Have read Mehler's book and also talked w/ him in person at the WW
shows. Yeah, put some kind of splitter in there. Mine is real
simple. I just took a piece of metal, dilled a hole, but a slot and
use the screw that held the blade guard to hold this "splitte". It
sits pretty far back from the blade (more than the 1/4" recommended),
but it's better than nothing, and once the stock passes by it, it's
pretty good at keeping the stock off the back teeth. Actually, by
raising my blade, I can get the blade closer to my splitter ;-)

I guess we could take some styrofoam and test KB with a high vs low
blade??

I still am curious about the DC impacts. Seems to me a higher blade
would throw dust down and into the saw box. The cutting action would
be nearly straight down, wheras a low blade is going to be more
towards the operator. With a high blade, the dust would have to stay
in the gullets all around the blade and get ejected one the teeth
emerge from the saw.

Hmm... next time out, we'll run some experiments.


On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 10:55:41 -0800, "Brett A. Thomas"
wrote:

mac davis wrote:
On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 00:02:10 -0700,
wrote:

logic (not usually applied to my thoughts) would say that a higher
blade that had more teeth moving downwards in front would also have
more teeth moving UP in back, right?

I *think* the logic is that, with the blade at just above the level of
the wood, if you "hook" the wood on the back just a little - enough to
lift it like 1/4" - the wood will lift into the horizontally-moving part
of the blade, which will throw the wood at you. If the blade is all the
way up, lifting the piece off the table a little bit won't cause a kickback.

I'm not saying I *buy* that, I'm just explaining the reasoning.

I always liked Kelly Mehler's line on it, which I mentioned the last
time I participated in this thread, in May, 2002 - thread he

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...vel3.net#link1

Mehler's line answers the qeustion "How high above my workpiece should
the sawblade be?" with "How much do you want to cut into your fingers?"

Of course, that's kind of a cute answer for him, since if you're
following his advice, you're using a splitter and a guard, and neither
kickback nor touching your blade should be much of a risk for you. The
most compelling answer I've heard for running the blade high is that
it's supposed to run cooler. In the thread I reference above one poster
claims that the instructions with his Forrest blade said to run it at
full height - I don't recall that with mine, but it's been years since I
read the instructions - if I ever did . I usually shoot for having
the teeth completely clear the workpiece, but I certainly don't know
better than anyone else - and probably worse than many.

-BAT