Flying Dutchman blades

All the experts in the YouTube videos seem to really like Flying Dutchman blades. Everyone also says you need to get the scroll reverse blades so that you get a nice smooth bottom to your project. I ordered a few dozen of these blades in a couple of different sizes to give them a try.

When I bought my scroll saw it came with a dozen #5 Olson skip tooth blades. These are the ones I have been using up to this point. So I put in a Flying Dutchman (FD) #5 scroll reverse blade and started cutting a Christmas Ornament pattern. There were a few things I noticed right away.

First of all it was very difficult to tell which way the teeth went on the FD. On the Olson blades it was easy to run your finger down the blade and tell which direction the teeth were going. On the FD it felt the same going both ways. I had to use a magnifying glass to try and determine which direction they were going. The teeth don't seem to obviously point up or down. They sort of just point out. I had to look for the subtle change on the last few reverse teeth to pick out the top and bottom. Maybe this is good and that is why they are preferred but it was real hard to figure out which way to put it in.  See the pictures below for a comparison of the two blades.

Next, they seemed much more brittle than the Olson blades. I had only broken one blade up to now and I broke three FD blades on one little ornament. I don't think I was doing anything different so I was disappointed that they seemed to break so easily.

The last thing I noticed was that it was much more difficult to cut a straight line. They say that blades will always pull to one side so you have to actually go at the blade from a bit of an angle to get a straight cut. That angle was much greater with the FD blade than with the Olson blade. I guess this is something you get used to after time but it seemed much harder to get it going in a straight line and then keeping it on that line.

I will use these blades some more, especially since I bought 6 dozen of them, but after some more practice I will use the Olson blades again and see if I still prefer them. Should be an interesting exercise. I don't want to discredit some product because of my lack of skill but I want to make sure I am using the product that works best for me.

This is roughly how the blades look with the naked eye.  The Olson blade on the left has obvious teeth and you can see they are pointing down.  The Flying Dutchman blade on the right is difficult to see.

I used my camera's zoom to get this picture.  Again the Olson teeth on the left are more pronounced.  The Flying Dutchman teeth on the right are much smaller.  From the top of the picture you can see the FD teeth change direction between the 3rd and 4th teeth.