If you are working in a shop with a single machine you may sometimes run into this question. Maybe you’re working on a project and suddenly you realize you need a few pieces of wood for something else, maybe you need to put together a pallet or a shipping crate. How much damage will it do to cut wood using your metal cutting blade?

In an ideal world, you would always change your blade to one with fewer teeth per inch and increase the RPMs on your machine before switching materials. However, if this isn’t possible consider how versatile your machine and blades are designed to be. Changing the blade can be time-consuming and if you are in a crunch it may not be feasible. But a metal cutting bandsaw is built more solidly than a wood cutting saw typically and therefore you won’t have any issues with the machine at all. Wood fibers could clog the metal cutting blade’s teeth more quickly and it would also likely cut through the wood more slowly but this is because blades made for metal have finer and sharper-cut teeth. Fine metal particles will easily fall free but bigger wooden particles may not.

So while ideally, you will always change your blade and your settings, if you are using a single machine and simply do not have the time, cutting a quick wood piece on your metal bandsaw won’t harm your machine at all. Obviously, you should not make habit of doing things like this because you will wear your blades out faster and cost yourself more downtime than just swapping blades in the first place. But if you have a one-off situation, you won’t be harming your machine, just adding extra wear to your blade.

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