Cutting speed on saw

stardiamond , thank you. So very slow
is normal

Very slow is normal.

For reference, the specs for the Highland Park 10” slab saw, which uses oil and has an automatic feed, are as follows:

-POWERFEED – Approximate workpiece infeed rates 11-1/4 inches per hour, 3/16 inches per minute

It may also help to think about how much of the saw blade is making contact with the rock. If it is a 1/4” thick slab being trimmed, not much contact is occurring between the blade and the rock and it cuts relatively quickly. For a 3” thick rock, you have 12 times the contact between rock and blade and should expect much slower speeds.

I seem to like rocks that are painfully slow to cut and it barely looks like the rock is moving at times. That is with a 10” tile saw with a Hot Dog blade on it. A water additive seems to help quite a bit. I used Jet Dry dishwashing rinse aid last time and it cut much quicker for me.

Hand cutting has a learning curve. If you tried to push too hard for awhile it can glaze the blade and it cuts slower or not at all. Lapidary supply places sell dressing sticks to "sharpen" blades by removing the metal to expose diamond. Periodically making a cut into one may help.
As someone said, a slab saw cuts 1 inch in 5 minutes or more, a lesson in patience.

Thank you for your response Rockoonz . I will try to see
if the blade is glazed when I can get ahold of a dressing
stick. A lesson in patience seems to be a mantra for most
things lapidary!

I have never used a dressing stick and wouldn't know where to buy one.  However, I have had good results slicing into an old brick or piece of obsidian.  I heard you can also use glass, but never tried.  My blades get bunged up with silver swarf (real word).

Correct.  It removes the swarf from the diamonds, so the diamonds are exposed again.  

Are those cold mountain jasper, or some other kind of rhyolite? I find that thickness and hardness of the rock are the biggest factors. There is a non-linear relationship between thickness and how fast it cuts. In other words, a 4 inch thick rock does not take 4 times as long as a 1 inch thick rock, but rather, something like 6 or 8 times as long.

And depending on the power of the motor, I do not find that thicker blades cut slower than thinner ones. I am talking about small differences. For example, I don't think a 0.032" blade on a 6" trim saw cuts any slower than a 0.02" blade. This could be because a few light touch is required with thin blades to keep them from overheating and warping, whereas I have confidence to press a little more with thicker blades.

If you want to ram rocks through the saw as fast as you can without bring the motor to a halt, you will need to dress the blade. This is the fastest way to cut rocks on a manual feed saw, although ram hard enough and you might be dressing it between every cut. There is usually a sweet spot where you are providing a moderate about of pressure but not chipping off the exposed diamonds, which is why you have to dress diamond blades. The blades look glazed because once you chip off the exposed diamonds, you are trying to grind with just the metal matrix, which doesn't grind rocks well and instead gets very hot as you apply more and more pressure.

A final consideration, different rim types or segment types on the blades makes a big different in how well they are able to clean out the rock dust from the cut. This can dramatically affect cutting speed. Unfortunately, my experience is that the blades that provide the smoothest cut -- solid sintered rim lapidary blades like the MK Diamond 303 series -- are also the slowest on a manual feed saw. I like the MK 301 better for manual feed saws for that reason.

That first picture of what I think is Butterfly Wing jasper looks like a skeleton head.  Great slab!