Table saw blades and MFC

[George_N]

I have started making some kitchen cabinets out if 18 mm MFC. I cut the parts oversize with my hand held circular saw and started trimming them to final size on my Triton Workcentre, fitted with a 235 mm 60t blade marketed as being suitable for melamine. On the first few parts I was getting was getting nice clean cuts with almost no chipping. Soon though, the quality of cut deterioriated until it was little better than I was getting with my hand held Makita. I took the blade out of the Workcentre last night and found that one of the teeth was badly chipped. Presumably this was caused by a piece of metal or other hard rubbish in the chipboard . Would one bad tooth be enough to give serious chipping? This is not a cheap blade and while I have ordered a replacement, I'm worried that the new blade will suffer the same problems. In the meantime will need to find out about getting my damaged blade repaired/sharpened. The joys of woodworking!

 

[jasonB]

Melamine blades tend to have a higher top bevel so they cut with a slicing action, the disadvantage of this high angle is that it will wear quickly.

You have probably also taken the edge of several if not all the other teeth when you hit the debris

A good sawdoctor will be able to braze on a replacement tip and sharpen the blade.

Jason

 

[George_N]

Yes, the tips do have fairly steep bevels...I think alternate left and right bevels separated by a straight tooth. I'll check out local saw sharpening services.

 

[George_N]

I thought I'd revive this thread to have another moan about the joys of working with melamine faced chipboard. Boy, is that stuff hard on tools! I spent yesterday cutting out the parts for a tall oven housing. This is to be made up of side panels approx 2000 x 570, a top, bottom, three internal shelves and a couple of back panels. I cut the pieces roughly to size with my hand held circular saw and trimmed to size on my Triton workcentre. After cutting just these nine pieces my workcentre blade is already showing signs of blunting and I have ruined a brand new 19 mm router bit. The router bit (Wealden straight, two flute) was used to cut a shallow housing (dado?) in the side panels for the full thickness back panels. I had previously only routed the housings for 3 base units with this bit. The first ong side panel was very slow to pass ober the router table and there was some burning. On inspecting the bit I found that there was a distinct notch in both TC flutes where it had been cutting through the laminate. The MFC may be cheaper than other materials but I think that is going to be off-set by the cost of tools.
Moan over, back to work...Has anybody else experienced this degree of rapid wear on TCT tools with MFC?

 

[jasonB]

Worktops are made up the same way and I usually allow 1 cutting edge per joint (two cuts) replacable tip cutters help keep the cost down.

Jason

 

[Scrit]

Has anybody else experienced this degree of rapid wear on TCT tools with MFC?

Yes. When I used to CNC machine the stuff we ran replaceable-tip carbide tooling because MFC is so aggressive - much worse that MDF I found. I wouldn't ever used spirals on the stuff because I wrote off a number of solid carbide spirals in the early days when I hit inclusions (screws, calcified stuff, etc - chipboard generally contains 10 to 30% recycled materials) - expensive when they can't be reground and you've just destroyed a £60 cutter after 20 metres of cutting :evil: The cheapest way to machine turned out to be the replaceable tip tools - the tips are only a few quid, they hold their cutting circle (resharpened TCTs shrink over time) and if you hit a screw then you only loose a few quid's worth of carbide. Best of all they genuinely seem to be sharper, possibly because they are so thin. The only possible downside is the initial cost of the cutters. They are sold by Wealden (KWO Versafix - German), Titman (British-made), CMT and Freud (both Italian) and Trend (Israeli). As Joson says you get a limited cut out of them, but the quality is good

Scrit

 

[George_N]

Has anybody else experienced this degree of rapid wear on TCT tools with MFC?

Yes. When I used to CNC machine the stuff we ran replaceable-tip carbide tooling because MFC is so aggressive - much worse that MDF I found. I wouldn't ever used spirals on the stuff because I wrote off a number of solid carbide spirals in the early days when I hit inclusions (screws, calcified stuff, etc - chipboard generally contains 10 to 30% recycled materials) - expensive when they can't be reground and you've just destroyed a £60 cutter after 20 metres of cutting :evil: The cheapest way to machine turned out to be the replaceable tip tools - the tips are only a few quid, they hold their cutting circle (resharpened TCTs shrink over time) and if you hit a screw then you only loose a few quid's worth of carbide. Best of all they genuinely seem to be sharper, possibly because they are so thin. The only possible downside is the initial cost of the cutters. They are sold by Wealden (KWO Versafix - German), Titman (British-made), CMT and Freud (both Italian) and Trend (Israeli). As Joson says you get a limited cut out of them, but the quality is good

Scrit

I had a look at the versofix bits on the Wealden site but unfortunately they don't appear to do 19 mm...18 and 20 mm only. I'll have a look at some of the other sites. As an alternative I might fit the backs in with biscuits and a couple of screws, since I'm using that method for the rest of the carcass anyway.

 

[Scrit]

I'm surprised that your MFC is 19mm, most of it is (nominally) 18mm. In any case if you need to fit into a groove that's too narrow you could always rebate the panel:

Scrit

 

[George_N]

I'm surprised that your MFC is 19mm, most of it is (nominally) 18mm. In any case if you need to fit into a groove that's too narrow you could always rebate the panel:

Scrit

It is nominal 18 mm but is actually about 18.4 mm and a housing cut with my 18 mm bit (bought for the job) is too tight. Yes I could nibble a little off the back edge the panel to get it to fit but as the cutters are blunting so quickly I am getting a fair bit of chipout on the edge of the housing. I know this will be at the back of the cupboards and hardly seen but the perfectionist in me wants the cuts to be as clean as possible.

 

[DomValente]

Trend used to supply an 18.2 mm cutter perhaps they do an 18.4

Dom

 

[NeilO]

yes, i have ... fitted my kitchen last year , and bought a kitchen fitters pack of routers cutters, with the intention of using them to cut and trim the worktops , and then dispose of them... knowing how harsh manmade boards can be on cutting tools.

i try to do this as much as possible, whenever i use MM boards I just buy a budget set of cutters/saw blades and throw. saving the good tools for real wood.