DeWalt 2X Demo Circular Saw Framing Blade Review

We expend a lot of digital ink writing about tool performance and that’s good! What else would we be doing? I’d probably just be wandering the streets. A tool’s accessories – in a saw’s case, the blades – are a significant contributing factor to overall performance but it’s easy to give them less attention in an individual tool review. Kenny does a great job of controlling the accessory variable in shootouts among tools, but he wanted to see how a few circular saw blades stacked up against one another – in this case, how the new DeWalt 2X Demo Circular Saw Blade Review stacks up to solid performers from Hilti along with Diablo’s newest framing blade with Tracking Point. I was happy to make a lot of sawdust in pursuit of the answer.

Showing Its Teeth

The DeWalt 2X Demo Circular Saw Blade Review is available in a carbide 24T configuration. There’s not much point in having a fine tooth blade for demo work, so 24T is an ideal call for a blade capable of combining demo and framing applications. This tooth count may not leave the prettiest finished cut, but of course, that’s not the purpose of blade. With fewer teeth and larger gullets as well as a positive 18-degree hook angle, the DeWalt blade is designed to clear material quickly and aggressively.

The blade’s thin kerf is appropriate for the cordless circular saw I’ll be using for the comparison, as thin kerf was originally developed for saws with less power. Although it should move through the wood quicker than a thicker kerf, the trade-off for a thin kerf has traditionally been some vibration. New blade design has suppressed that vibration quite a bit in many blades, so we’ll see how the DeWalt feels in the cut.

Cutting In Line

The comparison was pretty simple – I clamped a pressure-treated 2×12 to the DeWalt Metal Folding Sawhorses, inserted a fully-charged 2.0Ah battery into the saw (I wanted to test run time without taking all day), made a crosscut, gave the saw 30 seconds of rest, and made the next cut. I repeated this until the saw failed to complete a cut due to battery depletion. Then I’d change blades, insert a new fully-charged 2.0Ah battery, and repeat the process.

Because the Hilti was more of a standard circular saw blade and Diablo has a reputation as being the saw blade leader (the one I use in my DeWalt table saw is exceptional and Leon Ward found his Diablo HardieBlade to be of the same quality), I hypothesized that the DeWalt’s performance would fall in the middle. So a drumroll please: the Hilti ran out of gas on the 26th cut, the Diablo on the 35th cut, and the DeWalt on the 39th cut. That’s 50% more cutting than on a solid stock blade and a little more than 11% better than the blades we usually go for.

What’s more – the DeWalt made the cut feel like butter whereas the Hilti was labored slightly more and the Diablo, although fast, actually produced some felt vibration. The goal was not to push the saw through the material as fast as poosible, but rather to find an efficient work rate for each blade without bogging the saw down. I say that only to point out that the vibration I felt with Diablo was not due to stressing the saw/blade system.

The Bottom Line

The thin kerf of this blade was noticeable the moment I picked it up compared to the standard stock blade from Hilti. This carried with it the thought that vibration could become an issue but it simply wasn’t. Carbide teeth ensure that the blade’s life should be excellent and the cutting performance was certainly on par with Pro-level expectations.

The combination of thin kerf, carbide teeth, rake angle, and gullet design are optimized for cutting with cordless saws and it showed against what many Pros consider to be the best on the market in Diablo.

Maintaining the comparison, the DeWalt 2X Demo Circular Saw Blade Review is priced several dollars higher than Diablo, but you do get a performance benefit there. The question that’s left is what the full usable life of the blade will be.

I was truly – pleasantly – surprised by the outstanding performance of the DeWalt 2X Demo Circular Saw Blade Review. You could be forgiven for thinking that a major tool manufacturer would regard their own accessory quality as an afterthought, perhaps branding a mediocre blade and sticking it on a saw more as a placeholder than a functional contributor to performance. But DeWalt didn’t do that here – in fact, it outshined its competitors. At less than $19 for a single blade, I’d recommend picking one of these up the next chance you get.

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