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  1. #31
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    I also wonder a little at the limitations imposed by our ideas of sharpening with an equilateral triangular file.


    This is the crazy saw I ripped a 5" thick "log" with. You can see the crazy gullet size (let alone the crazy gullet pattern)

    I feel like that might speed things along a bit also.

    Cheers,
    Paul

    Large Saw, Medium 'Log'-20150414_160445-jpg

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  3. #32
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    I think i'm not filling the gullets of this saw, but if I made the teeth coarser in an attempt to get them to remove more material, then it would only cut wide material. On smaller saws, I have definitely filled gullets on a couple of occasions and had them pack full (which is annoying),

    Your saw pattern reminds me of the disston d-15 (?) that has a large gullet after every nth tooht, as does the japanese version of the same (except many of the japanese saws are intended for crosscutting logs).

    This (frame) saw puts out two separate bits of particles, like any saw I guess. The larger filings come out and land on the bench and are almost unseen (but at the end of the video you can see the piled around the burnisher handle). The smaller files come out in a puff and float away slower. Obviously, I like more big filings and fewer small filings.

    I think there may be something to the amount of relief on those steel teeth that you're showing, making it easier for the teeth to dig deeper. Or maybe less so much being relief, and more being the smaller total angle at the tooth. I wonder if that has implications on longevity on a rip saw.

  4. #33
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    Default My Damascus moment....

    Several years ago, I was picking up a couple of new bandsaw blades & I asked if they had any leftovers off the roll of blade stock too short to make up into a blade. The bloke went out the back & returned with about a metre of 1/2 inch "Woodpecker" blade stock. When I got home, I cut a bit off & tried it in a small bowsaw & it was hopeless. At 3 1/3tpi and more rake than Don Juan, it was unmanageable and rougher than a back country road.

    I've been having a major clean-up of my shed this week, & came across the remains of the blade stock at the back of a shelf. I was about to toss it in the garbage, but this thread must;ve tickled something in my brain, & I decided to try an experiment. There was exactly 600mm of blade left, so I put a small hole in each end of it, then went scavenging for some other raw materials. First find was an old 3/8 x 6 inch coach bolt. I hacksawed it in half, slotted the end of each piece, & drilled 2mm holes for retaining pins.:1 bolts.jpg
    I then made a simple frame, joined at each corner with an unglued tenon into the end pieces. I wanted a light frame, so I used some Celtis for the end pieces (about 25 x 40mm by 400mm long) and Camphor Laurel for the spreaders: 2 Frame joint.jpg Both woods are light, but quite tough. In a short time I had my frame together and the blade fitted & tensioned up: 3 Frame saw.jpg then I took it for a test run on a piece of 250mm wide Red Gum. My first discovery was that it was almost impossible to start that blade cleanly on a line. I solved that by making a shallow kerf with a tenon saw. Once on its way, the thing cut like a hot knife through butter! 4 Redgum cut.jpg

    So I thought, "Okay, I'll try it on a narrower piece, that'll snag the teeth and cause some bouncy cutting". Nope, it cut this ~45mm wide scrap just as easily, once I started with the tenon saw again: 5 cut surface.jpg As you can see the cut is pretty rough, but no rougher than I get off the bandsaw. My other discovery was how uncomfortable it was to use with all square corners! A bit of shaping and sanding soon fixed that: 6 Tidied up.jpg Now it's much more hand-friendly!

    I had predicted that the bandsaw blade wouldn't be functional, after my bowsaw experience, and was prepared to make something more suitable, to get this saw working, so I was amazed by how well it worked. It cut very well under its own light weight, and the only difficulty I noted was that the narrow blade wants to wander a bit, but I think it's mostly my inexperience, & with a bit of practice I should be able to control the thing properly. The rate at which this thing flew through the Red Gum was impressive. I'm well used to the effort it would take to saw through a piece like this using my Disston ripsaw, but this dodgy gadget cut faster, & required about half the effort. I tried both 'pull' cuts & 'push' cuts, and the push cuts seemed easier & smoother. I expected pulling to cut would be better as it would maintain tension on the blade more evenly. But the most surprising thing of all was that with barely 6 teeth riding in the cut, it still cut smoothly. I would have thought it would snag pretty badly, with only 6-7 teeth riding on the wood.

    So there you go, a bit of bandsaw blade can work well in a simple frame saw, where it definitely did not work at all at a bit less than half that length as a bowsaw blade. My hypothesis is that I was lucky & got the frame weight just right so that it doesn't force the blade to bite too deeply, just enough to remove wood at an impressive rate. So I tidied up my new saw, gave it a coat of oil & hung it up to dry. I'll be playing with it a bit over the next few months - I could become quite a convert to frame saws....

    Cheers,
    IW

  5. #34
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    Ian, how long is the blade in your bow saw? My cousin and I have decided to use one to mill some logs by hand over the holidays. Ours is coming from Isaac at Blackburn Tools and is 48" long. Obviously meant for two people. I know you said the guy gave you about a metre of saw blade, but how much actually went into the saw?

    Cheers,
    Luke

  6. #35
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    Quote Originally Posted by IanW View Post
    There was exactly 600mm of blade left ....

    Cheers,
    I'm guessing it was around 600mm!

  7. #36
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    Quote Originally Posted by hiroller View Post
    I'm guessing it was around 600mm!
    Hah. I promise I really did go back and try to find the answer.

  8. #37
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    Yep, HR has it, that's how long the blade is, Luke.

    I saw frame saws of all sizes being used everywhere, when I was working in rural Vietnam during the 90s, and I always had it in the back of my mind to make one 'someday'. This thread and my big shed cleanup have finally provoked some action! The tools they were using in Vn were such simple things, but seemed to be capable of pretty impressive performance in practiced hands. I can't remember how they tensioned their blades, & the couple of pics I have don't show enough detail of the saws to see, but iirc, some of them simply used wire or cord, twitched up with a stick. This is about the best pic I have, these blokes are planking up a bit of White cedar (Melia azedarach), a common tree around he villages: Sawing log red.jpg

    This little project was purely a bit of fun, aimed mostly at working out what goes into one, particularly the 'right' sizes for the structural bits. (BTW, maybe we should get our terminology settled, this is a 'frame' saw as opposed to a 'bow' saw. The difference is academic, I guess, both employ a thin blade held under tension, but the frame saw has two compression beams as opposed to the single beam of the bowsaw). The frames I saw always looked quite light. The most common material for the compression members was bamboo, & the ends were sometimes bamboo too, sometimes wood. I went with intuition on the dimensions for the ends & compression members, and they seem to have worked out pretty close to the mark. Like many of my 'prototypes', it could do with some refinements, but it's good enough to do a job, & given how long it's taken to get around to it, this will probably be the last one I have time for.

    One of the aims I had in making the saw was to 'prove' that bandsaw blades are not appropriate for hand tools, as I've advised others on a number of occasions. As too often happens when I make bold assertions, I was wrong. Th same stuff may have been hopeless in a small bowsaw, but in this application it works waaay better than I expected. I think, with a bit of practice, this saw could be my 'go to' tool for splitting 300-350mm wide pieces for book-matching - at least it can't run off-course quite as quickly & disastrously as the big bandsaw! I should try to get a wider blade, perhaps, but quite like this one, it's thin (0.4mm), so easy to tension & leaves a very fine kerf. As I said, maybe with a little more practice, I will be able to reliably follow a line with the accuracy needed for good book-matching.

    For breaking down a log, you're going to need something much more substantial, you want a blade at least twice as long as the width of the log you wish to cut, but you're welcome to come & play with this saw to get an idea of what might be needed in scaling up to a log-sized saw....

    Cheers,
    IW

  9. #38
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    Quote Originally Posted by Luke Maddux View Post
    Ian, how long is the blade in your bow saw? My cousin and I have decided to use one to mill some logs by hand over the holidays. Ours is coming from Isaac at Blackburn Tools and is 48" long. Obviously meant for two people. Cheers, Luke
    Luke, you will enjoy the saw, I have tried one (with Isaac on the other end) and it certainly motors through the wood. Might have brought back the materials myself, but the shipping looked too hard...
    Cheers
    Peter

  10. #39
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    Yeah, I had a lysdexic moment. DaveTTC's post and my recent acquisition of a bow saw have me thinking in two directions.

    We've definitely got a FRAME saw coming, or at least the metal parts. Isaac is going to do something to it that he recommended for green wood. I believe he's adding some set, but my cousin has been doing the communicating with him. Anyway, it's a 48" blade and I think my cousin is going to make the frame from Hickory. We're expecting it to have a bit of a learning curve, but we've pretty much decided that the only better option is a pit saw, and we're not quite that ambitious...

    We're either going to mill Walnut or Cherry, and I think we're leaning toward Cherry, because he has one that has fallen and then continued to grow, so we wouldn't actually have to fell a living tree, which is a bonus. Both trees are similar sized at 24" DBH, so we're expecting 12" riven quarters. We may end up slabbing one of the halves. Hard to say. Nonetheless we have a beast of a frame saw with which to do it.

    I'll post photos...

    Cheers,
    Luke

  11. #40
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    Quote Originally Posted by Luke Maddux View Post
    .... Both trees are similar sized at 24" DBH, so we're expecting 12" riven quarters. We may end up slabbing one of the halves. Hard to say. Nonetheless we have a beast of a frame saw with which to do it.....
    I'd be experimenting with the frame to get it as light as possible without being too flimsy - the less weight you have to pull back & forth, the happier you'll be!

    I've seen a log about the diameter you mention, and about 8 feet long, sawn into 1 inch planks in a day by two blokes with a very primitive-looking saw, so that might give you something to aim for. Actually, I don't know how long it took them, but it was less than 9 hours. When I went past early in the morning, they'd taken off a slab and were partway down the first plank. When we came back that way about 8 or 9 hours later, the log was a pile of stickered planks. I imagine the blokes doing the sawing were pros, they were keeping up a very steady, but good pace with that saw (they were also supple young fellas who didn't seem to mind squatting in what would have been a very uncomfortable position for me!).

    I only got to see what was going on very briefly as we walked past, and I can't remember exactly how the saw was configured, but it must've been more like a bowsaw than a frame saw, to cut planks like that. The log was lying almost where it fell, just heaved up onto a couple of chocks to lift it a little bit. Wish I'd stopped & taken pics, but as I was the only one in the group with those sorts of interests & we had a fair bit to get done that day, I didn't want to be a nuisance & hold things up. I did get a pic of a pair in another village, 'thicknessing' a pile of sawn planks, so if the manual lumbering bug really bites, you better start training for the next step: Armstrong thickness planer.jpg


    Cheers,
    IW

  12. #41
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    Seems to be the thing to do these days.

    http://www.schoolofwood.com/node/59
    Innovations are those useful things that, by dint of chance, manage to survive the stupidity and destructive tendencies inherent in human nature.

  13. #42
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    Apparently.

    I checked with George Wilson about the veneer saw that they were using in the colonial williamsburg video to find out how the blade was made, and he said that it was very thin, like something on the order of .020 (but two people were using it).

    Point being, I didn't find too much luck with a thinner blade in a saw of that type with one person sawing with it. I wonder if they'll find the MSSW saw in that blog post to be difficult to use with one person. I think all of them would work well with two people, but not all of us have that luxury (I wouldn't dare ask my wife to stand on the other side of the saw - she has no interest in that kind of stuff at all and I would regret it).

  14. #43
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    Quote Originally Posted by IanW View Post
    My first discovery was that it was almost impossible to start that blade cleanly on a line. I solved that by making a shallow kerf with a tenon saw. Once on its way, the thing cut like a hot knife through butter!
    Ian

    I think this would be a classic contender for the progressive tooth solution. You may recall that with rip saws the better quality offerings had a finer tooth at the toe for easy starting. A further refinement is to relax the rake at the start too.

    I appreciate that the first of these comments would have been difficult as your bandsaw blade was already toothed, but you may be able to add a little more rake to the first three or four inches.

    Dropping the sawing angle down to maximise the teeth in contact with timber when first starting may also help, but I am guessing you tried that.

    Regards
    Paul
    Bushmiller;

    "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely!"

  15. #44
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bushmiller View Post
    I.....your bandsaw blade was already toothed, but you may be able to add a little more rake to the first three or four inches........
    Difficult, Paul. A file won't touch the hard point teeth, though since it appears to be only about a mm of the tips of the teeth that are hardened, I could skim off the tips with a cutoff wheel, to get at the fileable material below. However, even if I did that, I wouldn't be able to make very useful extra teeth, due to the extreme rounded shape and deep gullets of the existing profile. Since this was entirely a quick prototype (partly to 'prove' to all & sundry that the bandsaw blade wouldn't work at all ), the outcome was unexpectedly successful, after a fashion! However, if I scale up to something that can handle an 18" or slightly wider panel, which is my ultimate goal, I think a wider & heavier gauge blade would be called for, so I will either look for a more suitable bandsaw blade which I can either use as-is, or re-tooth if needed, or start with plain saw steel. I think 3" x 32 thou stock (ripped in half to yield two approx. 1 1/2" blades would be ideal for my envisaged uses...

    Quote Originally Posted by Bushmiller View Post
    I.....Dropping the sawing angle down to maximise the teeth in contact with timber when first starting may also help, but I am guessing you tried that....
    Yep, it was my automatic response, but the gappy, light blade just wants to wander all over the shop, and it is exceedingly difficult to persuade it to start on a line. A couple of days ago, I wanted to rip off a 15mm thick piece from a wide, thick piece of Camphor Laurel, & thought I'd give the saw a try in a real situation. With my thinnest tablesaw blade, I ran a 25mm deep kerf along both sides of the piece. I found it far easier to start the frame saw in the 'front' kerf, then quickly bring it down to meet the kerf on the back side, after which it easily followed both kerfs all the way down the 400mm long board in a very disciplined way. For a single, short cut like this, it was far quicker than pulling out the b'saw, hooking up the dusty & cleaning it out afterwards. Quieter, too, I didn't miss a note of a favourite piece that happened to be playing on the radio.....

    Cheers,
    IW

  16. #45
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    Ian

    If you are just looking for plate steel, I have any number of old 26" saw plates hanging around (literally) that you could cut off 1 1/2" or 2" strips. You would be welcome to them for "research."

    Regards
    Paul
    Bushmiller;

    "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely!"

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