The handle on my old beat-up Jackson backsaw looks really sad and has a lot of nasty rot and gunk in it. In preparation for the handles on my other backsaws, I thought it might be a good idea to start with the old one, just so I can continue to mess around with a saw that isn’t worth very much.

I finally got my stupid scanner working and scanned the old handle. Then I used Inkscape to trace the outline, and finally, today, I cleaned it up a little. I got this thing:

This seems reasonable, and the dimensions also appear to be correct. I didn’t try to make it pretty or add extra flair. The “holes” are almost certainly inaccurate, but I don’t care, since I’ll be transferring them from the blade and not the drawing.

It’s a somewhat “urgent” project now. I put new teeth on another one of those cheap Craftsman dovetail saws this weekend, so I have the “urge” to put a real handle on the ones I have. This time I went for 14tpi rip, and I used a worn 5″ x-slim taper to cut the initial teeth. That went a lot faster this time.

The saw works perfectly… as a dovetail saw, that is. This is or is not unfortunate, depending on how you look at it. I wasn’t intending to make a saw that cut as well as this one, I just wanted something that was faster than my current 20tpi dovetail saw. This cuts so well that I might just try it for stuff that I used the dovetail saw on before.

So I’ll probably be getting yet another one of those cheapie saws. This time, I’ll file it to something like 10 or 11tpi rip. That ought to do what I want it to. Except that maybe I wanted to make a panel saw? Eh, I guess it doesn’t hurt to have a few.