Picco Duro

Oh the damned stuff will do the same thing on a big carbide tipped drill bit made for cutting cast iron but used on steel .If you break the damned stuff off in the hole you have to dig it all out out before you go deeper even with a high speed steel bit .Buried carbide will really screw up a HSS drill bit .

Even those solid carbide CNC style bits I've given away by the hundreds will break if you aren't carefull with them .I mean they're hard enough to punch right through a chainsaw bar which is harder than twice hammered hell but they'll still break like an egg shell .
 
I'll tell ya what ya'll ought to do if you are going to dig out impacted chit under a foundation .Scrounge around and get about a 5 gallon bucket full of old chipper chain .Not semi chisel ,real chipper .Make up some loops and use them if you going to get into trash .

You can find them for next to nothing and just use them up rather than snag the teeth right off of a chisel chain or blow your wad on one carbide rescue chain .

You can bounce that stuff right off a rock and still save it .More often than not a rock will break a chisel cutter .
 
I guess that the carbide tips are hard enough but break because they take too much hard material at one time to handle the load.

I saw that with a router.
The carbide tips are big and sharp enough to give nicely cut areas, but the hedges are fragile and the corners even more.
I worked on pieces of oak from an old window and found small nails and screws buried in. They were rusted in the wood and impossible to pull out.
So I pushed slowly and smoothly the router over the nails. The noise changed but the nails were perfectly cut, even some in the length. No damage on the bit (at least that I could notice). Except when the bit catch the wrong side of the slot and gave a jerky movement at the router. Just near a nail of course. The bit cut the nail but lost a fragment at one corner.

On the bench for the router, I use square tubes to support and to clamp the boards. Once, I screwed up one tightening and the board slightly moved during the machining. The router followed the movement and its bit progressively carved a groove 2" long by 1/8" in the iron tube before I noticed there was something wrong.
No damage this time.

I think that if you know there is some iron buried in the wood (not too big ), like nails, even T posts, you can cut throw with the carbide chain if you hold steadily the chainsaw and retain the cut (to reduce the thickness of the chips).
I did that with a regular chain on a nail (not a carpenter nail though). I saw the head but didn't know where the rod went and I had to cut near it. So I cut here carefully and with all the trunk's diameter to slow down the cutting speed. Obviously I was on the wrong side, but the chainsaw did cut it obliquely. The chain was no more sharp as usual, but not dulled as by a touch in the dirt. Easy resharpening.
 
Ive been using pico durro since februrary.....sharpened it once so far. Diamond wheel took ten minutes

loop was 30 bucks.....so far I like it
 
I prefer a saw that's 100% sharp and will tolerate a saw that's 90% sharp. Running carbide chain is like having a chain that's 80% sharp but it never gets any worse. Unfortunately even at its best it isn't sharp enough for me.

I am with you on this one my chains are either sharp or slightly less sharp there is no such thing as dull unless you hit a rock or sumthin and then it's time for a new chain or a grind job.
 
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