Homemade Rig for Sharpening Table Saw Blades

Clamps and a File

• An article in “Mother Earth News,” a magazine and online guide to DIY living, suggests a simple method of DIY blade-sharpening based on commercially available methods. Setting this rig up requires the use of jig clamps and a metal file. You need one horizontally oriented clamp to secure your saw blade to a work surface and one vertically oriented clamp to hold your file in place. Once you set this rig up, all you need to do is file every tooth on your blade to the same length, then sharpen. Sharpening requires setting the file at the right angle for your teeth and slowly moving the blade clockwise against the file until all teeth are uniformly sharp.

Other Tools

• A guide to sharpening tools published in the “Family Handyman” magazine suggests using other tools in your workshop to sharpen things like lawnmower blades and saw blades. This article recommends the use of three basic tools for DIY tool-sharpening: a grinding wheel, mill file and sharpening stone. If you already own a grinding wheel, you can use this tool to sharpen your table saw blade by holding each tooth of the saw individually against the wheel. Hold the blade at such an angle that the wheel moves in a straight vertical line across the angle. Or, you can use handheld files to slowly sharpen your blade by filing each blade to an even point using the angle of the tooth as a guide.

Limitations

• DIY table saw-sharpening rigs present some limitations, particularly when you possess little to no experience in working with tools. Optimal sharpness for saw blades requires more than filing each tooth on a blade to a sharp point; you must also file each tooth to the same length and angle. This requires exacting work and can take a very long time. Improperly sharpening a blade, particularly with regard to tooth angles, can affect the performance of your saw and even ruin the blade in extreme cases.

Carbide Blades

• Experts like Gordana Trifunovic, author of “Great DIY Book,” recommend against sharpening carbide-tipped saw blades on your own. Two primary reasons exist for this. Carbide is an extremely hard material – so hard that in most cases a DIY rig cannot sharpen it. To sharpen carbide teeth, you need something stronger than carbide, such as diamond-tipped sharpeners. Furthermore, carbide-tipped blades require special grinding techniques to get the proper angle and sharpness for optimal saw performance.