Circular saw blade plates

[Exador]

I've just done up some CAD drawings for some new blade plates for my Lucas mill, which I intend to get laser cut locally, since I reckon the cost of new Lucas blades is over the top. I'm also going to try a couple of different tooth configurations, including 4 tooth and 6 tooth options just to see how they work.

My question is to do with the grade of steel. I presume a high-grade mild steel is the go to avoid work-hardening and so on. Does anyone have any more specific data as to what grade might be appropriate?

[RayG]

Hi Craig,

Try drilling or filing an old blade, that might provide a clue, my guess is it would be a high tensile steel alloy of some sort, I doubt that it would be mild steel.

Also, there is the issue of "tensioning" the blade.

Regards
Ray

[Exador]

Thanks Ray, tensioning is no issue, since that is done post manufacture anyway. There were a couple of reasons I thought mild steel, the main one being work-hardening and consequent stress fracturing and the other being the fact that the TCT tips are silver soldered on with the resultant frequent annealling. After probably 100 sets of teeth, my current blades are quite soft in the area of the tip pocket, to the extent that if they happen to get slightly bent during use (can happen when a tip comes off) they are quite easily bent back to straight using nothing more than a pair of multigrips when cold. Also, it's pretty easy to file when it gets a bit "mushroomed", but that may be just due to the annealling.

Having said all that, I don't know much about the subject really and I'm sure there must be someone here who does.