Saturday, December 20, 2014

Shortening saws

It's not a secret I cannot straighten saws. I don't take it as a joke about my sexual preferences, at least not always.

Long story short, I cut a saw in half today. Or rather, I cut by half something that was once sold a japanese saw. Cheap industrial crap that somebody in Opa's workshop had used to cut metal. So no big loss here.

I tried previously to straighten it but it only got worse and more ugly. Then I used fired on the back, even worse.

For quite long time I've been looking at dai-groove cutting saw, so this was the chance to do it.

After I shaped it, I decided to tackle the biggest problem the saw had: it was tapered along the length in the thickness. So it jammed. Always. Every time.

You can set more the teeth to avoid this but we are talking of a good .1mm here. Near the neck it was 0.51mm while on the top around 0.40mm. Definitely not nice.

This is the set up.


Something to measure the blade's thickness, a file (I'm using the large one, bought in Leipzig for 1.5euros, awesome Stasi quality). After a few passes I measured, and realised that it was going to take a fair bit of time. The file scraps fast, but it kinda make lines so you need to move it around to cover all the surface.

Nice shavings


I even managed some long curly ones but didn't take pictures of those.


After ten minutes or so, I had an uniform thickness. Around 0.38mm or so


I love the look of the steel. Looks like new. 


For the handle I used some really light wood from Ecuador, looks like walnut but weights like pawlonia.


Then I sharpened it a bit more, and now I have a lovely short, no-set, dai-groove cutting saw with chumasaru cross cut pattern. It kinda got better after all.


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