Best saw blade

I don't know the answer to your question, but I always enjoyed Forrest's posts, a very knowledgeable man. As I recall his "protocal" was if offering expert advice for something you weren't an expert in, state as such.

Dale Stansbery wrote:

I don't know the answer to your question, but I always enjoyed Forrest's posts, a very knowledgeable man. As I recall his "protocal" was if offering expert advice for something you weren't an expert in, state as such.

Agree. A color coded box to click that identifies if you're giving information you've never done, done once or a few times, or done many would be excellent along with that. 

Peter - having long ago used power saw blades ( and still sometimes ) the group of options 20 years ago - especially as far as lower cost decent saw blades - was much different than it is now. As far as the plates go, and anything else like those plates ...I'll give a good example at the end of this unrelated to saws - i'm sure there are differences in the plates as well as in the teeth. 

But two big differences stood out back then - how much carbide you get and how nicely it was ground. 

i'm sure there could be differences between quality of saw plates, stability and balance, but I wouldn't have had a saw accurate enough for it to matter. 

I bought according to a friend's recommendations - three forrest blades to start. One for a miter saw, and two for the table saw. i could've gotten blades a third as good and been fine with them, but said friend's advice is very conservative in what standards are acceptable to say the least. 

Years of woodworking say to me that I never finish work off of the saw blade, and I could've gotten by with enormously less, actually. 

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Here's the example of sneaky little details. In combination squares (the one with a steel ruler separate from a head), the rule is usually hardened and tempered, and the head often isn't on cheaper stuff and some vintage. But hardened doesn't say much, and here's why - the rule on an older lufkin square that I have (this was a high quality tool back then, not the hardware store stuff now) is 53 hardness, rockwell c scale. Good hardness, but not brittle. Hard to choose a better figure. 

Someone was recommending something to me called "i gaging" when I suggested I wouldn't buy anything imported if hardened head and rule vintage stuff was the same price in good condition. A very highly skilled toolmaker told me this long ago - find a hardened rule and hardened head, nothing else. I looked up the specs for i-gaging and their definition of hardened was 32 hardness. Both are labeled as having a "hardened rule". the "i gaging" rule would be easy to dent or burr and make into a big problem. The lufkin rule isn't, it is hard and a lifetime of use along with its hardened head would not wear it out. And it's more accurate from the start. 

Just an example of how both groups could say "our square has a hardened rule" and one not be remotely in the same class as another. I've paid on average about $40 for a vintage lufkin 12" rule with a hardened head attached. The price for the imported "igaging" is about the same as that, and from a practical standpoint, it won't last a tenth as long wear wise and is almost certainly not nearly as accurate from the start. Put a different way, the stock number in a world full of reasonable people wouldn't change for the igaging rules until the stock of vintage lufkin hardened combination squares was $0. 

Do the premium blades do something better in terms of making a saw plate that is balanced and doesn't change shape under changing temperatures, etc? Probably. Does it matter? I don't know, I only know the answer for the squares - it matters for those.