Just sawed through a 4/4" x 5" curly maple with an old 12" hand held bandsaw and this blade did it with ease! I used very minimal back pressure and after planing I had 2 pieces of maple that were 3/8 inch thick. There is a video on YouTube comparing this blade to a lumberjack and the lumberjack actually had problems. I don't know why he had problems but that wasn't my experience. If I were to make one criticism that doesn't affect performance, but that's an issue, the weld could be cleaned up a bit. The back of the blade is polished and the weld is very rough. Again, this didn't seem to affect performance, and it only takes a few minutes for it to be as smooth as the rest of the blade. I was finally able to cut without releasing pressure, I had a 1/2 blade on a 3/8" setting and it worked great.