A saw cuts area
Everything on this page follows from that. A 2 inch round bar is 3.142 square inches of cut; a 1 inch bar is 0.785, so the big one takes four times as long, not twice. At 4 square inches a minute the 2 inch bar is 47 seconds of blade time, and with half a minute to load, clamp and unload it, just under 1.3 minutes a cut and 77 minutes for a run of sixty.
Hollow sections invert people's intuition here. A 2 inch round tube with a 0.125 wall is only 0.736 square inches — less than a quarter of the solid bar of the same outside diameter — so it cuts in a quarter of the time and uses a quarter of the blade. The dimension on the label is not the thing being cut.
Teeth in the cut is where thin wall goes wrong
Teeth in the cut is the governing thickness multiplied by the blade pitch. Ten teeth per inch through a 2 inch solid bar is twenty teeth carrying the load, which is comfortable. The same blade on that 2 inch tube with a 0.125 wall has 1.25 teeth in the wall as it rides over the sides, and a tooth that is alone in the cut is a tooth about to be pulled off.
What range a blade wants is on the blade maker's chart and it is entered on the form rather than asserted here, because it varies between blade types and the numbers do not transfer. The geometry, though, is geometry, and the page prints which side of your own figures it lands on.
Solid round stock has a separate problem that no pitch fixes. The blade meets a round bar along a tangent, so at the instant of entry there is no thickness and therefore no teeth in the cut whatever the pitch says. That is why round bar strips teeth on entry and why easing the head down for the first quarter inch is worth the ten seconds.
The blade is the cheapest thing on the list
A 28 dollar blade that gets through 3,000 square inches does 954 cuts of 2 inch round bar, which is 2.9 cents a cut. The kerf costs more: 0.05 inches through 3.142 square inches is 0.157 cubic inches, or 0.0446 pounds of steel, which at 1.20 a pound is 5.4 cents. The swarf is nearly twice the blade.
Both of them together are noise next to the minutes. At a 65 dollar shop rate, 1.29 minutes is 1.39 dollars, which is 47 times what the blade costs. That ranking is worth carrying around, because it is the opposite of how sawing usually gets discussed. Buying a cheaper blade that cuts slower is usually a bad trade, and the page prints exactly where the line falls. At these numbers a blade costing twice as much that cuts twenty percent faster breaks even at a shop rate of 13.44 dollars an hour, so at 65 it is worth it by a factor of nearly five. It is not unconditional, though: put the blade at 120 dollars with a life of only 200 square inches and the break-even shop rate goes to 4,320 an hour, which is a long way of saying that a blade which dies quickly is never worth a premium.
The two numbers you have to measure
Cut rate and blade life are both fields rather than constants, and both are deliberately unpopulated by anything authoritative. Cut rate belongs to a blade, a material, a feed pressure and a machine; blade life additionally belongs to how the saw is run and to when somebody decides a blade is done. Time one cut, divide the area the page prints by the minutes, and keep a tally on the saw of what a blade gets through before it is binned. Two afternoons of attention makes every other number here yours.
Questions people ask
How long does it take to cut 2 inch steel bar on a bandsaw?
Divide the cut area by your saw and blade rate. A 2 inch round bar is 3.142 square inches, so at 4 square inches a minute it is 47 seconds of blade time, plus however long loading and clamping takes. Doubling the diameter quadruples the time, because a saw cuts area and area goes as the square of the diameter.
How many teeth should be in the cut on a bandsaw?
That range comes from the blade maker chart for the blade you have, and this page states none of its own — it takes the low and high figures you enter and says which side of them the geometry lands on. The geometry itself is simple: governing thickness times teeth per inch. A 0.125 wall with a 10 tooth blade gives 1.25 teeth in the cut, which is where thin wall tube gets its teeth pulled off.
How do I work out my bandsaw cut rate?
Time a cut with a stopwatch, take the cut area the page prints for that section, and divide. A 2 inch round bar at 47 seconds is 3.142 divided by 0.783, or 4.0 square inches a minute. Do it once for mild steel and once for stainless and those two numbers will estimate every job you cut for years, which no published chart can do because it does not know your saw.
How much does a bandsaw blade cost per cut?
Blade price divided by the cuts it lasts, and cuts come from blade life in square inches divided by the area of your section. A 28 dollar blade with 3,000 square inches of life makes 954 cuts of 2 inch round bar, which is 2.9 cents each. That is usually less than the steel lost in the kerf and a tiny fraction of the minutes, so a faster blade almost always beats a cheaper one.
How much steel does the kerf waste?
Kerf width times the cut area gives the volume gone per cut. A 0.05 inch kerf through a 2 inch round bar takes 0.157 cubic inches, or 0.0446 pounds of steel — 2.7 pounds over sixty cuts, 3.21 dollars at 1.20 a pound. It matters more than people expect on thick sections and on expensive alloys, and it matters most when a cut list is fitted onto stock lengths, where the kerf decides whether the last piece fits at all.