A Google search of high speed camera rental looks very promising.

Maybe take that result and enter your locale as well to narrow your search.

Sounds an interesting project. Good luck.

[edit] I see some on eBay too. Look to start at about $1,500 USD. Might be kinda steep for what you want to do.

Renting is a good idea because you could spend enough money buying the equipment to pay for a new luxury car.

You may be interested in this video

circular sawstop sensor

There are a number of these video's on you tube. Perhaps you can get your information by viewing them?

You can also use a high-speed strobe in conjunction with a (much) less expensive, off-the-shelf video camera, if a suitable high-speed camera rental is not available. You'll want a strobe capable of max rep rate in the hundreds of Hertz to low kilohertz range and which can be sync'd to an external signal (possibly the teeth on the blade?).

If you like to tinker with electronics, you can build your own strobe using ultrabright LEDs. This is the approach I've used for several projects. Nice thing about LEDs is that you can build fairly bright strobe lights having rep rates in the hundreds of kHz without too much trouble and without the need for high voltages. You can also control the pulse width much more easily than with, say, strobes based on xenon lamps. Due to the high currents involved I use current-steering rather than an off-on-off approach, ie, much the way ECL works (for those here ancient enough to remember that logic family lol).

Another, quick-and-dirty approach is to use an automotive strobe light.

Good thinking re the strobe solution.

I've not seen a saw blade's behaviour captured this way but I have seen this.

Very economical way to do "highspeed" video. Not true real time high speed but it does capture very short moments you want to observe.

Synching would be as difficult as changing the strobe frequency until you saw a desirable image on your video monitor.

This video was shot without a strobe but the mains frequency lamp flicker combined with the video frame rate also "slows" the motion. Could be a good starting point Ron.....

If you use a strobe to freeze the blade movement & have manual adjust to "inch" the freeze point backwards or forewards you could capture the results with a video camera, no sync problems involved. I've used strobes long ago to look at movement under vibration & they just had a rotary knob to set the rate.

Depends on the frame rate of the camera. Most are only 30 fps or less. That is not high speed and regardless of the strobe frequency that frame rate is still the limiting factor for capturing data.

A true high speed camera will have frame rates from as low as 1,000 to 250,000 frames per second.

The only way for the strobe to work is to use a still frame camera with the shutter open for the duration of the test (bulb mode).

Video will not work due to frame smearing effects (Rolling Shutter) and possible interference with the strobe frequency and the video frame rate.

If the OP is trying to see how chips and splinters are actually formed, a strobe isn't the answer: unless the wood is INCREDIBLY uniform, each tooth and each growth ring will be slightly different from all others. Besides, looking for arbor runout-induced errors would mean looking at a very different frequency than what will "freeze" teeth best, by a ratio of tooth count:1. Again, individual encounters between teeth and wood are of interest, if I understand the post correctly, rather than the approximately steady-state condition.

Syncing to a mark on the blade is critical because the blade RPM varies greatly under load. Ordinarily, tweaking the strobe rate manually might work, but here the blade RPM depends on the feed rate and uniformity of the workpiece density. As the OP has indicated (below), using a strobe will not work at all in this application because what is being studied is not a steady-state situation. Looks like a high-speed camera is needed after all. Oh, well...

Well, you are correct. No saw blade cuts - they bludgeon a gap and the chips are full of splinters. Remember, if you wanted to cut with a sharp blade it would take a huge force to push that blade into the wood since you are operating a sharp wedge into the wood with a tensile strength of 500 psi and you must force the wood apart and cut into the fibers with quite a lot of force. The saw chisels away small areas, which fail = a chip and a circular saw repeats this at a high speed.

If you placed a wooden beam in tension, so it stretched 2%, you could cut it with a razor blade as each fiber was cut it would withdraw 2% and get out of the way, and you would work onwards. Reduce the tension as wooded area got smaller

Hi Ronseto,

You mentioned hiring. Google your nearest professional video camera hire and talk through the issue with them. The TV / video industry does this sort of thing on a daily basis. You can also Google "TV Facilities" companies which typically provide post-production equipment hire but you can ask them who the best & most suitable camera hire company in the area is. Finally, if you have a "Rostrum Camera" facilities house in your area them may be interested in your project. Rostrum cameras are used to track over a still shot, such as a photograph, to give moving interest to it for a video production. They can also be used for in-studio close-ups if you fancy trucking your saw bed to their studio.

I had to do this once for a very slow slow-mo of a golf club hitting the ball. It was in the days before video cameras were good enough for the job. The very high speed camera only cost us (IIRC) something like £200 per day. We spent a small fortune in 16mm film stock though.

There are a lot of very good points and observations about this question, this might be the best suggestion so far. I'll give Evan a GA for this.

Very good point. If you hire a video production company of some sort, they have the equipment, the learning curve has already been flattened out, they have the proper software and cables... easy-cheesy! Should you need the service in the future, the relationship will have been already established. If you rent and wish to run a similar investigation in the future, what are the chances of getting the same equipment again? Another learning curve, some more dedicated cables...

With modern solid state video systems there is no expensive film stock. In fact, film video is virtually obsolete. Try purchasing or processing 16mm film these days and you will find out. Working with video is much simpler and straight forward than working with film.

Try contacting the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, WI. (overview at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Products_Laboratory). If they don't already have such videos, they probably know who does. Also, try contacting various blade manufacturers: they may well study their own, and their competitors, blades before finalizing a design. This may be considered proprietary, though.

here's a mob that specialises in this.

Gotta admit, I'd tend to agree that you'll never get a 100% perfect cut with any sort of saw, but then that's why we have all the other tools to clean up the job.
Surley it's a matter of optimising the process to suit the task so that the cleaning process is minimised. This may mean cutting at an earlier stage in the process so that the subsequent operations clean up the splinters etc.
(Like making a bow, rough it out on a bandsaw, subsequent spokeshave, rasp,file scraper work removes the saw marks.)
I wonder if a two blade solution could work, with a cutting blade followed by a V slightly wider finishing blade, in fact ithe second disc be a fine abrasive sanding disc. Drat, too late to patent it now
Del

Sometimes, in a slack moment, which can be often, I'd use an abrasive cutoff saw for wood.

No splinters, lots of smoke.

Is that the trade off? Smoke V Splinters?

"Drat, too late to patent it now"

True: it has been on the market for years. See http://www.oneprojectcloser.com/10-inch-sanding-blade-final-cut-saw-blade-review/ for one example.

If you watch this you-tube video I shot a few years ago, you will see what we were able to accomplish in one day with a rented high speed video system. The frame rate of 10,000 fps was easily achieved without auxiliary lighting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PN79TEW5Ps

Nice work.

Shot pellets could be seen and all.

I didn't think about using a strobe. Thanks all for your input.