DIYbanter - View Single Post

chaniarts[_3_]

On 9/6/2013 7:54 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 06 Sep 2013 18:41:20 -0700, sms
wrote:

On 9/4/2013 12:31 PM, mike wrote:

Don't even think about doing this without a chop-saw and more than
one carbide blade. The stuff dulls blades FAST. Do all your
sawing outside with eye and breathing protection. The surface
material is hard and sharp.

I bought a Skil flooring saw from someone on craigslist
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0037KM8TQ. He had two extra new blades. I
wondered why he only used the blade that came with the saw, since my
laminate dulled the blades pretty fast. The answer was that he installed
bamboo flooring, which is very soft (a complaint I heard is that it gets
indentations in it very easily).

I've found that bamboo is varies a lot. The stuff I had in VT was
great. The stuff in the AL house, not so much.

But the laminate, even though the
laminate layer is very thin, is also very hard, as you stated. I
probably only ripped 15 planks before the blade dulled. Fortunately
there's not a great deal of ripping. You really want both a flooring saw
(or table saw) plus a chop saw because you don't want to keep changing
the orientation of the flooring saw or table saw.

"Hard" doesn't dull blades. Abrasives do. Since bamboo is a grass,
it's not very abrasive. Some woods are very abrasive (a lot if
silicon in the wood) and laminates will add abrasives to the surface
(some bamboo, too, for that matter).

lots of laminates now have a silicon coating applied at the factory for
hard wearing.