Tonight, I was ripping some 8/4 hard maple to make yet another cutting board. I had bought 3 planks from Woodwerks on the same day, and all 3 have given me problems, but I was working with the worst of them tonight. The planks all have had immense internal stress, but this one was so bad I threw the rest of it out lest I accidentally use some of it in the future. The wood actually had so much tension that, even with the riving knife in place on my PCS, it actually grabbed the saw blade tightly enough to make the motor stall and trip out. The scary part was that I could feel it give just a bit of a lurch back towards me (thankfully, I was standing off to the side) before it clamped down solid and stopped the saw. Anyway, it locked on to the blade so tightly that I actually had trouble removing the wood. I couldn't pull it off and I couldn't lift it off. I was eventually able to lever it off by lifting the end nearest me and letting the far end jam against the table to serve as a fulcrum but I had to put some serious wellie into it to get it to shift.
No part of the blade seemed damaged on a quick visual inspection, so I threw out the Wood of Death and kept going with a different board. Now, a few hours later, I'm second-guessing whether this blade is still alright or not. Since it's pretty expensive (WWII), I don't want to trash it just on a suspicion, but at the same time my safety is worth a lot more than a saw blade. What do you guys think?