I recently enrolled in The Hand Tool School, which is an online school for learning and improving hand tool skills. The first ‘semester’ is focused on fundamentals, beginning with hand saws. The longer I am involved with woodworking and lutherie, the more interested I’ve become in using mostly hand tools. I’m certainly not giving up my power tools, but everything has its place.
I have spent quite a bit of time recently ‘restoring‘ several old Disston saws I’ve picked up along the way, so I thought I’d post a photo of my saw ‘collection’ laid out on my bench. (L to R):
* Gramercy Dovetail Saw
* Lie-Nielsen Crosscut
* Lie-Nielsen Crosscut Rip
* Atkins panel saw (found under a beach house as a pile of rust!)
* Disston D-95 rip saw
* 2 Disston D-23s (one more not shown that is still in pieces that I plan to re-file as rip)
* Disston D-100 with the space age handle from the 1960’s
* Sears Kromedge 12ppt crosscut (c. 1970’s with a new handle that I made for it because the one it originally had was AWFUL)
One of my next projects is to make a saw vise (from the I found in Popular Woodworking) so I can sharpen all of these old saws with the new files I just got from Niles Krech at Kennebec Saws.
The saw project for the ‘class’ was to build a saw bench, designed specifically for hand sawing. I used Kakuri tapered wooden nails, which I got from Japan Woodworker to attach everything. I really like the look of these wooden nails. It is a good height for me now, sure beats that old chair I was trying to cut boards on previously! It still needs to have some finish applied.
Confessions of an Amateur Luthier 