Friday, October 10, 2014

Four steps forward


There they are. Directly to my door in a week or so from japan. Very much speechless I am. 

The largest is slightly over 30cm, while the small is 24cm. The single edged one I guess it used to be a Ryoba, but they ran out of steel and decided to do a cut-orientation reassignment surgery. 


Drops of a hammer. The small one also has but in that one is lines, not triangles.



 Welded blades. I like them


This one sounds like a tuning fork. It's the large one Gary was selling under the description of "really good steel." We need to be honest, Gary knows a good steel from a poor one.




 Any idea who or where sakou is? Google wants to make me think the saw was made by a gay anime character. I'm not yet convinced.

There is plenty to look at here. The teeth geometry (mostly ChuMasaru), the marks of the hammer on the blade. The shape of the gullets. They all give you hints of how they were made, what shape of hammer was used, the beat, the angle of fleam and rake... It feel like when you find this lovely book you've been looking for years in a lost bookshop in central London, or even, better, in a busy street of Quito. You smell it, preparing your senses for all the beauty you know you'll find inside. If poetry is the evocation of meanings by means of language, then this is definitely saw poetry.



2 comments:

  1. "Any idea who or where sakou is? Google wants to make me think the saw was made by a gay anime character. I'm not yet convinced."

    I laughed so hard I farted! But then I thought of the movie "Mononoke Hime", where there were guys dinking on anvils - so who knows!

    It looks like these were sent to a pro? As for the triangular dents, this too is different from the way I do hizumi. As I understand it, these raise a low spot; I use a polished convex hammerface, a variety of forms, to lower a high spot.

    I'm guessing, based on several hundred saws from various makers, that these saws are annealed a bit more, as there is usually more burr left by the file.

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    Replies
    1. Good to hear you laughed :)

      The triangular marks are really weird. On one side 95% of the marks point upwards, and the few pointing downwards are next to a one pointing up. They are pretty much all over the place.

      On the other side of the blade the thing is inverted: most of the marks are pointing down and a few up to "correct" a mark too many (or so I think). In my mind that looks like he was trying to correct a twist. Or to tension the blade, it's a really really solid one.

      I also have a small saw where the triangular marks are pointing along the axis of the blade, and next to the teeth. Both side the same marks in the same direction. That's a very well tensioned saw.

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