i created a sled on my slider to slice veneer for seaming, and it works pretty well. i've been using the high-tooth crosscut blade, but i got to thinking, perhaps a negative rake angle blade makes more sense to avoid chipping on the figured veneers?

what's the best blade tooth configuration for such a task? thanks.

Negative hook 100 tooth or more and some way to exert down pressure on entire length of the veneer. Sacrificial board top and bottom of the stack. Do this and you will have a clean cut that you can seam together.

For ripping veneer, I like triple chip grind (TCG) blades (10" 80 tooth). Think of a TCG as a modified ripping blade. the added facets progressively cut the kerf from center to edge. There is actually a pretty good melamine blade that takes it a step further by adding small facets to the TCG raker teeth. The less material left in the kerf when that final cut on the edges of the kerf is made, the cleaner the edge of the material will be.

A 0/negative hook blade is less aggressive (good for aluminum and radial arm/sliding miter saws) and reduces the angle of the teeth when they exit the bottom of the material (reduced bottom chipping on melamine). Neither would seem valuable If you're ripping veneer with sacrificial boards, but I do get excellent rips with my negative hook TCG melamine blades.

The idea behind ATB blades is that they score the edges of the kerf before removing the material between. Think about using a knife/blade to manually score a straight line parallel to the grain (VS across). ATB blades work best when cutting across the grain. They (w/ raker) are good for plywood (~50% cross grain), but not for ripping wood/veneer.

I walk the veneer stack through the saw with my hands to the right of the blade so that the stack is tight as it passes the blade.