Hi Ike
For blades I'd go for a hook tooth over a skip tooth if you can simply because it will cut more aggressively. For rough but fast sawing the Dakin-Flather "Ripper" hook blade suggested by Davy Owen is a fast if coarse cutting blade, but I seriously doubt that a 16in machine with 1in wheels will be able to tension a 1in wide x 0.035in thick blade adequately and that your idea of using a 3/4in (or even a 1/2in) blade will allow you to generate the required tension more easily. The "Ripper" blade stock is very coarse toothed at 1.3tpi and is a good blade stock for the deep ripping, but I wouldn't expect it to resaw much less than about 2 to 3 in thickness. What the "Ripper" won't do is produce quality veneers - it's simply too coarse a blade. For that you need to look for something like a 3tpi hook tooth (or skip tooth) blade, and something thinner so that you can get a decent tension on it. In that respect Rob's 0.014in blades sound much more appropriate as they should tension well on the 4300.
As to throughput that's really one of those "how long's a piece of string" questions. As Roy says some softwoods can be worse that hardwoods, but there's also the fact that carbon steel blades aren't particularly hard and what really kills them is hitting an inclusion, such a grit or a piece of embedded metal (barbed wire, bullets, buck shot, etc). To overcome this a lot of trade guys go to bi-metallic blades and even stellite or carbide tipped blades these days, but those blades come on very thick bands (typically 0.045 to 0.050in) and require a heavy duty saw to tension (also a 3/4in TCT blade for a 28in bandsaw will run you about £130 VAT, so....)
For sawing veneers I'd recommend that you retain a blade solely for that purpose and no other and that you dry the stock completely before sawing. Stick with a 3/4in blade and you won't habve too many problems with drift, but going to the machine's (theoritical) maximum capacity in blade width and cut height is possibly pushing too many things to the limit. I've tried sawing veneers from slightly green stock in the past and I find it tends to become very uneven and require a lot of flattening out before you can use it, depending on how wet it is and what species, of course. The main things for getting a decent sawn veneer are good blade tension, a sharp blade which has never cut a curve (because that alters the set of the teeth), a good high fence to support the material with consistent side pressure onto the fence and as consistent a feed rate as you can manage.
Scrit
