Wow, This Stuff Is Hard to Cut Part One

I wrapped up my future guitar neck in a heavy-duty plastic bag and threw a couple of dust masks into the car.  On the way to my dad's house I stopped by a big box home improvement store to buy a saw blade with as many teeth as I could find.  I didn't know what size saw he's got; most of the table/miter saw blades at this place were 10" or 12".  I can either buy one and return it immediately for the correct item (my usual pattern) or do the right thing...so I called him up from inside the maw of the beast.  Is it pathetic of me to say that sometimes, still, mobile phones strike me as new, strange and marvelous?

Why, yes.  Yes it is.

He told me the blade on his saw is an 8.25", and that's the biggest that will fit.  I was walking up and down the aisle, not seeing any such size:  the table saw blades being too big, and the circular saw blades being too small.  I finally settled on an inexpensive 7.25" plywood blade meant for a circular saw, advertised as working on OSB and plastic as well.  Lots of teeth - check.  Cheap - check.  There's a really cool one that looks like it could cut through a bass boat, but it's over $40 and I'm on a budget here.

My dad's table saw is a piece of junk.  Now please understand that this is a guy who literally makes his own wooden replacement garage doors, with the inset panels and all that, and he rebuilds windows too.  He doesn't have a problem with this saw - I do.  It's got a 1/2" arbor and everything else in the world is 5/8", so he hand-centers the blade under the washer.  No, really.  Really.  The rip fence needs to be shimmed with wood slivers for the lock-down lever to work, and it doesn't quite go parallel unless you measure it and tap it into position.  The guy grew up helping my grandfather build houses, and I think that back in the day they had to cut wood with their fingernails - that must be it, because I don't think it's possible to cut a straight line with this saw.

That's what makes my father's table saw perfect for this job.  If we live through it.

We masked up and I put some work gloves on.  We adjusted the rip fence to approximately okay and I fed the piece in slow.  The board has two fuzzy sides and no frame of reference, so I quickly got off track and started digging into the wood.  I gave myself more room and just took the plastic off.  This is probably what wrecked the blade.  It stalled out completely and began to burn the plastic when I tried to cut one end off:

You can probably see how that cut is a little toasty.  By this point the teeth on the blade were actually rounded off.  You could throw it at a bowl of jello and it would bounce off.  As a bonus, the air was indeed filled with scintillating death, a glass fiber death cloud that could have shut down air traffic downwind for 200 miles (current events reference!).

So what now?  I'm 25% done turning this into a presentable piece of wood, and the future looks like an endless serious of broken table saw blades, burnt wood, melted epoxy, and a small Superfund cleanup.  I'm thinking three things:

• Band saw!  Someone else's band saw!
• Don't cut the plastic next time
• How on earth will I shape the neck, if simply cutting it is this difficult?

Total cost:  $9 for a useless metal disc