Comment by solomonb
7 months ago
Professional sharpeners have tools for testing blade conditions. We had a guy who would drop by the shop once every couple months and pickup all our used blades to service.
This is really standard fare with professional carpentry. I don't understand why so many people here are in shock at the concept of blade servicing.
> This is really standard fare with professional carpentry. I don't understand why so many people here are in shock at the concept of blade servicing.
For me, I'm just surprised that the economics of it can work. I'd imagine such a specialist is not going to charge less than a $100/hr so I wouldn't have expected the cost of repair to make sense. But interesting that it does!
I think they make their money in the scale. They have a pickup guy who drives all over Los Angeles to pick up blades from all their customers. We had him come in every 2 months. He would return a batch of sharpened blades and take whatever blades were dull.
Definitely an old school style of business.
Have you had a SawStop? It really doesn’t seem like it, because if you did you wouldn’t be so stuck on this line of argument.
Just getting saw blade out of the stop is a major effort with a vice and engineers hammer. The way it brakes is an extremely violent process.
It definitely warps the blades in weird ways, and fixing them to actually be true is unlikely to be economic.
Yes I have the industrial grade Sawstop. I ran a professional carpentry business for years using it as our main saw. I probably bought it around 2012 or 2013, I can't remember exactly.
I don't know what to tell you. I ran a professional shop, I'm not a hobbyist. I couldn't tell you how many feet of lumber I've shoved through my table saw. I've never personally had the Sawstop pop due to a safety issue, but every single time it happened in the shop I was able to remove the blade and get it serviced for around $30-40 depending on how many teeth were lost. Most of my saw blades are greater then $100 new so this cost is worth it.
The workshop I used had a dozen plus false pops due to people cutting wet wood or similar issues. None of the blades were worth saving due to significant warping or damage.
I guess we’re just living in different worlds.
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