Rockwerks Lapidary Forum

Hey everyone, how's it all going?
The general hectacity of life around here has been driving me nuts (one wedding down and two more this month) so I've been hounding every spare moment I've had lately. It's lead me to decide the rock saw and polisher would likely be the most useful tools to attack next.
Yes this decision is driven by todays discoveries of two very large pieces of stone.The first is a quartz running 5 1/2 inches long and 3 thick and wide at largest. The other is an as of yet unidentified blue and white crystaline structure running 5x3x3 and both are best guess measurements. Crystal and I will be posting pics of these stones and a couple others soon.
My main curiosity at the moment is what blade to use. We have two motors, one is 1/2hp the other 1/4, and all the other materials to use in building our first saw. This does include an old but still functional variable speed switch and a set of plans derived from one of the sites suggested in another post. We're pretty sure a carbide blade of some sort would be able to do the work and keeping it under 10 inch should allow us to run water as a coolant. If I've got any of this info wrong please feel free to correct me
Right now I'm looking for any info you could give me on the different brands of blades. Or if you prefer what brands to avoid entirely. Thank you all in advance for any info or advice.

Carbide blades will cut stone, but the life on them while cutting stone is extremely limited. You will get probably 10+ times the life if you use diamond. Diamond is a bit more expensive at first, but after you go thru 3-4 carbide blades, you will want to go with diamond.
MK diamond is a good general use blade. The cheap diamond blades made in China, are cheap (relatively) they won't last quite as long as a name brand, but are way better than carbide.
I get cheap China blades from here;
http://lapidary-rock-saw-blade.com/blade.html
But I have no association with them. Lopacki.com is another choice.
You will want a course cut for most general cutting. The fine cut is for inlay, and precious stone.
Feel free to ask away. Hope the info helped a bit,
KOR
Dan

I agree with Dan that diamond is the only way to go with saw blades. I love the blades I bought from Lopacki.

Wow guys, thanks for the site links. I would have never found those by myself! Construction on the actual rock saw will be started tonight. We're editing the pictures of four of what I think are our best recent finds in a few minutes so they'll be up soon. Would love to get a positive ID on the blue and white stone even if it's nothing special
I'll probably be ordering a blade in the next few days and we picked up a couple cheap DeWalts for practice slabbing some granite chunks. They're pretty chunky blades but dirt cheap and the practice pieces of stone we have are around 3-5 lb chunks. Even though the blades most likely won't last the practice in slabbing should be worth the $5 price tag on the blades.
Thanks again for the links guys.

- Mike