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Safety with power tools is boring but vital topic and there's not a lot that can make it interesting. I have always been paranoid about loosing digits or parts of digits and to date - after 50 years of woodworking I still have all of them intact, and I intend to keep it that way.
RULE #1 - STOP, LOOK and PLAN. I never attempt any cuts with the table saw that I even think will land me in trouble. If I have any hesitation about making a cut, I look for an alternative method or a safer way of doing things.
In the past generation when power tools started to become popular, the pioneers in power tool woodworking lost fingers and parts of fingers because they were not aware of safety procedures and in many cases there were not the safety shields on machinery that there are now. They taught us that safety IS important.
Part of the problem today, is that many manufacturers that produce inexpensive table saws are, in many cases, unable to manufacture things like blade guards, slitters, riving knives that are truly safe. And what I mean by that, is once you get some of this equipment home and set put it all together, the problem is that some of the safety equipment is so crappy that you need to take it OFF the machine to make the machine safer, because wood is getting caught in and under there supposed safety features and in fact are making the machinery less safe.
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One of the main reasons many woodworkers purchase bandsaws is because of their ability to re-saw wood. This might mean re-sawing logs to make boards (usually short boards) or re-sawing existing boards to make thinner boards for projects like small boxes where you might want a 3/8" or 1/2" board. Planing down a 3/4" board to 3/8" is a waste of good lumber and a waste of time if you have a bandsaw.
The most common bandsaw is 14 inch. With some brands you can also purchase a height adjustment block which raises the top wheel of the bandsaw higher and therefore allows for wider cuts. If you are planning on doing a LOT of re-sawing you might want to look seriously at 16" or even 18" or larger bandsaws.
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I often hear woodworkers say something like "I always buy good quality 60 tooth blades", or something to that effect. When I hear things like that I know that they really don't know how to select blades for the table saw, radial arm saw, sliding mitre or chop saw, because arbitrarily selecting a 60 tooth blade could in fact be the worst choice they could make, depending on what they are cutting.
Cutting Natural Woods - There are only 2 blades you need if you are working with natural wood, a ripping blade and a cross cut blade. That's it - 2 blades.
Ripping blades are used on table saws to cut along the grain of the wood. These blades will have fewer teeth ususally between 20 and 30 with 24 being the most common in 10 inch diameter blades. The other feature on ripping blades will be large gullets (the deep space between the teeth), these are used to clear out the long fibers of the wood as the saw blade moves through the wood.
Cross Cutting Blades are used on table saws, sliding mitres, chop saws and radial arm saws and are often 60 to 80 teeth in a 10 inch diameter blades. The reason a cross cut blade can get away with more teeth is because cutting across the grain doesn't require moving much wood fibre out of the way so the blade can do a better job.
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Spending good money on crappy power saw blades is what every woodworker wants to avoid. Some distributors of saw blades can "dress up" an inferior saw blade with a bit of paint, some cool packaging and sell a $12.00 power saw blade for $75.00 The only way of knowing what is a good buy and what is not a good buy is to educate yourself on saw blades and how to recognize the good from the not so good.
here are basically 2 ways to manufacture saw blades, the cheapest and most popular is to "stamp" the blades our of sheets of mild steel. The second way is to use a harder steel and actually laser cut the blades one at a time out of the steel.