Thread: Best table saw blade for resawing old red gum fence posts

Hi 419. A dedicated rip saw blade (I assume you are wanting to rip if this is why you think a bandsaw would be ideal) and a slow feed rate. Sharp blades will deal with anything and red gum isn't that hard. Preparing your stock is important, you will need 2 square edges and 1 square face. I would set the blade at 40mm or so high, make sure the squared face is against the fence and complete in 2 passes. I have both CMT and Freud blades (10") and would recommend either.

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

Hi 419. A dedicated rip saw blade (I assume you are wanting to rip if this is why you think a bandsaw would be ideal) and a slow feed rate. Sharp blades will deal with anything and red gum isn't that hard. Preparing your stock is important, you will need 2 square edges and 1 square face. I would set the blade at 40mm or so high, make sure the squared face is against the fence and complete in 2 passes. I have both CMT and Freud blades (10") and would recommend either.

Thanks again, Mountain Ash.

I did exactly what you recommended when resawing probably 50 or so years old 100x80mm red gum house stumps with this new Freud blade https://www.timbecon.com.au/industri...CABEgJ2bvD_BwE . They came out very, very well in straightness of cut and cleanness of finish.

That Freud blade is excellent. I could see the timber going slowly into the blade on the first embedded cut but it was so smooth compared with anything I've used before that I was starting to wonder if I was just imagining I was feeding it into the blade. The smoothness of the blade and the feel it gave me on manual feeding allowed me to adjust the feed rate according to what the blade was going through with a lot more efficiency than I've experienced before, not that I have a lot of experience ripping hardwood.

At the risk of annoying people with very much better and vastly more expensive table saws, I did it on a quite old Ozito saw table I picked up for $30 last weekend purely for trying out resawing old timber on a table saw versus maybe getting a decent bandsaw around $1,500. Obviously not the greatest machine ever made, but I wasn't facing financial ruin if it and a new Freud blade costing three and half times as much as the table turned out to be a failed experiment. I'd still have the blade. Main reason for buying the Ozito was that the riving knife sits slightly below the top of the blade and can do embedded cuts without removing it or butchering a higher knife, unlike my better table saw. A couple of hours with a straightedge, a square, a digital angle gauge and some shims and it set up to look like it should cut square, straight and reasonably safely, and it did.

Now I'm thinking I should get a better table saw for longer term use, but why bother when a crappy $30 saw does the same job on what will be intermittent use?

That's a great outcome. A mate recently bought the Ozito bench top thicknesses and ran a whole lot of old messmate through it. Turned out fine. I guess the problem with the cheaper tools is the build quality. Like you say, using it occasionally will place nowhere near the same stress on the machine. But I have found that the more you use something the more uses you find for it and just when you need it to get the job done......