Thanks for all the replies and Jack, I'm using the finer 80T blade from two different companies. Mastercabman said to try the 60T blade, but everything I've read says use the 80T blade. Going to the 60T blade sounds counter-intuitive. Are you sure that is right? I mean, I'll try it if you think it will work on such a hard wood. I have the speed set at 6. I didn't mess with this since faster would be better, in this case, but what do I know? If I really did know, I wouldn't be having any issues, right?
In the meantime, I think I have it figured out a workaround or work through, although it is an involved process for every cut and not the quick and easy plunge of a 12" saw like the Dewalt or any of the $250-$600 12" Miter saws out there. The floors that I do all go diagonal or Herringbone and I have borders going around everything so all the cuts are exposed and need to be perfect. I slightly back draft/bevel the cut edges of the diagonal boards when they butt up against the border so there is a tight seamless joining and then I groove both edges and glue a spline to mate the grooves. Kind of a pain but it looks great. The Dewalt 716 worked great for as long as the blade was sharp but after about 100 cuts into 5" Brazillian Cherry 3/4" thick tongue and groove planks, the blade would start to deflect as the burning got worse. The burning wasn't too bad but as you had to go slower and slower and the burn would worsen. For the next 400 cuts or so, it smelled like incense as it burned but hardly any smoke. Once you saw smoke though, it was past time to change out the blade. You'd start noticing the miter cuts were cupped across the width. This is the reason I though moving to a smaller blade was the way to go. Now, I wonder.
The way that I got around the top surface tearout, and the old master woodworkers on here will say, "Duh" but I am not one of them,... what I did was, I built an auxiliary fence out of the 3/4" planks (This BTW, totally makes the Festool Kapex hold down clamp useless since there isn't an adjustable throat depth on the clamp) and then adjusted the cutting depth as shallow as I could go and still make a complete cut through the wood as the blade intersected with the front face of the fence. The deeper cuts meant that the blade angle was more extreme as it spun free of the cut on the surface which lifted the chips at the leading edge of the cut which created a poor cut. With a normal plunge cut, the angle was never great enough to tear out the back half of the width of the cut but a push cut, the whole cut pretty much has that more extreme angle as the blade leaves the cut and thus adjusting the work piece out via the thickness of the fence I chose and minimizing the depth to the least possible depth helped. I might see if I can build out the fence another 3/4" to see if it gets better.
I was getting bad tearout on the left side of the blade compared to the right side. Turns out I was always clamping or holding the wood with my right hand than the cut off piece was free to vibrate. I didn't understand it since the tearout happened almost instantly. OK, here comes the debatable solution. Normally I hold the keeper piece of wood and let the other side go. It isn't a problem with a 12" chop (both pieces were perfect) but what I found was the piece being cut off is allowed the vibrate and thus the edge gets all chipped up. I went against common practices and I did the clamp both sides of the work piece thing and I got a good edge on both sides and I need both sides because both cut edges are used and exposed. Now I'm thinking I should make a U-channel holding fixture that will keep the work pieces secured backward and forward and a channel to keep the board flat.
Man, what they need to do is have a system that you choose a feed, and then you can plunge the saw in the backmost position and the machine does the dreaded pull cut in a control feeding manner until you let go of the switch and the blade stops. Then you lift and return it to the starting point. Basically, you would be in control of the downward force and the on/off. The machine would do the speed and feed control based on what you set it at. This way, You'd have the blade cutting down into the wood with the leading edge of the blade, and thus no topside tear out, and you would have consistent speed of the cut and the quality would match the cut before. Then you could simply disengage the feed feature and then you could do the normal plunge and push cuts if you wanted to use it the regular way. It wouldn't be too difficult to implement since man tools out there already use some variant of this concept.
Anyway, the last thing was the rate of the plunge and the push. I was already doing it very slowly, but then I had to slow down to the ridiculous rate of about 1/4" per second. Talk about a loud and long lasting cut, but I digress. So a simple plunge cut that I made on the Dewalt took about 15 seconds to line up, adjust the slight undercut bevel, hold by hand instead of having to clamp the piece, and then cut. This plunge cut took less than 5 seconds and I could shave the edge to perfection rather quickly if I needed. Now to come up to the same result with the Kapex , barring any problems with unexpected/inconsistant tearout, takes over a minute to do with the actual cut at a 45º angle across a 5" wide board now takes almost 30 seconds to complete. It seems so much longer while you watch and cringe to see if any tearout is going to happen and thus ruin the cut and maybe the whole work piece if this was the final cut, ready to install. If you got tearout, you had to do it all again and then figure out how and where you are going to use that wasted board since it is too expensive of a piece of wood to just throw away.
I think that was it. It doesn't sound like a good solution, and if I had it all to do over again, I would have returned the Kapex and CT48, but alas, it is past the 30 day trial period and I'm stuck with it. I'm not sure what this saw excels at besides costing a lot of money and even worse, the cost of the add-ons. Why are the Vaccum bags almost $10 a piece? And why doesn't the Kapex/CT48 package not automatically come with a 36mm hose to extract the sawdust since the 27mm doesn't work very well at all and I'm hesitant to mortgage my house to by a simple hose that doesn't work much better and should have been included if the smaller one was inadequate. Maybe when this is all over, I'll do a review based on my experience. So far, the only bright light has been this forum and the knowledgable people that take the time to help less experienced people like me. Thanks for your help.
Red
