Holy cutting ability!

[scorrpio]

This is one interesting observation.
In order to cut laminate flooring, I replaced the stock blade in my BT3100 with a 7.5" CS Freud 40T blade. The frst thing I needed to to was rip 2" off several sections (whch are about 4' long). On first two rips, the blade would bind once or twice through (though the saw did not appear to be 'laboring'), but lifting the piece off and then re-feeding it and going slowly would complete the rip just fine.
After second rip, I noticed that blade was coasting a lot longer than usual. I checked it, and found out that blade was not tightened - it was rotating free on the arbor! Not sure how that happened - I thought I tightened it properly. What is amazing is that blade was sharp enough to rip 4 foot long laminate boards on nothing but friction between arbor and blade.

Sure enough, after proper tightening, I had no more cutting problems, even with fairly aggressive feed rates. And after numerous rips and crosscuts installing ~300 sq ft of laminate, the blade shows no signs of wear.

[atgcpaul]

Well, I guess you're lucky that that little blade
didn't quickly and unexpectedly become a wobble dado.

[lkazista]

I checked it, and found out that blade was not tightened - it was rotating free on the arbor!

YIKES!!!!!

[Ken Weaver]

Be still my heart! Scorrpio, you're one lucky dude. I hate to think of the possibilities.

[scorrpio]

Well, the reason it seems was that those spacers on the arbor are kinda tight - and grease on them seems to make make it tighter. When removing stock blade, it appears that spacers shifted a little. And when I was tightening the nut, used the usual amount of force. The wobble was real tiny - maybe 0.002 or so gap remained. Enough for blade to spin free, but not enough for a visible wobble.

What could have happened? Not much really. arbor nut threads are designed to tighten against rotation, so it is unlikely the nut would come loose. If it did start to come loose, the blade wobble would become a lot more pronounced, prompting me to check it earlier. Even if both the nut and the collar came all the way off, they'd just end up banging up the blade shroud. The blade was quite low - less than half an inch exposed. There is not enough clearance in the throat plate for them to have flown out. Ditto for blade - not enough clearance in TP for it to have gone off the arbor. Even if it did, I never stand in line with blade. If I somehow missed the major wobbles, the heavy vibration, and the banging of loose nut in the shroud I would (at an extremely unlikely worst) have the blade fly out and embed itself in the ceiling. There was no danger of kickback.

Overall, I agree that it was not a good thing, but it was far less dangerous than about any other error you can make with a tablesaw. Now improperly tightened arbor on a RAS.... that's a whole another story.

The fact remains that a free-spinning blade would still cut.