How to Align Saw Bolt Holes to a New Saw Handle

My vertigo is slowly improving and I’m hoping to be back to filming more videos for the Hand Saw Foundations course next week. I was able to go down the stairs to the workshop unassisted yesterday, so things are improving, even if they’re not improving as quickly as I’d like. So for now, here’s one more old saw doctoring video that I did in 2012.

If you have an old saw that needs a new handle, you will have to transfer the location of the saw bolt holes from the saw blade to the new handle blank. This seems like it should be an easy task of using the old handle as a template and drilling through it into the new handle blank. However, it can be a little tricky because the old handle is often worn pretty badly, and, if the holes are bored in the wrong spot, or the drill bit wanders, the new handle is basically trashed. So here’s how I go about getting everything lined up well.