Hello again JA, I wish I had a really good response for you on this one. One thing I will say is that I believe all of the teeth that are engaged in a particular cut carry some of the load of the cut, having said that, the teeth in near proximity to the splice point will likely be soft and not contribute to the cutting process and unless you are cutting very thin-walled pieces they will not tear out either. If a person pays attention to using the proper blade tooth pitch and band speed for a particular material you will not have issues with teeth being fractured or ripped from the band. When you check the information that tells you the type and pitch of saw blade to use for various materials you will notice a few things, generally shapes of material with thin walls such as thinwall tubing, thinwall pipe, light gauge angle iron etc. use blade pitches with many more teeth per inch than say solids that might be 3" or thicker. Part of this cutting theory allows for multiple teeth to be engaged in the cut at the same time so that not only one tooth is required to make the cut through the section of the material and carry the load of the cut, at the same time, in an ideal situation, a tooth that is cutting through the material section shouldn't load up with a chip completely before it passes through the section of the material, if a chip does load beyond the depth of the tooth it will cause the tooth to stop cutting and actually lift the blade and curtail the cutting action. Thus various material thickness will require different blade tooth pitches, an 8-10 vari-tooth pitch might be used for materials ranging in thickness from 1/8" to 1" and a 3-6 vari-tooth pitch might be used for cutting materials over 3" in thickness. You can get straight pitch blades also but I typically find that they set up harmonic type vibrations and don't perform as well as the vari-tooth configurations. Do-All has some very good information describing proper blade selections and applications, so does Lennox, machine manufacturers such as Hydro-Mech, Ellis, Kalamazoo, and many others usually include information for blade suggestions, feeds, and speeds. Sorry for the windy reply, I certainly don't claim to be an expert in this area, but I have worked with some very knowledgeable material processing people who have shared a bit of the finer points of sawing with me. There is a lot more to it than most people realize, the difference in most cases is the quality, speed, and accuracy of the cuts and the longevity of the saw blades. Regards, Allan