Cutting Steel with a Skil Saw Blade

I’m am bolting a bunch of scrap steel together to make an anvil and I need the pieces to fit as tightly together as possible so I’ve been milling the surfaces on the CNC mill. I created a piece with a horn and step and I needed to create a area to set it down into.  Milling away 1 1/4″ steel to a depth of more than an inch would have taken a very long time so I decided to see if I could cut it away with a saw.

Now they make slitting and cut-off saws for milling machines but they tend to be kind of expense. Recently I saw one of the new generation of “cold cut” chop saws at Lowes and the blade seemed to be the same carbide tipped blade used for wood so I thought I’d just give it a try.

I bought a 5 1/5″ 24 tooth framing blade and welded it to a 5/8″ bolt. The heat of welding warped the blade so I spun it up and heated the area between hub and teeth to a red heat to shrink it. After it cooled the blade ran true and I tried a cut.

I was very surprised at how well it worked! I set the RPM at about 400 and started to feed with flood coolant at 2 IPM.  I bumped that up to 4 IPM almost immediately and I am sure I could have gone significantly faster!  This is definitely a technique I will try again and I am going to build myself a cold cut chop saw like this gentleman did: