The beauty of carbide tipped blades is that they can be sharpened many times before they need to be replaced. Depending on the quality of the saw blade sometimes it is cheaper to buy a replacement blade than sharpen it. But that is a whole different discussion.
In my area there are a couple of tool sharpening services. The typical turn around time is seven days. Drop it off on a Wednesday and pick it up the following Wednesday. Not bad a bad deal. The prices are pretty good for the small blades with a low number of teeth. All saw blades over 10” in diameter they charge per tooth. For my 80 tooth 12” miter saw blade the sharpening cost would be over $33!
That was a bit too much for me, so I started a quest to find information and tools to sharpen my carbide saw blades myself. Surprisingly there isn’t a whole lot of useful information on this topic. I found an interesting article discussing sharpening carbide tipped tools on ask me help desk site.
I purchased a set of diamond paddle hones from Rockler.com.
I have so far sharpened a 12” forty tooth miter saw blade. The difference in cutting is like night and day! The ‘sharpened’ saw blade cuts so much better.
Next I am planning on sharpening the 12” 80 tooth saw blade. Upon inspection I noticed that the teeth are covered in what appears to be a fair amount of resin build up. First I will clean it off with an orange based stripper and then see if the saw blade needs to be sharpened.
