If you’ve been around woodworking hand tools for a while, you’ve likely heard of the hand saw hack that lets you saw perfectly square across a board without the aid of a pencil line to guide your cut. Wait! You haven’t seen this before? Here, hold my beer.
Try these three tips to improve your hand sawing.
While sawing precisely by hand may seem like black magic when you’re first learning, the secret to precision hand sawing, if you can call it that, is starting the cut precisely, and proper body mechanics during the cut.
In this video, I demonstrate an exercise I call “saw without sawing”. This short exercise helps to teach the new hand saw user what it feels like to take the weight of the saw off of the wood when starting a cut with a hand saw, and makes for more precise cuts.
A common struggle for new hand saw users is starting the saw cut cleanly and accurately. While the symptoms being experienced might seem like a problem with the saw itself, they are all caused by improper technique.
If you don’t have a band saw, you can still resaw thick boards into thinner boards, or make your own shop sawn veneer. In this video, I demonstrate the use of a frame saw for resawing by hand.
If a bandsaw is not available and you need to resaw a board into a thinner dimension, are there ways to do it by hand? Of course there are!
Most historical texts don’t have much to say about the process of resawing, or the tools that would have been used in the joiner’s or cabinetmaker’s shop to perform this task. This usually begs the question, “How did they do it?” However, before we address the question of how they did it, we should first understand IF they did it.
One of the questions most often asked by new woodworkers, and most often waffled on by experienced woodworkers in not HOW to sharpen but WHEN to sharpen.
The question of how much set to add to a hand saw is a common one for new saw sharpeners. Tooth set is a critical component to the performance of a hand saw. But how do you know if your saw has the proper amount of set?
Contrary to what many of the woodworking books and magazines would have us all believe, not all of the furniture and cabinetry of old was built using dovetails and mortise and tenon joinery.
One inconvenience with a solvent based finish like shellac is getting the brushes used to apply it thoroughly clean when you’re done. However, there is a very simple solution to this little conundrum.
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