Thread: Hand ripsawing insanity

for frame sawing veneer, you need to have the saw sitting on something vertical under its own weight. a veneer saw will usually be somewhat lightly built. It won't have any trouble clearing chips from the teeth as long as the length is a good bit more than half of the width of the material being sawn. Increasing the width of the material obviously shortens the stroke, too.

If the discussion turns to pitsaws and log framesaws, I'm sure they are lifted with each stroke away from the wood because of physical effort of dragging coarse teeth and a heavy saw on wood.

When ripping a board on saw horses, I ease the return stroke by lifting the handle just a fraction. It's not so much a conscious lift as pulling back in a line slightly angled to the bottom of the kerf so that just a tooth or two contacting the bottom of the kerf at the far end. It's an unconscious habit acquired over time. You can feel the slight reduction in drag, it's not much over a stroke or two, but it adds up over a long cut. Some people exaggerate the lifting on the return stroke to the point where if you watch from the side their sawing hand is making quite a large circle.

I've never had the misfortune to be attached to a pitsaw (as a junior I would certainly have scored the underneath spot!), but I spent many an hour on the end of a crosscut saw, which are usually sharpened so they can cut in either direction. When working on his own, my dad sometimes used a 'silent mate', which was a length of rubber cut from an old truck inner tube, attached by a rope to a tree so that it pulled the saw back after the power stroke. I never tried it myself but it seemed like doubling the work having to pull against the cutting resistance as well as the elastic 'return spring'! It can't have been much fun 'cos he conscripted me at an early age whenever I was available and I don't think I would have improved the situation all that much as a 12 yr old, but I must have been a bit better than a bungey cord (despite my constant whining). It may have been character-building, but it was not my preferred way to spend my weekends....

Cheers,

that was a done thing here also, Ian, when using a two man saw and not having a second man. I'd bet the two man saws are a lot faster than the long one man pushers.

A setup like that also allows a felling cut, which is really hard without it.

I haven't been conscripted either. My dad is 76. One of his first chainsaws in his early teens (safety not such a big thing back then) was a 22 pound remington monster with rigid handles. I said something about how bad it must've been to run, and he was eating something and said "what are you talking about?". I said slow chain speed 22 pound saw ....and he said "beat what we were stuck doing before it!"

Saws were available before that, but they were trying to make a house go on 110 acres and grandfather also was the court record keeper ( a job with visibility, but not monetary rewards to go with it).

My point being they got stuff once someone else had decided to get something new and cast off. If you had a farm back then, you may have gotten some coal in, but there are always fence rows and wet or hilly areas with trees.

Dad said they also mowed two acres with two iron reel mowers and he wouldn't touch mine. My father in law who is the same age and also grew up on a farm mowed half of my yard "just giving it a quick try". Dad's family was one for working hard, but they didn't have much sense in setting or fixing things. A poorly set reel mower is torture. there were six boys, five of them around the same age, and dad suggests with some certainty that it wasn't a priority to replace two reel mowers if it would've let the kids sit around and be lazy. More so than it was a money issue.

as for the circular thing - I tried early on to lift on the back stroke of a carpenter saw vs. just letting pressure off. Not for efficiency, but i got tired of gullets emptying over my line. I find it a lot easier to blow every so many strokes instead, though. it's too disruptive for a big lift.

Eventually, laziness will guide you for want of the setup both feeling good and being controllable - that will lead to efficiency. If you commit to making a bunch of stuff entirely by hand, then efficiency comes very fast.