Thread: Atkins Four Hundred. "The Finest on Earth?"

Hello Ian,

you asked how the currently produced saws compare in price, well I had a go at the currency conversion.

For this exercise there is no discount for buying 1 doz. saws, so I've just multiplied the list price by 12
then converted that figure to the 1906 rates for the comparison.

There are probably a lot of other factors as well but they have not been considered for this exercise either.

Pax $39 $1668 / doz. = $60.50

L N $225 $2700 / doz. = $97.90

B A $375 $4500 / doz. = $163.16

S $770 $9240 / doz. = $335

Having done the conversion, the figures look like they need an inflation factor or something else
to help them make sense.

Which reminds me that I have better things to do out in the shed.

Graham.

Originally Posted by ian

Paul
going back to your initial question ...

For the Atkins 400 to be the best of all time, you would have to compare it to current commercially available saws, so my challenge is

how does an Atkins 400 (or a Disston D115, or an equivalent vintage Spear & Jackson) compare to

• a current production PAX Pax Handsaws - Lee Valley Tools
• a Lie Nielsen https://www.lie-nielsen.com/product/...cut-?node=4149
• Bad Axe's interpretation of Henry's classic D8 Bad Axe Tool Works - D8 Hand and Panel Saws
• the Seaton inspired panel saw from Skelton (UK) https://www.skeltonsaws.co.uk/hand-saw-1

so just to kick this along a little bit ...

Thomas Flinn & Co still make a range of saws in Sheffield. Although their web prices are retail and in GBP, I've assumed that wholesale and by the dozen is approximately 50% of retail. Further I've converted GBP to USD using XE's mid-market rate as of an hour or so ago. ($1.43 USD to 1 GBP).

The saws

• Pax 26" Rip, 4-1/2 tpi, Beech handle -- $776 USD
• Lynx 26" Rip, 4-1/2 tpi, Beech handle -- $493
• Lynx 26" rip, 4-1/2 tpi, Walnut handle -- $897. Note that a premium wood (walnut) adds $33.66 to the wholesale cost of each saw.
• Roberts & Lee Dorchester, 26" rip, 4-1/2 tpi, Walnut handle -- $877. Estimated price with Beech handles $473 per doz wholesale.
• William Greaves & Sons 26" Rip, 4-1/2 tpi, beech handle -- $429.

So in terms of price, Pax branded saws might be a step below an Atkins 400, and equivalent if they came with a walnut handle.

and of course some eye candy
Pax


Lynx, with walnut handle


Roberts & Lee Dorchester

Originally Posted by ian

so just to kick this along a little bit ...

I've assumed that wholesale and by the dozen is approximately 50% of retail.

Ian

Thanks for the price conversions. It is a bit of a tangle. I found it difficult to get an exchange rate back around the 1900 period which was why I went with the carpenters's wages to get some sort of balance. However I realise I did not explain that.

The assumption of a wholesale rate is not an unreasonable one except that I think the prices quoted are in fact the retail prices. I have two reasons for saying this. Firstly the catalogues were often accompanied by another price sheets advising dealer discounts and in the example of the Simonds saws with a dollar medallion, the price was unequivocal as the retail price. A further substantiation is the advertisements to the public which are in line with the catalogues although not always identical.

Regards
Paul

Just on the Diamond edge saws and the manufacturer, I saw this saw for sale which has an HJ Finch medallion. The handle is very like the Diamond edge DE145 and DE150. Note the abrupt line at the top of the saw.

HM Finch.jpgHM Finch medallion..jpgDiamond edge DE 145 DE150.jpg


I would suggest that these saws are made by the same manufacturer, but I still don't know who it is.

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

Ian

Thanks for the price conversions. It is a bit of a tangle. I found it difficult to get an exchange rate back around the 1900 period which was why I went with the carpenters's wages to get some sort of balance. However I realise I did not explain that.

The assumption of a wholesale rate is not an unreasonable one except that I think the prices quoted are in fact the retail prices. I have two reasons for saying this. Firstly the catalogues were often accompanied by another price sheets advising dealer discounts and in the example of the Simonds saws with a dollar medallion, the price was unequivocal as the retail price. A further substantiation is the advertisements to the public which are in line with the catalogues although not always identical.

Regards
Paul

Foreign Exchange wasn't really a thing back in 1900.
I remember reading that after Alfred Nobel (Mr dynamite) died, the executors of his estate had a real job returning his foreign holdings into cash and repatriating it all to Sweden too establish the Nobel Awards.
If you really need to do a ForEx "transaction" from that long ago, I think you will find that the gold standard works.


Curious that the per dozen price is also the retail price -- apart from retailers, who buys 12 of the same saw?

I'm sort of in the market for a good rip saw 22, 24 or 26 inch

the Skelton copy of the Keyton is far, far too much
Mike Wenzloff appears to have ceased trading -- I hope he is still alive as last I heard he was off to hospital for heart surgery.

preference is new or refurbished classic, so I'm tossing up between
Pax, Lie Neilsen, or ???

thoughts

Nice wheat carving eh? That one really is shown as almost 100% negative. The reason I say "almost" is that the timber handle itself should show up as ~50% black (which is also the same as 50% white - perzackly halfway between white and black). However, they are representing it as very dark indeed (aka very light indeed, given it's a -ve).

I'm rapidly coming to a conclusion that the carpenters of the day either didn't care what it looked like as long as it cut, or......summink else that I haven't worked out......

One thing is certain: whatever they saw advertised was never going to match reality.

Maybe that's why they all let them rust? So that when they were restored (aka de-rusted) they would finally look like the advert? Nice pitted black rust holes.

Originally Posted by ian

I'm sort of in the market for a good rip saw 22, 24 or 26 inch

preference is new or refurbished classic, so I'm tossing up between
Pax, Lie Neilsen, or ???

thoughts

Either a Bad Axe (new saws, and have heard nothing but VERY good reports), or a refurb from someone like Marv Werner (I can shoot you his email addy). They both have an excellent reputation.

Originally Posted by ian

I'm sort of in the market for a good rip saw 22, 24 or 26 inch

the Skelton copy of the Keyton is far, far too much
Mike Wenzloff appears to have ceased trading -- I hope he is still alive as last I heard he was off to hospital for heart surgery.

preference is new or refurbished classic, so I'm tossing up between
Pax, Lie Neilsen, or ???

thoughts

For joinery stuff, LN's new saws are excellent, though I don't know what price they come to there. They're generally cheaper than the boutique makers here in the states, with the exception of Wenzloff, but I suspect a lot of Mike W's issues with running his business were that he was riddled with guilt about prices and never charged enough to do anything more than survive making saws all of his waking hours. Nobody ever told me that, just a supposition based on having made a few saws. Even if I could cut my make time into half, it would be hard to make more than $150 a day in a regular day.

A slotted factory saw of good quality like LN is probably the best value if the price isn't severely bloated there (the dovetail saw here is $125, and I think the joinery saws are perhaps 1 1/2 times that until you get into the large ones).

As far as the large saws, get vintage. I see recommendations for saw restorers, and I don't have a great answer, but I haven't ever felt like they're much of a deal vs. a saw that's just in good condition and needs to be filed instead. Needing help vs. good condition has always cost me a difference of about $50 (i file my own). The gurus usually mark a saw up about triple that or more.

Why not LN's saws? simply because they're too small to be useful and everyone I've talked to over here (who uses saws a lot) says they feel like toys and they end up finding vintage saws for ripping, anyway.

Beware of uniform surface rust. If you sand enough of the surface away on a saw, the tension will be gone. Just pay what it costs to get a saw that's in good condition. Discoloration without significant rusting is fine. See broken teeth? pass up the saw. It's not a guarantee that it wasn't due to abuse, but my experience is that when you're playing the odds, it's quite often an indicator that more teeth will break, which is a real downer after you spend an hour or so cutting fresh teeth into a saw with a file. Everything's up to snuff, and then you get the dreaded click under the sawset which lets you know that a tooth just snapped.

(my comment about taking the tension out isn't a rumor - someone gave me a nice woodrough and mcparlin saw with brown uniform rust that was a layer and not really significant pitting. Ideal candidate for a deburring wheel, but removal of the rust left me with a saw with no tension and I had to hammer tension back into it. Works great now, but I wouldn't guess most people would have luck tensioning a saw. Or stiffening, whatever people call it. A saw that has lost its stiffness is completely useless. It will bend and bind in even light work.

The new sheffield long saws are second rate. A later pattern that isn't as nice to use, and some of them are a bit soft. Soft isn't that big of a deal if it's just by a little, but if it's by a lot, it is. It all points back to vintage and in reasonably good shape for old saws.

Originally Posted by D.W.

Beware of uniform surface rust. If you sand enough of the surface away on a saw, the tension will be gone.

Nope, the deformations induced by hammering go all of the way through. Rust doesn't tension so rust removal won't change tension unless you overdo it.
Remember the blades you sent me years ago? You told me at the time that you worked them over with W&D and WD40. They still had hard and soft regions that I was able to measure.

Originally Posted by D.W.

(my comment about taking the tension out isn't a rumor -

Something was wrong with your saw before you started.

Originally Posted by D.W.

someone gave me a nice woodrough and mcparlin saw with brown uniform rust that was a layer and not really significant pitting. Ideal candidate for a deburring wheel, but removal of the rust left me with a saw with no tension and I had to hammer tension back into it. Works great now, but I wouldn't guess most people would have luck tensioning a saw. Or stiffening, whatever people call it. A saw that has lost its stiffness is completely useless. It will bend and bind in even light work.

Several possibilities.

1) The saw had at some point since manufacture been overheated.

2) Less likely is that the saw was never tensioned in the first place.

3) Even less likely is that your cleaning softened it. This would only happen if you got it hot enough to show blue or grey in air.

4) Possible that it had been cleaned so many times in a century that it lost significant amounts of steel and became flimsy. If this was the case you should have seen a deflection.

5) May have been a manufacturing failure to properly harden or over-grinding such that it was barely thick enough when new.

Something I haven't discussed much is the adjustment of tension by grinding. Yes you can do it and I do it as part of making my saws, something I need to get back to.

In grinding saw blades I've found that you can get them too hot to hold bare handed and it has no effect on the hardness.

Further, I've found that a mild heat cycle of no more than about 700 ^oF after grinding and tensioning results in higher instrumental hardness and lower standard deviation of hardness, see step 9 of 13 (stiffening) in the 1880 Scientific American discussion of Disston saw manufacturing stages.

The saw was fine before I cleaned it, actually. I used it - it did not have any appearance of having been cleaned previously. The tension (Stiffness) was fine (actually quite nice, all of the W&McP saws that I've used have had good stiffness), but it was about as brown as that #7 that I sent you (I can't remember the final state of that plate, but it had a pretty thick coating of rust on it), and removing the "brown-ness" made a substantial mess, not just a little bit of dust.

Running the saw on a 3m deburring wheel is a bit rough on it (it heats it, but not to the point where temper would be affected, or the steel would be blue).

It's noticeable when working the saw to the point that the plate is warm that it will develop a bias for stiffness, and actually may "pop" to certain positions. That tendency goes away once the saw has completely cooled.

In this case, though, after deburring both sides fairly significantly to get the whole saw to clean metal (or relatively close) it had lost all of its stiffness. The tension wouldn't have been in the rust, but the rust wasn't perfectly even in thickness, so some metal was removed. Maybe a fair amount.

Certainly some of the working properties of rolling the saws to stiffen them goes all the way through the steel, but quite a lot of it is on the surface. I'm sure I could duplicate the results of this (the amount of deburring was probably about 20 minutes worth), though I don't buy dirty saws at this point (someone gave me that one).

I'm quite sure of what I stated above.

the popping thing at relatively low temperature was interesting, but I recall George Wilson mentioning that they would straighten saws at CW by pouring boiling water on them and then bending them to remove a gradual curve/bow. Certainly the saws change properties other than hardness before hardness is affected (they must be tempered around 750 degrees F or more - there's no way I could hold a saw plate if anything close to that was being achieved ....plus the tempering color issue).

I had one other oddity on a factory disston (not McP) saw before (the saw was straw tempered and retained the tempering color, and was perfectly straight and unfileable - not a specialty saw, either, a stock, Disston #7 retaining a clean - but straw colored - plate with a nice clean etch), but we'll save that for another day.

(by the way, if you have a deburring wheel and a spare plate, run one of your plates uniformly on the wheel for 20 minutes overlapping the saw alternating from one side to another and let me know what happens).

It may have been on the verge of losing it's tensioning. Sometimes a plate, if unevenly tensioned will pop from one shape to another. They'll also do it if they're over-tensioned. I haven't figured out how to correct an overtensioned saw yet but re-grinding followed by hammering improves them. I've had several people ask me to try but I've never been fully satisfied with the results. This may be what was going on with your saw.

The 1095 stock I use already has a great deal of internal stress because of the forming at the mill. As I grind a blade, and I grind the heavily, they will tend to bow into the side that is being ground, i.e. the ground side becomes concave. Grinding the other side restores the straightness. Just as described in the Scientific American article I do the heavy work of grinding, tension using hammers and then do finish grinding, sometimes with some more hammering. Once the plate is true I re-heat it. I don't understand how it happens but the blades come out of the oven after a couple of hours and they're a point or two harder. The S.D. of the hardness also goes down by about 75-90%.

I need to teach myself how to polish and etch the metal for metallography and source a good metallurgical microscope. Are you pleased with the one you bought?

The one I had didn't pop like that before I started to work it over. It did that after I'd worked a substantial area on one side while it was warm (but stopped as soon as it was cooled). It had as good of a feel in use as anything else prior, but I wanted to try the deburring wheel, and I knew it had a thick layer of rust on it, but the kind that makes a plate brown, and not the kind that makes deep pits or looks flakey.

Thankfully, it completely lost all stiffness by the time I had abraded it for a while, so it hammered predictably. I thought it was ruined at first, as I've never hammered one from complete floppiness like that, but i checked it relatively frequently as I was hammering it and it never got out of control. I haven't used it in the last year or so, so I'm assuming that if I go pull it off the rack, it won't be dead straight, and I'll need to give it just a bit more work to get it back.

I have another one (a large rip saw that was unevenly tensioned - badly) that is like you describe. It will pop one way, but it's stiff the other. i cannot manage to get it hammered satisfactorily, and I'm considering deburring the crap out of it to start over. Or throwing it away (that would be a lot more reasonable).

As far as the microscopes go, I'm satisfied with the scope that I have for my needs (which is looking at razor edges), but I notice that it has an extremely short focal range. If metal has pitting on it, the pits will be out of focus while the surface is not. Even significant sharpening scratches are blurry at the top or the bottom. I think most people might find a problem with it if they wanted to do more than check perfectly flat surfaces without much depth variation. If mine's $430, I'm not sure how much money you have to spend to be able to get a scope that has better focusing across minor depth variations.

Ian

For a rip saw I think you need length in the saw plate so really 24" is a minimum size. This automatically restricts your choice with the new boutique saw makers. Rob Streeper used to produce some D-8 style saws but I don'r think he is doing that at present. However in the vintage market you will have a huge choice. It is as if you had just entered the Tardis and were back before WW1. You will be able to purchase one of the best saws ever made (not necessarily a 400 ). Just trawl through the US Ebay. Up to US$150 and you can own a Rolls Royce, a Type 57SC or a Lady Blunt.

Regards
Paul