I am actually a bit excited to mess with the slitting saw for some clipons now that I have an enclosure, I just didnt like that very fast blade spinning around gut height without something between us
I've recently been going down the advances in tooling rabbit hole and man is it eye opening just how much things have changed since WW2 or so with HSS. its crazy the MRR you can get nowadays especially compared to the pre HSS days!
Yeah if you push those saws too hard they shatter at something close to the speed of light lol... sometimes you can find fragments.
I can hold .001" straight without a lot of trouble w/ good finishes in steel, aluminum, copper alloys. It helps to make the first few passes as not more than .005 to .010, until the kerf depth is about the same as the teeth, then you can step up the cut depth to not more than twice the thickness of the saw. You can go higher and even try to be studly and do a complete cut in one pass but you have to be careful with the feed, control the rpm, chip evacuation and so on- when chips start packing in the tooth gullets or the saw starts flexing things are starting to go sideways.
I use saws on a lever feed production style horizontal mill, so its hand pressure on the table traverse lever which gives great feedback on how the cutter is doing. Since most arbor/saw combos have some runout that amounts to a cut with some degree of pulsation. When feeding by hand, the tool can push back a bit as the high spot passes thru the cut which relieves tool pressure. When feeding by a screw that high spot is doing most of the work and is at risk of overpressure. Overpressure leads to saw breakage and a wandering kerf, which also promotes tool breakage since it warps the cutter.
Careful setup is the game; minimize the runout, use quite a bit less than the textbook feed and rpm, manage DOC via multiple passes if possible, handle chip evac, use flood if you can, use only sharp saws (don't save the dull ones).
IIRC my largest saw is 6" diam and about 1/32" thick- my thinnest saw is .016". They are super-helpful when sawing pieces of of plate, much less waste, no rough sawing- sometimes I get lucky and saw right to finished size. I use only HSS saws (being a LOT cheaper)- wouldn't mind trying some carbide ones but I'm not optimizing production rate so don't mind if the ops take a bit longer.