Thread: Who has made a frame saw?

Hi DW. Can you provide the link.

Stewie;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLrAQVMYjfg

I probably shouldn't have posted this video. I had trouble making the point, which was really less about the frame saw and more about cutting up a rip saw to make a decent kerfing saw (which is less work than making the roubo plate style tool that looks more like a plow plane).

Thanks DW. I was expecting to see more on the subject of the frame saw you built.

Stewie;

I can only say this much:
* my mock up frame (it's scrap, just screwed together) is too wide
* the plate has to be substantial, a small plate cuts super fast, but wanders because of the weight of the saw influencing it. My plate is now the same as isaac suggested - 4 inches wide, .042.
* I'll eventually redo the wood for it - probably - and if I don't, I'll clean up what's there and make it at least 6 inches narrower.
* for resawing, I wouldn't want it any shorter
* it takes a great deal of physical energy to use it fast, and it exerts an enormous amount of force on wood in a vise
* after cutting the teeth twice on four foot plates, I don't feel like cutting more teeth for a while. I was lucky to have an appropriate file size on hand
* It's important for the metal fixtures to allow a little bit of adjustment so that the plate is all in plane
* Despite the problems, it works and stays in its kerfs if they are deep enough (1/2 inch). I intend to work with it until I get to the point that i can resaw without the kerf sawing, we'll see how that goes. It would be easy with someone standing on the opposite side of the saw tracking the opposite side line.

Tom Fidgen has a shorter frame saw that looks like it works well, but it's not faster than my 3 1/2 point #7 (maybe I said that above). Perhaps a little bit more accurate, I'm going for fast because my power tools will all be gone by the end of the year. I get a great deal of pleasure out of doing the rough work by hand, and with power tools, I feel instead like a bystander trying to avert trouble and not let the machines get ahead of my thoughts (the temptation is to get in a rhythm and ram stock through).

Shannon rodgers has a nice one in a video.

I don't know anything about tom fidgen and shannon rodgers other than that when I looked up frame saws, I saw them using theirs. I've seen others (adam cherubini, notably) declare that they just aren't worth the trouble. I'd kind of like to have a 35 inch long 2 1/2 tooth per inch disston rip saw, but the only thing that big that i've seen is timber type stuff, and those are too fat plated.

Makes sense DW. Not sure why you would need the frame that wide.

Stewie;

Originally Posted by planemaker

Makes sense DW. Not sure why you would need the frame that wide.

Stewie;

Neither am I. I don't remember what I was thinking when I made it like that. I may have been shooting for that hand hold width and figured it wouldn't hurt, but i don't like the width of the frame now nor the width of the hand hold, so I will shorten those bits and screw it back together and try it again before making nice wood. It would be nice if the stuff was held together M&T, it does have a little bit of flex in it - it's just double screwed with long stainless screws in the end of each board.

I usually do all or none when thinking about making tools. In this case, the first effort was just throwing crap up against the wall and then figuring out what needs to change to make it better. Every once in a while you get a good tool on the first time doing that, but usually not, and in this case not. With the heavier plate, it actually works, but there's plenty of room to make it better.

I do think it's never going to be the mindless riskless work that a lot of other things are, but with some improvement in the frame and some repetition in use (that always makes things work a little better), hopefully it won't be a dread like a poorly set bandsaw can be (fortunately, my bandsaw doesn't meet that critera, but I did resaw with it using a defective laguna blade at one point, and it wandered in every cut - horrible).

Good to see that you got it more or less worked out. I'm a little bit surprised the Somax handled those teeth. I know that took some determination.

For what it's worth, the only saw set I've found that worked well on teeth of this size is the Stanley 42 (not the 42X). It's become my set of choice for anything coarser than about 6 or 7 ppi. I'm guessing that some of the saw sets made for the two man crosscut saws would work, too, but I've never bothered trying those.

The somax on those teeth was sort of like hauling 2 tons of stone in a 1 ton dump wagon. Creaking, feelings of overstressing. I've only got two somax sets and a

The anvil is just tall enough to bend the very tip of the tooth, just enough to give it enough set to stay free in the cut and not find a wander and try to follow it for lack of any room to move at all.

I thought about trying hammer setting but those are strong teeth on a 42 thousandth plate, and I didn't want to have to stone or file a bunch of inaccuracy off. Same reason I didn't find one of the timber saw wrests.

I'm looking forward to getting the problems corrected and giving it another try. Just as big of an issue is what you alluded to, work holding. I need to put some dog holes in my bench so that I can restrain the board with dogs instead of clamps, because clamping and unclamping is a pain. I don't want to subject my vise to the torture that it would take to hold a board still at this point. It's hard to overstate how much bite the saw has.

workholding

I've taken a small survey, and tying it to a tree is head of the list atm.

Paul

I'll go for that. Tree sounds good. I want it to be rigged with some kind of thingamabob that lifts the board 4 inches each time you step on a foot pedal, too.

I narrowed the frame too 48 inches long still but only 16 inches wide. It could really be another inch or three narrower yet without any problem. I attempted to make a video after that, but i'm running out of thick stock that I need to use to make my last two kitchen cabinets, I guess to a point, the lumber guy who sold me 6/4 stock had given me a lot of extra work to do, but it's provided fodder for this (giving various methods of resawing an earnest test), and it's certainly more fun to resaw and hand plane than it is to take 2/3rds of an inch off in lunchbox planers.

In the middle of my video attempt, my wife opened the door and said if I make more noise while the kids are trying to go to sleep, she'll shoot me, and she threw a diaper (albeit one in little baggie all closed up - you guys with kids might know what I'm talking about). So we won't be posting that! (the woodworking never wakes up the kids, though, but it's a bugaboo of my wifes that she thinks it will). I didn't have the camera oriented right, anyway, but it did catch the diaper throw!

What I did figure out, though, is it takes me about 4-5 minutes to kerf both sides of a 4 foot long board, and the frame saw goes about twice as fast after that as does my coarsest handsaw (which is coarser than most people have). On a 6 inch wide cherry board, the frame saw equates to about 1/8th inch of cut per stroke, which in turn ends up being about 5 inches of board resawn per minute, a little more than twice as fast as the handsaw, but I am not accurate enough to cut with it without a guide kerf (which is not the case for a handsaw). The overall score on something like a 4 foot long 6" wide board is that the frame saw is a bit faster (like a 15 minute job instead of 20), but the margin should be larger on wider boards because of the frame saw's weight advantage. We'll see.

The workholding is another thing to tackle, too. I don't want to abuse my vise, and might try cutting across the width of the bench (my vise will go out to about a foot or so) rather than putting the board in the vise by thickness. The frame saw levers the board an extreme amount, and at the same time, it's not that nice to use when it's down at waist level (which is where it is if you want to minimize the levering - which won't be possible anyway on four foot long or longer boards.

Initial results.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1GHQwYoux0

Pardon me for showing my mug in the video, I wanted to get an underside view of the cut to see the dust coming out of the cut (which only ever shows up well in HD).

Cut rate for the frame saw so far is about 20% faster than a hand saw with about the same tooth pitch, and more sustainable (I had to lean on the hand saw to get it to go that fast). There's a little more speed potential yet in the frame saw (maybe another 25%) if not stopping all the time to check (I'm getting the feel for it liking just a little bit of bias when cutting, or maybe what feels like a little bit of bias to me is actually even left to right pressure.)

It works well enough that I will make good wood for it at some point (it's just scrap ash and doweled and glued).

Personally ... I like seeing some experimental woodworking. (Fair enough it is my area of interest)
At some stage all this would have been common enough that it wasn't so remarkable ... but I think this is our best way to try to recreate that knowledge for the resources we have to hand today.

I think the frame saw idea would get kinda turbo-charged with two people working it ... please arrange that experiment for my amusement.

I wonder if a bungee-cord to the other wall might be a help? ... they do stuff like that with the big xcut saws.

I could also picture it fixed into a vertical frame like the original machine-driven frame saws ... maybe pedal-powered.
Again ... if there was a bungee upwards, and a board to press to make a downwards stroke ... (might limit the "throw"'though)

I've considered (only briefly) some kind of mirror setup that would show me the back side of the cut. That's the best thing for a one man enterprise, because you can see a wander as soon as it starts.

There's definitely nothing remarkable about what I did, what is remarkable is that as many times as I have learned that it's far better to find someone who has done something successfully before you start doing anything, I ordered materials before asking, that cost me a lot of time here.

Two people would be better because the back person could steer, too, and then no kerf would be needed. I don't know if the saw would cut better with two people (faster), if the second person is my wife, no way. Someone who wanted thing to work well, maybe!

Remarkable or not, though, it's all fun...even cutting the teeth in twice gave me an opportunity to see how far you can push a coarse triangular file. Strangely, when the file starts to feel dull, if you lean hard on it and cut a few teeth, it gets a second wind, and it does that a couple of times before it feels dull no matter what. I never knew that before, it's like really hard use blows some of the wear off the file briefly. Maybe sometime, I'll get the opportunity to try it on something less coarse than a 8 inch heavy taper file.

I've got a five year old daughter, perhaps she'd like to try the opposite side of the saw!!

If I've got something else interesting, I'll post it on here. One thing I know is when I post anything on here, I get an instant thumbs down on the video. A day or two later when google analytics tells me where it comes from, it's australia. I have a good idea who it might be!

(My videos definitely deserve some thumbs down, they're shot on a phone with no retakes unless someone walks in and interrupts - but it's strange they don't get a lot of them - usually only if I hit a hot button subject (videos about natural japanese stones get thumbs down from japan, but also more thumbs up than thumbs down...).