Tracksaw mix n match

[Sideways]

Sharing some photos in case they are of interest.

A year or two back I swapped from a Festool tracksaw to a Mafell but while I got the 2x1600mm mafell/bosch tracks to go with the saw, I hung onto my old Festool tracks because the Mafell saw has slots in the base to run on both types.
It was convenient the other day to grab the short Festool track for cross cutting some solid maple plank. I've never replaced and recut the rubber strip to suit the Mafell tracksaw. This is also the track I'd grab if using a bosch aluminium cutting blade in the MT55 so the 1.8mm wood blade runs half to one mm away from the strip on this track.

Despite the gap, I found the cut edge to be pretty good and I'm sharing it here for interest. My take away from this is that with a decently sharp blade, a small gap probably makes little difference to the edge except for the most critical work. Anyone wondering about switching back and forth between narrow 1.8mm kerf and Festool 2.2mm and perhaps even 2.5mm kerf blades probably doesn't have much to worry about.

Oh, and solid maple is a right pain. So easy to scorch on the crosscut !

Anyone else mix and match blade widths on your saw, and how does it work for you ?

 

[Spectric]

I think the major influence here is the material being cut and using the right blade. I think of the rubber strip as a zero clearance insert like on a table saw, the blade exits the cut on the top face so in theory the rubber strip helps prevent breakout but some materials are more prone to this than others.

The other way that @JobandKnock explained was to do a shallow scoring cut by pulling the saw backwards which I assume helps because it is downward .

 

[Doug71]

The rubber strip on my 3m rail is probably about 1mm away from the blade but doesn't really seem to affect the cut quality, it's mainly ply and MDF that I cut so might be different on MFC.

It would make it easier cutting things accurately to size if the strip was the cut line though so I should get it replaced.......