It seems everyone and their brother are recommending this blade, so I thought I’d give it a try.
At $155 on Amazon, I sure hope it’s worth it. Time will tell.
One thing I can vouch for, though, is the teeth are really f’ing sharp! I got cut just by looking at the teeth!
OK, not really, but I got the gloves out really quickly after that.
No, these are not blood-coated teeth, although I wouldn’t blame you if you thought they were. I have my red Freud blade behind the new Forrest blade, and the Forrest blade is just a little smaller in diameter.
Since my table saw is a SawStop PCS, and has a brake cartridge, I needed to check the gap between the blade and the brake to make sure it’s between 1/16th and 1/8th of an inch.
SawStop provides this yellow plastic holder thingy, and an 8mm hex key with a rounded end.
The plastic thingy is magnetic, so you can stick it to the cabinet body.
The tip of the yellow thingy is the right size for the gap.
(You can click on the image to see a larger version.)
So you stick the tip between the blade and the brake, and check the gap.
If the gap isn’t right, you adjust it by turning this yellow bolt, using the hex key, which moves the brake closer or farther away.
I also verified that the blade (yellow arrow) and the riving knife (red arrow) were aligned, which they were.
But see tomorrows post for more on the riving knife.
For a quick test of the blade, I cut some plywood cross-grain to see how much tear-out I got, if any.
By the way, the read-and-white insert plate here is from Infinity Tools, and I’ll talk about it in an upcoming blog post.
It’s kind of hard to see the result here (below), but click on the image then zoom it in to actual size, and hopefully you can see just how perfect the cut is, with absolutely no tear-out.
Click image to view full sized
In the next post, I’ll talk about the new insert plate.
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