Hanging on pegs or in individual sleeves, never stacked bare in a drawer. Carbide is hard and brittle, and teeth chip against each other far more often than they chip in timber — a chipped tooth means a regrind or a bin.
The commonest way to damage a blade is not cutting with it. It is putting it down next to another one.
Why carbide chips so easily
Tungsten carbide is very hard and correspondingly brittle. It resists abrasion superbly and takes a knock badly. Two blades sliding across each other in a drawer chip tips on both, and the damage is small enough to be invisible and large enough to leave a mark in every cut.
What works
Pegs on a wall, one blade per peg, is the simplest and best. The cardboard or plastic sleeve the blade arrived in is fine if you keep it. A shop-made rack with slots in plywood, or dividers in a drawer so no two blades touch, works equally well.
Rust
Blade bodies are plain steel and they rust, particularly in an unheated workshop where condensation forms on cold metal. A wipe with a light oil or wax before storage prevents it. Rust in the gullets increases drag; rust on the body increases friction in the kerf.
Label them
Write the tooth count and grind on the body with a marker, or on the peg. Fishing a blade out and holding it to the light to count teeth is how blades get handled more than they need to be.
Store them clean. Resin left on a blade hardens and is much harder to remove later.
Last reviewed 2026-08-12