HOW TO GET MORE FROM YOUR SAWMILL BLADES

What if I told you the biggest upgrade to your sawmill isn't going to be a fancy set work system? It's not going to be more horsepower or a larger motor, but what if it's your bandsaw blades? The right blades are going to actually make your mill work a little bit less, make flatter cuts, remove the sawdust, and last longer. But the wrong blade, tensioned wrong, is going to create wavy boards. so to max your mill how to get the most out of the saw blades you already have what if i told you ladder cut were you guys running better for you and thicker blade so the thing about geometry not just the blade has to enter the wood it needs to remove material it needs to stay properly tensioned track straight maintain tooth geometry handle knots changing grain and stay sharp every one of those things affects the finished board so i'd like to hear from you in the comments below what type of blades are you running what type of wood are you cutting and are you happy with the blades that you choose so we spend a lot of time talking about horsepower talking about hydraulics set works but it's actually the blades that are doing the cutting so this is what you're actually going to need to make sure you're doing right the standard tooth set blade the most common blade that you can find anywhere and what most hobby millers use this is a general-purpose blade meaning that it's really best to be run in all sorts of softwood you can run it in hardwood but it's gonna actually dull for you just a little bit faster there's also plenty places to get your tooth set blades a little more customized. You can get inch and a half wide bands. They fit on most hobby saw millers and you're also able to get a thicker piece of metal here. So these are .050s. These are .042s. So these are acting like they're a little bit thinner. That needs to be gauged, definitely on the size mill you have. Smaller mills cannot run .050s. They can run .042s and .045s. Bigger mills, bigger band wheels. So just because you can get thicker bands, thicker isn't always better. If you're running a small mill that has smaller band wheels, let's say under 23 inches, mine are 17. If you use a thicker material like .050, it is bending. So it's a piece of metal that is bending all the time and has a better chance to break. So on anything that has smaller band wheels, and I'm going to say 18 inches or under, you're going to want to stick to .042s and .045s in any one of the bands that you buy. The newest thing for hobby sawmillers is carbide saw blades, which you're starting to see everywhere. These things are great for hardwoods, great for knots, great for difficult logs, great for the fact that you do not have to sharpen these as much. The longevity of the cuts, the flatter cuts, and what else, Jay? Oh, man, you don't have to point them. You don't have to point them. These are a thinner curve cut. You're going to lose less wood, but in the sharpening phase, you don't have to do any pointing. which is the thing i hate the most is why i give that job to jay so the thing about carbide blades it's not just because the carbide is harder than a standard blade it's that you are not when you are when you are doing your resharpening you are not reshaping the blade you are just polishing the hardened geometry of this which is going to give you longer more repeatable flatter cuts that are going to last longer a properly tuned blade meaning that i don't overrun it to the point where i have to sharpen so much if you keep this sharp and the cuts keep coming out smooth this blade is going to last you a long long time so let me ask you dan real quick so this you're not really cutting into the kerf on these things at all you are you still are swiping into the kerf i was going to get into a little bit more of that when we talk about the sharpening aspect of it but what you're doing is you're not reshaping when you're doing a sharpen on a normal blade you are actually cutting let's say one 30 second and you're reshaping this whole kerf here the hardness of these carbide blades what you're trying to do is polish and keep sharp the geometry of the carbide itself so we're not really cutting into the tooth but for me maybe every third or fourth round i will dip down and i will take just a little bit out of the gullet here to keep from stress cracks there but it's all going to be on the quality of the cut if my cuts are being on the mill and are coming out quality i keep cutting if i see some sort of change or some sort of right here this is super smooth if I saw some sort of pattern which we'll try to demonstrate I can't promise that we're gonna find that I'm gonna take it off I'm gonna give it a fine-tune with my diamond wheels just to get this geometry straight why do my cuts get the dreaded wavy board cut from my standard blades well there's a lot of reasons why and a lot of it is gonna have to do that how sharp my blade is how pointed my blades are there's going to be a lot more drag that you're going to encounter because this blade is cutting thicker than a carbide blade because each one of the teeth is here and it's supposed and it's supposed to be so that you're removing the sawdust which makes it a little bit easier for you when you're running board you don't have to keep cleaning the sawdust this actually leaves a bed of sawdust so that the blade does not get hung up so it's cutting a little bit wider and the teeth set if the tooth set is out it's gonna want to rise if you have a as long as you have consistent motor speed and you start getting wavy boards 100% either your band is dull or your points are out of set and that's that's just a basic fact on this particular blade have you ever switched bands and notice that you feels like you have more horsepower or your speed is up it's happened to me so the next way to max your mill and make sure that you're gonna get the flattest cuts is that you need to set your bands up you need to set your mill up for success and where Jay's showing you right now you can see I have my blade set perfectly level from front to back not just side to side where a lot of people are gonna check it's front to back and what we did and mine's a Woodland Mills because we do not have adjustments on actually pitching our band here the first thing that we did is that on I'm gonna come to your side Jay I get to know this I need to know on both sides we what we did we loosened up our brackets here and we tilted our head so that the band when it's at full tension gives us a level cut just think about all of the times that you start start and you already have the opportunity. Every time somebody starts you're like why do I get that big dip? Why do I have that big rise? Well it very well could be is that your blade is pitched from your machine and until it levels itself out you're going to get your first section here to pitch. So to get even though you might get a little bit just because of the drag of the motor when you first start this should help you give you flatter cuts throughout your entire board. So not just side the side but you definitely need to get it here so that's not the only setup for your blades here on the Woodland Mills we have you have to make sure that your blade guides and your roller guides in the back are set correctly to standards so there's no deflection in the blade and then the last but not least is that you have to do your tensioning to get your blade tensioned correctly the next thing you need to do to make sure that you're going to be cutting straight and get the longest life of your band is to properly tension your band for your mill and a lot of these hobby mills they don't have like you go to a high-end mill and it's got a hydraulic gauge telling you exactly where that band needs to be it's more of a feel thing that we have going on here and everybody asks with the mills here where is snug because it says that it needs to be two and a half to three turns from snug now i've always said that i bring it to where i can't move it with one hand and i'm calling that snug so i'm going to do one and a half turns and i'm going to open this gate and i'm going to make sure that my band we rotate the band and you can listen you can actually hear mine which means that this is still not ready because i'm really only one and a half turns so i've straightened up my bands because we're trying to make sure that we attract correctly if your mill is not tracked correctly you're also not going to be able to cut straight so for me what we do is we have a buyer's TimberTech and for all my members we get a discount on this item here now this is only a thirty dollar item so i am going to what i call is double check how i'm supposed to tension my mill tension my band and i'm going to put my tensioner in place right here and what you can do is you can see the two arrows i've already set this to work with this particular band so to find yourself that you're perfectly snug or perfectly together i know that i need to do at least one more turn to get myself tight or how i would feel tight and i'm gonna look at the two arrows on this unit here if those two arrows are they lined up just pretty close then pretty close huh yeah i think well i just hit i just hit the tensioner there to me it looks like i to me it looks like i'm slightly over tension i see a little over tension it is a little higher on my on the right side so that's how you're gonna know if your snug was snug so i'm just gonna back off a little bit and only take a half a turn off and i've double checked it with my tensioner that my lines here are together and that's how i'm double checking this is a thirty dollar item for you to check your band this is not something I would still use the normal way how I tighten my band and I just double check now if I'm running bands all day long all the same size they're going to work if you needed to adjust this unit which is extremely simple is that I tension my band where I'm happy with and you're going to just adjust to that band right there where the two where the two numbers are going to meet and the next thing you know you'll be good for a different band. So if I'm using an inch and a half band, this tensioner is not going to work for an inch and a quarter band. I'm going to need to reset it. But normally for the day, I'm running all the same bands. So make sure that you tension properly. You double check it with this item. Make sure that you're tracking it straight. Make sure that all your guides are good. You should be good to go. And definitely get your mill set up to have your blade cut level. Is it milling time? Okay, so do you check your blade tension every time you put on a new band or do you do it by feel so here we go we're gonna do a real-world test on all three of these blades on a 16 inch wide dry poplar that's running at 15% moisture anybody that's actually cut poplar before knows it's really not an easy wood to cut especially when it's dry and the first blade that we have on here is the standard inch and a quarter set tooth blade let's see how she does jay so we had consistent motor speed consistent feed rate uh i'm not gonna lie i had to push so i had to actually work on pushing this blade through here so let's examine what we got and see how the cut is it looks pretty flat i know look some it looks flat let's do the cut side really it's not a terrible cut we have a little bit of wave right here coming in here through the knot honestly even the lead in with the knot with the level play you're always going to get something little here and a lot of times it's down then up and then back down but this it's actually pretty flat so for a standard butt joint it's got slight waves until you gotta remember this is the first cut going into here so it seems right here you're getting to a knot I have another you can see on both sides but really the rough sawn lumber cut too bad it's not bad other than the fact that I had to push um it even gave it pretty smooth so this is our new motor on here the extra horsepower definitely helped with that so let's throw that inch and a half curved blade on and see how he does see if it has enough power to pull that bigger blade through okay same board but we changed to the inch and a half by 0.050 same thing tooth set blade and let's see how she goes through again it's it it seemed really hard how long 68 58 so we timed that cut uh and that was 58 seconds is that we said to get through that and the first cut you checked out was 48 seconds so it actually took 10 seconds longer to get through I thought I was pushing through faster um did it feel it felt faster but honestly it felt like I had to work pretty hard to push that like it was not just cutting itself I was pushing itself that makes sense for the extra 10 seconds is that and honestly look at the chatter on here and this is a brand brand new blade so So I'm actually surprised. I would have thought that with the inch-and-a-quarter blade, but this inch-and-a-half blade left pretty deep chatter marks right there. Yeah, it's a bit of a mess through there. Let's see how flat it cut, though. This is 7 degrees, then? It is a 7 degree. Okay. You know, honestly, the other blade cut a little bit flatter than this blade. I have, you can kind of see, I've got dips. There was another one, you just went over, there's another one right here, and these are not they're not major dips But this is a brand new blade, so you would expect it to cut a little bit better than that It's workable, but it looked like it died out on the end as well So it took a little bit longer than the other blade. It was harder to push I don't think it gave as good of the cut and this is the first cut so imagine after 50 cuts What's gonna happen where you're definitely gonna be more fatigued? so let's drop them honestly for both blades though they cut reasonably well yeah i mean a little bit more effort but reasonably well the first one looked looked pretty beautiful though when it came off yeah i'm gonna we're gonna compare this next section of what it looks like when we run a carbide blade down through here what we're gonna do is we are gonna run the carbide blade through it feel how let's see let's see how smooth she runs through here jay all right i'm feeling good you feeling good what's that 46 but not the first one was 48 on the camera so it saved you a little bit of time honestly the fatigue coming off this was a lot less or a lot less for me i wasn't pushing i don't know if you actually saw that i was just one hand running it so you could have run it faster if you really needed to i could have but look how smooth the cut is a lot smoother than both of those cuts right there um you can see that there's no teeth marks it seemed to have left just a little bit less sawdust than the other blades uh this also you can run these dry we don't run these with a lot of water okay no we don't let's go check what this looks like so do a little bit let in you got a little bit of lead in deeper lead in as i'm coming across very same very little i have none here it's a flat cut it's a flat cut a little faster of a cut here's a knot right here so it going over the notch you're not going to have a problem like you do with the other one here's another knot another knot so i'm looking at it in this hardwood and this is poplar this is an oak gave us a little bit better of a cut gave us a little bit faster of a cut and you're going to get the longevity of these blades i love how smooth these two come out yeah you almost don't need to plane them it's just that especially without the offset teeth it just makes a big difference it does it does because you can see right there so even after this test where we only caught one board per blade the only two blades i would actually keep buying would be the standard inch and a quarter that you can get and the carbide blades this blade has not you know it It cost us a little bit more effort to push through. It was a little bit slower. These are more costly to use. And I think that's why there's a slight bit of rust on this one because we got these blades a long time ago and we tried. Trust me guys, we tried to love these and I really never did. We consistently use carbide blades. It's going to give you a smoother cut. You can see from the first blade that we used, even though we only made one cut, you're still going to need to sharpen the standard blade more than you're going to have to sharpen the carbide blade. It didn't cut quite as smooth as this did, but I'm happy with both. So it's not in any circumstance where you have to have carbide blades. I thought this would give a demonstration where it would actually show a little bit worse, but quite honestly, both of those blades cut flat and cut pretty quick and cut pretty easy. It's going to be the longevity, the amount of times you want to flip blades, even though a carbide blade costs you maybe three times as much as a standard blade, you are going to get ten times the use out of it. Less time changing blade and you're definitely going to get flatter blades. But for me to get you one that way that I have to sit here and cut all day and actually wear all these blades down and uh that wasn't what i was trying to show fair enough so in most cases for us we're not cutting poplar or if we were cutting poplar we actually could use some of our regular blades and our carbide blades and get a standard you know and get a cut that i'm happy with this is a piece of hickory that we cut last year and you can see how hot and this is extremely hard wood and we do cut a lot of it and this is what happens when you use a regular blade on an extremely hard piece of hickory is really why we started using the carbide blades and jason and i have tested every carbide blade on the market and like you guys i didn't want to spend 120 to 200 200 a blade but we found a manufacturer that's willing to work with us and they gave me a special deal that i can get for all of you guys if you wanted to try carbide blade it's well worth trying at least the carbide blades and all my members are going to get a special discount okay so we didn't get too much of a difference uh in the cut patterns or the cut uh quality in the poplar so i decided let's throw up a small white oak let's see if there's any difference with the the regular kerf blades, the carbide blades, and yes, the carbide blades, we did finish cutting up the rest of the oak, so he has a few more cuts on to him. And I think you should be timing it, Jeff, don't you? I think so, even though this is short log, let's just see if we're saving any time because saving time is, I don't know, as important as making time, right, Jay? That's right, save time is making money. What I can definitely say is it felt more like going through butter on that oak. How long? 16.5. I wasn't pushing this that hard, just to see what was happening here. But we have a bunch of knots in white oak. We should have gotten at least a little bit of deflection, but I noticed these carbide blades, the harder the wood, the nicer it really wants to cut. So I did, you can see right here, we have a little bit of deflection going through these two knots. Same right here, which is pretty small. So hopefully, let's see what the other two blades do. Let's do it. Okay, up next, we've got the inch and a half ripper. We'll see how it does through a piece of oak. I can tell you right now, just straight up without any timing, that was a lot harder to push through. And what were we with the first one? So what do we got, 28.9 and 16 and a half? 12 seconds on a six foot piece, you know, on a 20 foot piece. Let's see how the cut looks. it also comes down to feel right i mean it really does and look it's chattered up it's chattered up yeah it really is yeah i i i was i wasn't pushing it slow it just felt really hard it's like a pretty flat cut though but just chatter i still have the same same right here with that knot this still is decently let's say flat cut coming over the knot to have a little bit more yeah this one's a little bit more than the carbide but you don't have a smooth cut lead in very little right here that knot okay let's try the inch and a quarter okay last test standard inch and a quarter blade let's see how it goes through white oak four and a half seconds so that's the most right i gotta tell you both of those blades for me uh were hard to push yeah so there was a lot of effort in making this happen but uh let's see how flat the cut is now we've got a worse waves through the knot then look promising but yeah i could see it on my side you could see right there yeah that's pretty severe it's starting to get severe so uh yeah the standard blades didn't do anywhere near i probably should have tested the whole thing through an oak or hardwood uh it did it did okay in the poplar but here this would be an issue if we were running hickory this would be even worse well that's and it was harder to do so by the end of the day if i gotta push twice as hard with my blades it's uh it's gonna wear out on you i think it's gonna take your toll so what was our timing again 16 and a half for carbide so it's only on a six foot it's almost done it's that close to being twice as long to cut with a regular blade as a carbide blade so if you're going to make 300 cuts in a day it's going to add up to some extra time that's for sure well i know it felt like butter the harder the wood the the better it ran that's crazy but it works so it's worth trying worth seeing the longevity i know that they work i'm getting these factory direct from my guys, and they're actually reordering them. They wouldn't reorder them if they didn't think that they were worth it. We cut a lot of oak, a lot of hardwood, and if that's what you do, that's something that you should at least try, at least once. And not all carbides are created equal, because we have tried them all, and a lot of them I wasn't happy with. The brand that we did find is more of a commercial outlet so they're used to a lot bigger machinery and uh quite frankly we've had no problem with them so drop us a line and our members are going to get a discount for that so let's do a takeaway of how do i get the most out of any of my blades let's take the seven rules for any blade and you need to use the correct blade for the wood that you're using you need to keep it sharp don't run a blade after it's lost its cutting edge properly tension the blade don't assume thicker is better match your feed speed to the blade and the wood on the last show about maxing our mill this is the first real test that we've run our predator motor on and i can honestly say the extra horsepower the extra speed helped each and every one of the individual blades because our last 14 horsepower motor that let's say i could not keep consistent blade speed on our normal blades our inch and a quarter kerf blades we had a lot of issues with waves and things like that not everybody's gonna need a carbide blade you can see from this test that if your motor and your your sawmill is running correctly that your blades you're gonna cut quite a bit flatter now I know that the the only blade that we didn't like was the custom-made inch and a quarter blades that you're seeing and those were double hard blades so it should have really cut through a little bit easier I'm sticking with my inch and a quarter I'm definitely sticking with my carbide what's the next thing you want to max your mill drop us a line below but we'll see you on the next one