Above: Wikus reports that the Marathon X3000, which is made of M51 material, is a band saw blade for cutting high-strength and difficult-to-machine metals.
May. 2026- With 45 years of metal sawing experience, the last 13 years spent as owner of American Steel Plate Solutions LLC (ASPS) in Highland Heights, Ohio, Steve McCoy knows a thing or two about selecting the proper band saw blade for an application. “I’ve used probably every blade that’s out there sometime over the years.”
Throughout most of his career, McCoy says his go-to source for band saw blades is Saw Systems Inc. in Twinsburg, Ohio, a woman-owned company that also has locations in Ohio, Michigan and New Jersey. “I know the family very well. They were a vendor of mine at my previous job for a good 25 years.”
Cheryl Rinicella, president of Saw Systems, says the distributor was selling Wikus blades prior to 1999 when the German manufacturer established its U.S. operations. Her father, Jerry Brillhart, who launched Saw Systems, met Wilhelm Hubert Kullmann, the founder of Wikus, at a European trade show and purchased a couple of coils of Marathon 529 blade material. “We ran it against some of the other products that we were selling at the time, and Wikus’ performance kind of blew everybody out of the water.”
In addition to selling saw blades, other cutting tools and more, Saw Systems continues to cut coil stock and weld blades to specified lengths, Rinicella explains, including carbon steel, bimetal and carbide-tipped blades. “We can cut and weld the circles here and ship them to the customers.”
Prior to launching his company, McCoy says he used and “was totally sold on” saw blades from a prominent U.S. manufacturer. Once he started ASPS, Saw Systems recommended a bimetal band saw blade made with the M42 cutting material from Addison, Illinoisbased Wikus Saw Technology Corp., suggesting that it would work just as well if not better than the current one. “In a short amount of time, I was sold that that was a good replacement.”
Since then, ASPS has added carbide-tipped Duroset and Futura, Skalar Premium M42 bimetal, and Marathon X3000 bimetal band saw blades from Wikus, McCoy notes.
Both the M42 and X3000 cutting materials are made of alloyed steel for enhanced continuous operation properties, Wikus reports, but X3000, which is an M51 material, provides a high hardness, excellent toughness as well as high cutting edge stability, which is beneficial when sawing difficult-to-machine materials and special alloys.
ASPS saws a heat-treated 4340 steel components with a Marathon X3000 blade. American Steel Plate Solutions cuts a 16-inch-thick 17-4 stainless steel forging with a Marathon X3000 blade.
SAWING SUPERALLOYS
For some tough-to-cut metals and when ASPS has a fairly long production run, or both, McCoy says the team selects a carbide- tipped blade. One nickel-cobalt-based superalloy that comes to mind is Rene 77, which provides strength and corrosion resistance at elevated temperatures but “is really a bear” to cut. “We automatically attack that with a carbide. Our favorite is definitely the carbide, but we’ve found that the Skalar Premium is very comparable to a carbide and the cost is much less.”
To enhance the properties of the M42 cutting material, Wikus offers it with a hard coating to extend blade life while enabling high cutting rates. In addition, the carrier band for the material is made of tempered steel with optimal endurance properties.
He points out that the hard coating on an M42 blade costs less than a carbide-tipped blade but compares well to it when sawing workpieces with a medium hardness. The X3000 modified cutting material, which is exclusive to Wikus, is not available with a coating but has a tougher tool tip than the M42 blades, according to McCoy.
The Marathon X3000 has a positive rake angle and, similar to numerous blades, a variable tooth pitch, meaning it was designed with varying tooth distances within a group of teeth. “It gives the blade a little relief,” McCoy says. “It’s a very aggressive blade.”
Rinicella adds that a variable tooth pitch reduces vibration and noisy harmonics during cutting compared to a blade with a constant pitch, which used to be more common. “Most band saw blades now are a variable pitch, but when they started out, they were single pitch, and the harmonics got loud when people were cutting.”
The carbide-tipped blades from Wikus are also available with a hard coating, but he says ASPS does not choose the coating for those blades. “It seems to last just about the same as a regular carbide, so we don’t see paying for the coating when it’s really not a huge benefit.”
Long blade life is important because McCoy says a great proportion of time spent sawing is spent changing the blade. “We certainly want to try to keep the blade changes down, and the Wikus blade has done well for us.”
ASPS saws Inconel 600 with a Wikus Duroset carbide-tipped blade.
ASPS has 10 band saws at its 20,000-square-foot facility, with six of them being large capacity saws, either plate saws or large cross cutting saws, McCoy explains. The company saws sizes from one inch to 42 inches in diameter, and the workpiece materials include A36 carbon steel, stainless steel, titanium, super alloys such as Hastelloy, Waspaloy and Inconel and others. The cutting services provider has six employees and typically operates from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. five or six days a week. “The saws take a while to cut, so one person can relatively easily run five or six machines. That’s how we deal with such low manpower.”
When a new saw blade arrives, McCoy says ASPS breaks it in by running it for about 10 minutes at a reduced feed rate to slightly hone the teeth before taking a full load. Similar to a pencil in which the lead tip is so sharp that it will break when beginning to write, a blade must be broken in before it can saw effectively.
With Wikus blades being used on all the saws at ASPS, Saw Systems stocks the blades the company likes and needs and delivers an ordered blade in three or four days, McCoy notes. If for some reason Saw Systems does not have a blade in stock, it is shipped directly from Wikus. “The worst-case scenario would be two weeks if we have to order it directly from the factory.”
One characteristic about the Wikus band saw blades that McCoy says he appreciates is the consistency of their quality. Based on experience, other blade manufacturers did not provide the same level of consistency.
“The Wikus saw blade is definitely going to do the trick better than most of the competition because I’ve been cutting materials for 45 years and I know that there’s nothing worse than getting a bad cut,” he says.
McCoy adds that when a bad cut occurs, the workpiece material can become scrap or if it is sent out in a way the customer does not want, “they very well might charge us for it and say it’s not acceptable. There are many operations out there that shop just for the cheapest blade around. Wikus is not the cheapest blade around, but it’s worth the money for sure in the long run.”
Rinicella concurs. “Wikus’ quality standards are the best in the business.”
American Steel Plate Solutions LLC, 330/963-4972, americansteelplatesolutions.com.
Saw Systems Inc., 330/963-2992 sawsystemsinc.com or blades4saws.com.
Wikus Saw Technology Corp., 844/WIKUS-4U, wikussawtech.com.
