If you’re working with fiber cement of any significant amount and using typical saw blades instead of purpose built cutters like the Diablo blades we used for a siding project, then chances are pretty good you’re throwing money away.
This leads to a bigger question: When do you spend your money on a project: Up front? Or after going cheap? Note: It’s going to get spent anyway; it’s just a matter of when.
We’ll get back to this.
The 10-inch and 7 1/4-inch Diablo blades we used cutting cementitious siding rocked. They lasted through the entire project and, just as important, worked well cutting brutal-on-blades fiber cement from start to finsh.
We used the 10-inch, 6-tooth blade on the miter saw, which enabled us to gang cut 2-pieces at a time, significantly speeding up our work. You can use 10-inch Diablo blades on table saws as well. We loaded the 7 1/4-inch blade on our circular saw for rake and rip cuts.
Diablo says these blades produce less respirable dust than other blades. Since we did not have our respirable-dust- meter with us, I’ll take their word for it. For the dust that was there, we attached a shop vacuum to the miter saw and wore dust masks as needed.
Which brings us back to the big question about tooling up. Diablo blades cost more than typical wood-cutting blades. But not only do they last longer cutting fiber cement, they cut cleaner (meaning less tear-out) and they cut faster. Plus they’re the go-to for other projects we run into like cementitious backer board for floor and wall tile.
Conclusion: Diablo blades were well worth the up front investment for this project. They enabled us to do nice work faster and cleaner than if we cheaped out on the front end. And that goes for other projects too where we used Diablo blades, like Save My Bakery on Food Network where we used them non-stop for days at a time from rough to finish.
The right stuff: 1 | The cheap stuff: 0
