Saw Blade Cleaning - My way?

Well I had some down time in the shop this evening and thought it would be a good time to do some loooong needed maintenance. Tonight’s chore, cleaning saw blades.

I’ve always use some form of a pitch and resin remover in the past. But after the last move, most things, including the resin remover, never made the trip this far west. So I did some reading on the WWW and the two most popular methods to clean saw blades, sans resin cleaner, is:

1) Simple Green
2) Oven Cleaner

Both methods to clean the blade are the same and reported to work very well but the oven cleaner is said that it can loosen the bond between the carbide and the steel of the blade. Well CHEM 101 was never my strong subject at OSU so maybe it can, or maybe it’s just one of those things that after a 1,000 years of constant exposure to oven cleaner, it could weaken the bond and potentially … You get the point. I don’t know if it does or not nor do I have any oven cleaner in the house, all praise the self cleaning ovens! I don’t have to even consider the Oven Cleaner because I’m not going into town to buy Oven Cleaner when I have something else.

So it’s back to my old motto, “use what you’s got Chunk!” Well I don’t have any Simple Green cleaner around here but I do have a gallon of Super Clean! Yeah ME! One is “organic” sounding and one isn’t but both are excellent cleaners, so why not give it a go?

So I said to myself, “Chunk, you better test this on an old blade before ruining your prized and closely coveted blue ribbon babes.” So what do I have in the horde but nothing less than the original blade that came in my Porter-Cable circular saw that I got way back in the mid 80’s! Man that’s just so sad… What a perfect guinea pig your going to be.

So I poured a little S.C. onto a paper plate and dropped the blade in and went for it. Darn, I forgot to get an old toothbrush. So off I go to retrieve said implement of destruction only to return in less than a minute. When I returned, low and behold I could see those lovey tell tail streaks of brown wisps coming from the blade’s teeth. Hey this has potential! So I grab the Greeny, Scotch Bright pad for you non Navy types, and give it a nice polishing and it even removed the little bit of rust that had accumulated over the last 20 years give or take.

I’ve got say that S.C., a toothbrush and a Greeny is the ticket to a blade that looks like it could be only a year or so old.

One word of CAUTION. I would recommend that you use rubber gloves because the S.C. is going to suck the oil right out of your skin leaving your hands a mess and making typing near impossible. :( Learn from my mistakes and you will be the smartest person on Earth – I make a lot of mistakes.

Then just completely dry and protect the blades as you would always do.

The moral, you may not have S.C or S.G. but you might find that you have something that may work just a well. I wonder if Pine-Sol would work? If not, it sure would give the blades a nice pine sent. lol

-- Chunk