Progress on my new little saw was puttering along, but with the nightstand finished, I found the time to proceed. The handle was done, the sawplate was pretty much to size but not toothed or sharpened, and then there was the matter of the hardware. I decided to tackle this last matter first.

I wanted to do something a little special for this project because the handle is a more traditional style. However, I still wanted to use the furniture connectors that I’d used for my other saws because, well, I like them. Some time ago, and somewhere in the dark corners of my mind, I began to think of a plan to spice up those things. And out of whatever means, I came up with a ridiculous scheme to make sort of a pseudo-lathe out of an eggbeater drill.

The following is what happens when you do unholy things to a Millers Falls #2:

A few notes on this hand-cranked bit of absurdity:

• I removed the side handle (seen in the back above) and bolted this through a spacer and a dog hole with a threaded rod and a wingnut.
• I used the hacksawed-off tip of the sawplate for this project as a washer underneath. Turns out that the hang hole is useful for something!
• The connector bolt is chucked directly into the drill.
• I used a pretty coarse file for sizing the head, and a finer one for polishing.
• The calipers were really handy for getting a consistent size.

I don’t know why this worked, but it was surprisingly effective. Here’s the transformed hardware (with an original nut next to the handle in the background):

It turns out that the “antique bronze” finish had a bit of copper plating underneath, and when I put some very fine-grit sandpaper to the head while it was turning in the drill, it exposed a decent-looking surface.

Notice that one of the nuts and one of the bolts have bigger heads. Those are my “medallions” to match the original. Although, I suppose that if I were being ultra-correct, I’d size the bolt down to the other ones because the bolts on saws are all the same size. Meh, too much work now–I should have thought about that sooner.

I sprayed a protective coat of lacquer on the hardware and then set out to finish the sawplate. For whatever reason, it took me longer to sharpen this one because it was difficult to get past the remnants of the original teeth. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Then I sized up the heel of the plate, drilled the holes for the hardware (with that same eggbeater), and put it together. It was finished:

It’s a little difficult to get a sense of scale from the preceding photo. This is a small saw, having just a 16″ blade. Here’s a photo of how it compares in size to my 28″ No. 7:

And here’s a close-up of the handle, showing the ray pattern of the nearly-quartersawn pacific madrone that it’s made from, as well as how that goes with the hardware (if it actually goes):

I guess this is all fine and good, except there’s one question that I might not have answered so well: What’s this silly little thing used for?

In some earlier posts, I’d mentioned that I’d been having a little trouble ripping panels and drawer bottoms (I use my Pax saw for crosscutting them). Although this is not a frequent operation for me, every time I did it, it was annoying. And I’m happy to say that it works wonderfully for this type of thing, as shown in the test cut below:

All of this said, I would not have made this if not for two things. First, I’d wanted to make that saw handle for as long as I’ve had the original saw. And second, I had that “Kobalt” saw sitting around the shop doing nothing but taking up space. If neither of these had been true, I may have just bought a ryoba for the task.

I will mention, however, that if this saw were filed crosscut, it would make a nice kid’s saw.

Sometimes, you gotta learn the hard way.

I started work on the sawplate by cutting off a bit of the tip so that the hang hole was off and there was a reasonable depth to the blade at the tip. So far, so good–no trouble encountered there.

Then I removed the lacquer from the blade with this clamping arrangement and Norton 3X sandpaper:

That, too, worked pretty well, and to my surprise, it removed .001″ of the thickness of the blade. That got me thinking that, hey, maybe I could remove some of the steel with this sandpaper, too. Maybe I’d even be able to taper it!

Well, that turned out to be an idiotic idea. Spring steel is still pretty hard, m’kay? After wasting who knows-how-long to remove maybe .0005″, I decided that maybe I’d try drawfiling it:

That sort of worked. After expending a ridiculous amount of effort, I’d knocked the plate down to about .032″ (from .035″ originally), and I got the tip of the top tapered down to about .029″ (maybe). I decided to call it finished.

Please don’t try this yourself. It was an incredibly stupid idea, and I’m never going to do it again. If you want a nice blade, I suggest this approach:

1. Start with the blade thickness that you want in the first place.
2. Use something like a belt sander with Norton 3X belts if you want to taper grind it. (And remember to use proper safety equipment–a respirator mask, safety glasses, gloves, and something that will hold that blade in place with no chance of letting go.) Not that I’ve tried this, but it’s hard to imagine any way that this would be worse than what I did.

Speaking of taper grinding, I discovered something about it when working on this project. There is a fair amount of smoke-and-mirror action going on with some of these old taper-ground blades. Most full-size handsaws seem to go from a full thickness of about .040″ to around 0.030″ along most of the significantly-tapered tapered part of the top, then it drops down to about 0.025″ at the very tip at the top (maybe the last half-inch). So that’s about 25% thinner along most of the top and I can see where that could be helpful in use. But the teeny bit at the very end? Meh. You hardly ever even have that part in the kerf, anyway.

My Pax saw has similar taper grinding as on the old saws except at the very tip. It appears much thicker than the old saws, but measuring reveals that it’s about the same. What’s going on here?

The original saw that I’m copying has less significant taper-grinding along most of the top–its cutting side is about .031″ and it’s ground to about .028″ along the top. That’s about a roughly 10% difference. However, it looks a lot thinner up there, and after a long time, it dawned on me that they’ve rounded off the top of the saw a little to make it look more elegant. It was the same thing with the older saws, and that’s why the Pax doesn’t look like it’s been taper-ground as well, even though it has.

At this point, I was really starting to lose my mind, so I did the same rounding operation on the top of my new sawplate, and guess what? It now looks like it’s been “seriously” taper-ground. Continuing the absurd voodoo practice, I filed a nib onto the thing:

Now I’m almost ready to form and sharpen the teeth. I was originally going to file off all of the teeth and start new ones. However, it seems that the original teeth on this saw were set at 8TPI, which happens to be about what I want on this thing (it also matches the original), so maybe I don’t have to go the whole way.

The handle varnishing is almost done, too.