salmon manufacturer they may not know what your Sawmill take some companies do but not all I got a dog in my face my dogs are all over the place so let me go ahead and do this real quick okay also the dogs came up here and my son said I caught two they caught two what they look like yeah that's that's a leopard no but they're peeing all over you or they're wet no all right so he got his he got his bullfrogs going put him back out there don't let the dogs get them all right now let's go ahead and show you how to measure out this blade okay real quick before my battery dies you'll Mark a spot on your blade on the ground or on the floor or whatever mark it on your blade mark it on the floor you roll your blade out and whenever you get to that Mark again you mark it that's how you measure out a blade and that's how you can make sure you have that number written down somewhere around your Sawmill somewhere around your blade pile whatever that may be that's number you take to a blade manufacturer who can save you a lot of money over a distributor of Sawmills who sell saw blades if you go to the blade manufacturer themselves they can save you a lot of money they can hook you up with a lot of good blades all right folks I'm running a battery here hope you thought this is interesting trying to put some information out there for folks but please like subscribe stay tuned for more a lot of great information still to put out there for folks we'll see you around thanks

Channel: TC Sawmills

Views: 9,021

Keywords: Sawmill, bandsaw, Blade, blades, choosing, looking for, information, understand, how to, diy, learn, learning, teaching, timberking, woodmizer, cooks, Norwood, Frontier, Hudson

Id: LPDU7uchhUM

Length: 27min 14sec (1634 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023