Old and New Saw Blades

December 20th, 2019
tools
Five years ago I bought a used Model 77 Skilsaw. I've used it for a bunch of house projects, and it's very versatile. I noticed that it was starting to be more work to cut things and I was getting some burning and smoking, so I decided to put on a new blade. Here's the last cut with the old blade:

And the first cut with the new one:

You can see that the old one is much rougher, where the saw has torn its way through the wood. The rings are raised, because the dull blade has torn out more of the soft earlywood the harder latewood. The edges are splintered and there are burn marks. On the other hand, the new one is smooth, because the blade was sharp enough for a clean cut. No burning, minimal splintering. It was also a much quicker and easier cut.

Mostly this is to say, sawblades are not that expensive or difficult to change, and I should have replaced this one sooner!

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Linkpost for July

Effective Altruism

via Thing of Things July 3, 2026

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a t…

via Posts on July 3, 2026

Variable fonts aren't universally supported

I make a lot of webpages. I also use Lockdown Mode on iOS and MacOS for a bit of extra security. Sometimes I realize that I forgot to test on Safari and it looks like crap, or I test and don’t notice that there’s been a problem for months (as was the case…

via Home June 27, 2026

more     (via openring)