Who else wants to know the time tested tips and techniques that ensure you make professional quality cuts every time? Would you like to know, how to choose saw blades for your sliding compound miter saw to get the best cuts to achieve your success? As you read this article, I think you will begin to see, understanding these simple techniques will make the difference.
Step by Step Miter Cuts
1. Miter Saws; sliding miter, compound miter and power miter are all crosscut saws. Combined with the right blade for the job, they all perform difficult compound angled cuts on moldings and framing materials with ease and precision.
2. A Sliding Miter Saw is the most versatile of the miter saws. It is at home with the smallest trim projects or larger structural framing material cutting tasks when equipped with the proper blade configuration. For the serious-minded handyman where quality of cut and having the right tool for the job is concerned, a collection of different blades is required.
3. Crosscut Blades are designed as the name implies, to make smooth, chip and splinter free cuts across the grain of wood molding and other building materials. However, all blades are not created equal. To understand the differences, we first must familiarize ourselves with the parts of a saw blade and how they affect performance.
Teeth Basically the more teeth a blade has the smoother and slower the cut will be.
Gullet is the space cut out of the blade plate in front of the teeth that allows the material being cut away to be removed. Consequently, more teeth provides a smoother cut while smaller gullets remove less material during cutting and a slower rate of cut is the result.
Tooth Configuration For a crosscut saw, the best cutting blade is the Alternate Top Bevel (ATB) blade type which means the saw blade teeth alternate between a right and left hand bevel. This tooth configuration gives a smoother cut when crosscutting wood. The alternating beveled teeth form a knife-like edge on both the right and left sides of the blade to make a smoother clean cut.
Hook Angle refers to the angle of the cutting edge of a tooth. A positive hook angle has the tooth angled in the direction the blade rotates, while a negative hook angle is just the opposite with the tooth cutting edge behind the center line of the blade. For a miter saw, the negative hook angle blade is the best choice.
Kerf Simply put the Kerf is the amount of material that is being removed by the blade when it makes a cut. The standard Kerf is one eighth of an inch. There are, however, quality, thin Kerf blades available for use in portable and underpowered saws, especially when an extension cord is used.
The Preferred Trim Blade used by the professionals for cutting chair rails, crown or baseboard moldings and leaving a superior smooth finished cut is an 80 toothed (ATB) negative pitch angled C3 or C4 high quality carbide blade.
The Preferred Framing Blade used by the professionals for cutting framing materials and leaving a smooth cut is a 60 toothed (ATB) negative pitch angled C3 or C4 high quality carbide blade.
Now that you have all the information and a better understanding of how a saw blade actually works, you will be able to impress your friends and family the next time the conversation comes up about saw blades. Have fun, be safe and go build something.
