12 amp circular saw update
The new 12
amp circular saw is just under 3 months old and is already acting
like it wants to retire. The problem is an issue of needing to tighten
the blade every few cuts. It's possible it may have been over tightened
which might damage the bearings.
To be fair I think we under
estimated our usage and should have chosen the next level up.
I think it might be the right
saw for someone who doesn't cut treated lumber, but I now know we need
the next size up.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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With all your frequent use how sharp is the blade by now? Treated lumber dulls blades remarkably quickly.
I am not sure what to think of the screw loosening with use. It is usually a left-handed variety so the spinning blade should tighten it. Is there that much vibration? A drop or two of LocTite might band-aid the problem.
Good luck.
Good point about the blade. I should try a new one and I like the locktite idea for a band aid fix. Much better than duct tape.
Next time, get a saw with soldered in cemented carbide tips. It will stay sharp very long. You'll need to sharpen it with a grindstone though, a regular file literally won't cut it.
We have a 350 mm carbide tipped blade with cross-cut teeth on our big sliding table saw. It rips though 3/4" plywood like a hot knife through butter.
And watch out for nails in the wood; they'll chip the teeth.
The teeth of a sharp saw could easily pierce your skin by accident when you're handling it. If the teeth feel or look rounded (look at it with a magnifying glass if you can), it's time to sharpen it.
The size of the chips depends on the rotational speed of the saw and the speed at which you feed it through the wood. Since a circular saw moves pretty fast, there will be litte difference in the chip size, because they are small to begin with;
For example; our 350 mm sliding table saw is usually set at 3500 rpm; so the teeth are moving at 230 kph (143 mph). Let's say that you'd cut an inch with it in a second (you won't get that much I think, but just for example). In a second, the blade rotates 58.33 times. It has 96 teeth, IIRC. So in a second, around 5600 teeth pass through the wood. So each "chip" would be 1/5600 = 0.00018"! That's dust, not chips.
There are signs that a sawblade is dull, but most of those can also be produced by pushing too hard;
My guess is that most people sharpen too late.
Roland has covered blade sharpness well and I concur with everything he has said. The only other factor that occurs to me is that, depending upon what you have been cutting, sticky wood resins (or pressure treated crud?) can accumulate on the flat of the blade as well as the teeth, causing some drag.
That can be addressed by cleaning the blade with some Simple Green and carefully drying it to avoid rust. Some folks use oven cleaner but those can loosen the bond between carbide teeth and the blade and make for unexpected projectiles.
Sharpness of teeth is probably a bigger issue though.