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points by AngryData 2 days ago | 0 comments

Ive never used one, but why would the blade be destroyed? It is shoved into an aluminum block yes, but steel and/or carbide are way harder and unless the blade fractures it should cut fairly cleanly into the aluminum. Ive cut plenty of aluminum stock and blocks on wood working saws.

The hard part would be removing the blade from the aluminum block, but im sure if you were determined enough to save $20 it would come out.

[–] oasisaimlessly 2 days ago

Typically you're feeding aluminum into the table saw blade slowly enough that every tooth only has scrape off a fraction of a millimeter of material. If you shove it in 100x faster, the forces involved are ~100x larger. This will probably shatter the blade.

Also, the chip produced may be large enough to fill the air gap between teeth and have nowhere to go, resulting in the blade either instantly stopping, or plastically deforming/dragging the surrounding material.

EDIT: Seeing is believing: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ibp2Gy2CFrY

EDIT 2: Apparently the stresses involved when stopping can make teeth that aren't even touching the material fly off the blade: https://youtube.com/watch?v=SYLAi4jwXcs&t=5m50s