2/0 Jewelers blades and giant popsicle sticks. A match made in heaven!!

[crupiea]

All of my work is done with 1/8" baltic birch and 2/0 jewelers blades.

The reason I use these is they have like 50 teeth per inch or some crazy thing like that.  I have used FD and pegas 2/0 blades in the past and they are great but have their limitations. 

Mainly, they are very flexible and hard to control so doing very tight cuts is difficult.  Plus the lack of teeth makes blow outs are tear outs a common thing.

The jewelers blades are stiff , thin, combined with lots of teeth make fort great tiny inside cuts flawlessly. Talking in the mm scale cuts.

Sounds great but the downside is the lack of reverse teeth. Just like any saw without reverse teeth, they will make an absolute mess on the backside of the wood. This leads to blow outs, tear outs and lots of repeated work to fix the mess. 

What I used to use was another piece of 1/8" baltic birch as a backer as I had a specialty yard near me where I could get endless amounts of it for a reasonable price. 

Times have of course changed plus I moved so no longer have access to it so needed a new backer source.

this is how the giant popsicle sticks come in to play.  They sell them in the craft section of walmart for a few bucks for a big pack. They are 1/16" sp perfect backer material. 

Just lightly spray them with 77 and let it become super light to the touch.  hardly tacky at all.  Thats the trick. it should be just the slightest bit of tacky, just barely enough to stick. 

Put them on the back of the piece and thats it.  Too much tackiness and you wont be able to remove the popsicle sticks so its really use the lightest spray of super 77 and let it dry to barely tacky.

Just finished a very intricate piece, no tear outs and it looks great. 

[Denny Knappen]

You might consider the Pegas #2/0 Metal Cutting Blades.  They are 0.0102" thick x 0.0205" wide x 56.0 tpi.  I have them in stock. The price is $40.32 per 12 dozen/pack.  I also have smaller packs.

Edited yesterday at 03:38 PM by Denny Knappen