Kurt's thread on tension gauges sparked a question deep in the moldy recesses of my brain...not wanting to hijack his thread, here's a new one.
Say I've got a 1/2" blade, 0.035" thick...call it 1/32" for convenience. That means there's 1/64 square inches of blade cross-section under tension. Multiply that by 15000PSI and I get about 235lbs of "pull" required to get that tension...and that's the minimum value I should be using. Ok, so far so good.
So I go out to the garage and look at the spring on that bandsaw: if I believe the markings, it's compressing less than an inch to get to the "1/2" setting. There is simply no way that dinky little spring is in the 300 lbs/inch range.
What's wrong with this picture?