you will def need to grind and dress after the cut, you will also have to regrind redress and tweak many of the cuts to correct angles and get stuff to actually line up.

your cuts will be way to rough and crude for this. it will start out as a cut and progress into being more of a chewing and then finally burning/melting through by the time you get all the way through each cutģ, forget about the thought of making a nice cut and then welding it. weld el's that violently shoot across the shop are really not funĢ stainless weld el's are a total bitch to cut with an abrasive chop saw. I built one whole set of turbo headers with a chop saw and a grinder and here is the advice I have to give from that experienceġ, spend much of your effort on work holding. Where are you getting $50 dry cut blade? assuming it's a 14' Don't want to destroy the blade before it did much cutting. I would try it but I have only one blade that came with the saw (Northern Tool) and new. You can try a porta-band saw and look at you cut any 304(tube,bar,round) with the standard dry cut blade? I see stainless blades out there but at $200 a pop I'm not buying. Look at for some neat tools/ideasĪlso, if you run accross a vertical, metal cutting band saw, it makes life easier. Or buy a Millwaukee dry cut saw (no blade, Milwaukee charges too much) and grab an aftermarket blade (about $50). Plan on spending some time rounding the tubing if you cut in the middle of a bend. Note that mandrel bent tubing is better than most on tight bends, but it still isn' t perfectly round. Walter 14' abrasive blades seem to do better for me than the Home Depot ones.Ĭut it slow - leave you with less sanding to get the joints flat. The rate it melts at is proportional to how thing the metal is and how hard you push on the saw.

If by chop saw you mean an abrassive wheeled saw like you can get from Home Depot, it will definitly 'work' but on 16 gauge 304, you have to understand that the saw cuts through to some extent by melting.

Stainless steel tubing home depot