Glue Line Rip Blades

[Steve1]

I recently noticed that several manufacturers are selling "Glue Line Rip" blades that are supposed to (and apparently do) provide an excellent finish, ready for glue up.

Such as this Freud or this CMT Orange.

So why wouldn't somebody use such a blade for ALL their rip cuts ?
Does the fine finish quickly deteriorate with blade usage ?
There must be a downside ?
My current rip blade does the job, but the finish is certainly not exceptional (OK, its a Dewalt rip blade, not Forrest).

 

[peter halle]

I've always used the Freud Glue Line Ready for all my tablesaw rips of solid wood.  I just considered the phrase "glue ready" as marketing.

Peter

 

[Packard]

I bought a glue line rip blade, but could not tell the difference from cuts made on my Delta rip blade circa 1994 or 1995.  I considered them to be more or less equals.

 

[smorgasbord]

Glue Line Rip blades are designed to give decent enough results for gluing while maintaining high feed rates. They are intended for high production shops wanting to rip stock and then glue up without further ado. They are not designed to produce the best possible finish.

If your tablesaw is well aligned, most sharp blades can produce a good finish when ripping. If the blade has too many teeth, your feed rate has to be adjusted since there's less clearance for removal of sawdust and burning may also occur. Remember, ripping is cutting the wood along its fibers, which is the weakest direction for wood, and is also the easiest to get a good finish. And this is why you can often get away with square teeth on rip blades. The square teeth aren't designed to improve the cut, they’re designed to carry away as much sawdust as possible so you can keep the feed rate up.

For the best cut quality, however, you want ATB (Alternating Top Bevel). Sometimes you'll see ATB+R, which adds a square(ish) raker tooth every 5th tooth. It doesn't improve the cut quality, it helps get sawdust out of there. It has the side benefit of producing a flatish bottom in a groove, as do the all square tooth rips. But, don't use those for any kind of cross-cutting.

If you look at Forrest's blades, you'll see that their top 3 blades all have ATB only with a 20º Face Hook:
• the 48-tooth WWII "CrossCut" blade
• the 40-tooth WWII "Combination" blade
• the 20-tooth WWII "Rip" blade

The only difference is the number of teeth - that's why the combo blade is in the middle between rip and crosscut. You get away from the ATB tooth design when cutting materials other than solid wood. But, those aren't ripped and glued.

For home shop ripping, just put a combo ATB blade on and adjust your feed rate. Then have another blade or two if you do things like plywood, aluminum, melamine, or are cutting joints. I see no reason for a home shop to have a "glue line rip" blade unless you're not a typical home shop and are actually doing production run rips to glue up and want to save time with a decent enough finish for gluing, not for show.

 

[Tom the Remodeler]

I avoid using a table saw for rip cuts unless absolutely necessary, so most of the time I keep a high tooth count, low rake cross-cut blade on my saw.

Most rips are performed at the bandsaw (I'm using a 1-1/4" Resaw King), with a pass over the jointer, through the thickness planer, or through the shaper before a glue-up.

If I'm gluing up a panel I'll usually go through the shaper so I can apply a deep glue joint profile to the edge, which provides excellent indexing and a stronger glue joint.

 

[Rutabagared]

I bought the Freud glue line rip a while ago.  It does produce a very smooth surface.  But like all ripping, smoothness is dependent on several factors - stress in the wood, feed rate, species, thickness, saw set-up.  In my experience, the surface finish is only marginally better than their Premier Fusion combo blade.  I often go straight to glue-up from both blades.

I use the glue line rip mostly when batch-ripping hardwoods in order to preserve my combination blade, or when ripping thick stock.  The feed rate is noticeably quicker and easier as you’d expect from fewer teeth.  But I use it less and less as time goes by.

Another consideration, if you do table saw joinery, is that the glue-line rip will not produce a flat-bottomed cut.  I often do table saw joinery, so I use the Freud 24 tooth rip blade much more frequently.  It is a workhorse.  Note that it will produce a noticeably rougher surface, but feed rate is quicker and easier still due to the low tooth count, big gullets, etc.

Good luck with whatever you choose.

Joe

 

[Packard]

Out of curiosity, what is the going rate for sharpening a table saw blade?

A 12” chop saw blade?

 

[smorgasbord]

Out of curiosity, what is the going rate for sharpening a table saw blade?
A 12” chop saw blade?

I thought for me it was just under $0.30 per tooth, but there's some setup time cost, so it drops per tooth for high tooth count blades.
https://ridgecarbidetool.com/pages/...-AHEb63lXnFF-l_gQ9O26YaNnxjD1oUpqpK-MB2Xfng_a
https://www.bobssharpall.net/circularsaw
https://www.forrestblades.com/forrest-factory-carbide-saw-blade-sharpening/

 

[Cheese]

Here are a couple more options.
https://www.sliversmill.com/forrest_saw_blade_sharpening.html

​

https://festoolsharpen.com
https://quinnsaw.com
https://www.leitz.org/en-us/services/re-sharpening-tool-repair

 

[Packard]

How are you assured that the blade they return was the same one you sent to them?

Years ago I sent a pair of Lion trim blades (a guillotine blade widely used in the picture framing business) to a sharpening service that served that segment of business.

I sent high quality, but dull, OEM blades and I got correct-fitting generic blades that were razor sharp.  I complained to the service and they said I should have specified to “return owner’s blade sharpened”.  There was an extra fee for that and it added lead time.  At the time I called, they could not identify which blades I had sent.

 

[tjbnwi]

How are you assured that the blade they return was the same one you sent to them?

Years ago I sent a pair of Lion trim blades (a guillotine blade widely used in the picture framing business) to a sharpening service that served that segment of business.

I sent high quality, but dull, OEM blades and I got correct-fitting generic blades that were razor sharp.  I complained to the service and they said I should have specified to “return owner’s blade sharpened”.  There was an extra fee for that and it added lead time.  At the time I called, they could not identify which blades I had sent.

The first time I send a blade to Quinn they come back laser engraved with the company name on them. I send the blades in the original packaging, they come back in that packaging. I have no doubt I get my blades back.

Tom

 

[Cheese]

How are you assured that the blade they return was the same one you sent to them?

For premium blades, they are usually marked with an identifying number of some kind. Forrest marks their newer blades with a laser marked serial number while they marked their older blades with a hand engraved serial number.

[attachimg=1]

Festool marks their blades with a unique number or date none of which seems to be repeated? I have 12 different Festool blades and every blade marking is unique except for the markings on their dual Kapex blade pack 203150...and that makes sense.

[attachimg=2]

Even on commodity blades like the Milwaukee 14" blades for their metal saws, there is a unique number on each blade.

 

[Packard]

For Forest sharpening their own blades, there is not much of an incentive to fast-ship by shipping another “identical” blade.  They probably have a machine that remains set up for their own blades.

But for non-manufacturers sharpening that is almost certainly not so.  They will have a new setup for each blade.  If you figure 10 to 15 minutes to set up for a new blade and $100.00 per hour for the man’s salary and overhead and $100.00 per hour that the machine has to earn, then the cost to setup is probably as much as the cost to sharpen. 

It would pay for a sharpening service to buy 5 or 10 of a popular blade and dole those out as the orders come in.  It means that their setup costs and lost machine time costs are much lower.  And as an added benefit, there would be faster turnarounds.

Also, when there are quiet times with no orders to fill, they can keep their staff busy sharpening their inventory. 

Of course my numbers could be all wrong.  Setups could take just one minutes.  And their hourly rate may be different.

Before I retired, we figured man-hours at $140.00 per hour.  Our machine hours ranged from $100.00 per hour for a small machine, and $250.00 per hour for a large machine. 
Setups consumed both labor and machine time.

We had one job that required that we partially disassemble a machine to mount custom works for that job.  It took, typically, one man 4-1/2 days to install, and later restore the machine to original condition.  We typically would run the following anticipated order at the same time at our own risk.  If the customer never re-ordered that part we would be stuck with the inventory.  But if he did, we would earn about $3,000.00 extra.  It was a standard catalog item so we felt safe building the extra inventory.

In any case, that is hour manufacturers think.  Setup and lost machine hours are a cost, and anything that could reduce that cost was worth considering.

 

[Cheese]

I'd imagine most of the folks that are serious about being profitable in the blade sharpening business, have equipment that's almost fully automatic.

I know the Vollmer equipment that Quinn uses certainly is. Vollmer machines can store up to 4000 different blade geometries so it may just be as simple as identifying the blade and then choosing the program.

Here's a short video from Quinn.
=73
=12

 

[Crazyraceguy]

Leitz does the same with ours. They all come back with an ID number marked into the plate, along with the tooth count. It's done in a series of dots, like the old dot-matrix printers, from years ago.
The painted color-coding stripes, that Festool uses, is usually gone the first time. Whatever they clean them with does away with it, and even if it didn't, they end up getting a brushed finish put into the sides eventually anyway.

 

[Packard]

I’m fairly certain that computer setup saw sharpening did not exist in the early 1980s when I experienced this issue. 

The blades that I sent off were about 1” thick, 3” wide and 6” long, and were dangerous to handle because of how sharp they were.  You could slice hardwood so think that you could use it as tracing paper.

Lion is out of business.  Their blades were better, but the castings and assemblies were about equal to the Chinese knock offs.  They are cheaper now, than they were in the 1980s when Lion owned that market.

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