First walks

I took her for a ride. Nice steel, I mean. (I need to name the saws otherwise we will have a complete mess. They are, from left to right from previous post Fig. 1, Smallone, Oneside, Crapy and Nicesteel.) Nice steel is the large lovely one.

2in thick ash. Not so soft. I tried with my universal kataba last week but to no luck. The wood was closing the gap as I was cutting and god it was slow.

I cleaned nice steel first, a bit of sand paper 1000 and soapy water. 5 min max. Nothing fancy. No handle yet.

At first, it was slightly difficult to cut. Not so smooth. I remembered the feeling from my other saw and the solution is a small touch on the top eye or third facet. It took one minute each side, and BUM!

The only problem cutting it was to hold the piece of wood since it's so heavy. The saw ate the ash in less than 5 minutes, and left a better finish than the kataba.

The reason? I guess the tooth pattern. Our old friend ChuMasaru

I also corrected the set of a few teeth that were over bent.

I'm seriously looking forward to put a handle on this beauty.  I realised that this blade is one piece: you feel it in the sound of it. When saws are welded the vibrations are reflected at the interface, think of water and light rays. Same thing. I guess that the advantage of this method is that once you put the blade in a handle, the wood will damp those vibrations better than in a welded blade. But I'm just speculating, thinking at loud — that's what I do, as ghospoet would say.

I also tried to photograph the hammer marks on Smallone. Not an easy task.

First, there is this large area hammered that looks like this:

Hammer marks in two directions making a kind of grid. I guess you hammer from one side and move the blade, then you turn the blade and hammer again. My guess is that this was a bump on the blade.

Now, the "lines":

I hope you can see hammer marks in a line parallel to the blade direction. Those are four of five hammer marks separated by roughly constant intervals. The blade has several of those. No idea what those were for. 

I found something very very interesting in Oneside. But I want to see if in the scanner it's clearer. 

And I'm sorry I'm such a mess and contradict myself every 35 seconds, but that's just me. Once I'm done with all the "research" I will put together a clear and concise tutorial on how to do this thing, but for the moment, sketches will have to do. 

Bis morgen jongen.