Thread: Hand ripsawing insanity

funny enough, there is a thread scrolling down in that forum showing Chris Schwarz describing rip saw positions. I always thought he looked like he was thrashing (mack headley looks nothing like that effortlessly moving through work entirely by hand), but I didn't know at the time that Chris is more of an aficionado of reading about the stuff vs. doing it.

Which was highlighted when he wanted to make a bench entirely by hand and then didn't do it - I guess probably highlighted dozens of ways but one was asserting that the cut across the ends of the bench is too slow.

Really thick material is crosscut with an aggressive rip saw. That seemed to escape him. I've not seen texts that say to do it, just a lot of illustrations of people doing it.

The tall thin plate tenon saw idea that he got lots of people to buy into was another doosy.

But we can't pick too much who tells us how to use hand tools properly because there are none teaching it that I'm aware of that actually do it day to day, and the group being catered to is beginners. No other group will continue to show up for classes and pay, or sign up to watch online.

Hi David

Not entirely convinced that two handed vertical sawing it makes difficult to maintain squareness, photo attached. The German style reverse cut is also easy to keep track. Not sure way, maybe it's easier to see the line.

As for elbows I cannot be sure how you saw exactly but when I have watch other sawing at say 30 degrees they seem to rating at the elbow joint about 30 to 35 degrees. In two hand vertical grip the rotation is about 15 degrees but the load is spread onto both arms- less would seem to easier on the weaker elbow joint( compared to shoulders)


As a proviso the style cut is new to me. Experiments after CK found the video of Caspar sawing.
IMG_6418.jpg


Cheers M

-duplicate..

at some point, you want to maintain square without a fixture - it's just not practical to handle gadgets around the wood you're ripping.

I found trouble not with could i saw squarely any way needed in trials on short boards- of course you can, but rather if you're standing offset to an 8/4 board and you're on your 20th linear foot, what's happening in the cut and what is needed to correct. You want the squareness to be default when cutting vs. something you have to pay much attention to. As soon as you begin to steer to correct a short lapse, the cut and the saw below the cut go all over the place.

If you are standing astride a board facing the length and the size of the wood is considerable, you'll be leaning and you lose the visual of the saw. if you are standing facing the board, you are back from the board a little bit and you can see the tip of the saw the entire time, and that is a reference vs. the bench (it's no extra step, and nothing is dropped or forgotten).

It's also less tiring and easier to get equal hand use (and equal exhaustion both sides of the body).

That said, I'll probably prefer to sit as a default. a saw bench with a notch is good for this. if you are going to use a frame saw, some consideration needs to be had in terms of height, especially if you're using a handled frame saw as the handle sticking out of the opposite side is not a minor consideration. A 28" hand rip saw will probably get close to the floor in a typical notch and saw bench.

Why the preference? You are sitting on the board as a clamp - there's never any fixturing wood, nothing falls off of the cut, and by default, you are sawing right down your midline. Only careless steering will lead to a saw being vertical or starting to twist or something in the cut.

I prefer to make saw benches out of 2x12s rather than out of something nice. Slightly more than one hardware store 2x12x8 here will make an entire sawbench (perhaps add two 2x4 stringers, but on the floor rather than across the legs halfway up so that they are not touching the saw. That is, they are actually contacting the floor laying flat, not built along side the saw bench). the point of this aside from being able to make the saw bench in an hour is that dog holing the top for odd stuff, or accidentally overcutting into it is no big deal.

If a board is very long, all that's needed is something the same height, but the board will be cut from both ends toward the middle where the cuts meet, so it takes a long board to need something else. which for me is just a folding chair.

I'd encourage you to think of something you want to build and rip all of the wood on it. It is a far better experience and far less cumbersome and onerous than people suggest, and is engaging.

Also, rough dimensioning to a mark literally will eliminate the need to do anything to be good at joinery sawing. It's more difficult than joinery sawing, I guess, and you automatically go to cutting joints within a couple of projects and find that somehow cuts that seemed difficult are extremely easy.

update on the "trials" here.

I found a rip blade for a 3 foot frame saw that I made, and that rip blade is slightly finer tooth than my 2 1/3rd tooth per inch typical in the three and four foot saws. In fact, I don't know what a use for this second rip blade is and I know for sure that I really don't like the fine tooth rip blade I made for veneer at all - it would take two people to steer the saw.

So what does that mean? Nothing- except I don't feel like paying $50 with shipping for some .030 or .032 coil, and what I bought to put in the three foot resaw instead of .04 was .03 plate. i didn't remember doing this but I don't remember a lot of things. thanks to the calipers, I can confirm what I actually did though and suddenly any of the three plates for the 3 foot resaw are fair game.

So this middle one that's about 4 points (or three teeth per inch) becomes fodder to cut a blade out of a blade, so to speak. which I did.

And the first cut with it confirms the extra rigidity over the .024" stock or whatever was in the saw is helpful, as is the height (i made the blade 2" tall instead of about 1 1/2).

there is a limit to how much you want to put on a frame saw like this one - thankfully the arms are beech and so is the stretcher, so it isn't going just break, but unlike a frame saw where you'll just bend the wood and see it if you push things, the ends of the ece saws are unsupported and this is about as much strain as I want to put on this saw.

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short story long, what was initially a 2:45 cut is now down to 1:55 on the same wood, and I am by no means going fast because this is a muscle I have not exercised before and my shoulders are very sore on the fronts. it is not a straining exercise, it's a matter of neural development and technique, I think, along with a little bit of muscle. if you go from never ripping wood to ripping 20 feet one day and figuring things you, you'll feel the same.

If I rip 70 linear feet of 8/4 wood with a disston saw now, I am not sore the next day unless I'm stupid enough to do it without wearing a glove, which will lead to blister formation.

This will not be a sawing method for an older person who has COPD or something, though. you don't have to be fit at all to sit and saw with a disston saw, you can sit and rest and do whatever. the frame saw is more physically involved, but to be fair, it's very pleasant to use resawing but also that is something that will raise your heart rate and work the connecting muscles at your shoulders (think doing a pushup, but obviously less resistance - same muscles, though - you can switch narrower to wider grip to try to extend working time but eventually you will get tired and need to do something else for a little bit and then come back. the beauty of working entirely by hand is this is exactly how you'd do a project, though. You'd never rip everything, face everything in a separate step, etc, you do parts of a cabinet from end to end and then you never really notice the physical strain. If you try to rip 100 linear feet at once, you will be kaput for a while.

summarizing times
* disston 4 1/2 point rip - 2:45 (but the best accuracy and the most physical ease)
* initial cut with frame saw and "aggresivized" teeth on stock blade: 2:45
* Cut after ???? maybe four or five iterations - 2:30, but sneaky is the small difference - this cut is far more accurate than the one above. Still a random wander here or there that leads to some squirreliness but the first cut was just all of this, varying probably a solid 16th of an inch - completely unacceptable in day to day work, and correction leads to impact on squareness also, though it's not enormous, it's there.
* Installation of .030" shop made hand filed blade of 1095 - 2" tall - 3 1/2 tpi (just measured), 1:55. with not much additional experience, it may be possible to match the accuracy of the hand saw. Cut could be made faster if racing to make a single cut - maybe two feet a minute rate, but the shop session would be short if that were attempted

Sharpness and rake is about the same for all. I never allow a rip saw blade to get dull. it takes five minutes total to get the filing boards out and get a rip saw in a vise and go down the teeth with a file pass. It takes far longer to use a dull saw for even 20 or 30 linear feet.

one more follow up: 2:20 in the other side of the board (this is a junk board that's flatsawn and half sap).

the edges are more like all sap and the effect is obnoxious - grippy. I made one more cut because the prior board was starting to be much more heart wood in the cut.

the reality with hand tools is some stuff just works better than others. The reason I use cherry as a standard wood is partially because i like the way it looks, but also because if it's straight, it's a great wood to work by hand. for inexpensive woods here (woods 5 bucks a board foot and below in good quality), it's tops.

Woods like ash, beech and maple are less good looking in general in terms of furniture with some age. Beech looks really common, ash can look nice but the pores detract and maple really needs color to look good in older furniture styles, and it's a bung because of a "blunting" effect, meaning it doesn't allow tool penetration the way you'd expect for hits hardness. Beech and ash are almost the same, but beech especially is more amenable to chisels. The fact that it also wears a lot longer and doesn't transmit vibrations explains why we don't see a bunch of maple planes. Everything about beech is better for planes except availability.

Still, with the slower result in sap, the steering of the new blade is far better .

3 1/2 tpi with a 2" tall blade .030 is a good match, and my experimenting to get the saw set up to rip well is done. I will put the saw aside and use it later in the year when I build a couple of things.

Not much discussion so far on pull strokes for ripping.

For hand powered sawing I use forward or bi-directional strokes for crosscutting where I can get a good balanced stance. For ripping I prefer to cut with a pull stroke, which allows for a variety of stances, including sitting.

Depending on the stock, the cut can be made vertically, obliquely or horizontally.

For logs and beams the Japanese whale back style saw (Oga) with a its very deep back that keeps the ripping cut running straight and worked very well for that...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AbsoluteUni...hale_back_saw/



Oga oblique cut - Hokusai print.jpg

Oga oblique cut.jpg

Horizontal - standing & sitting

Oga - horizontal standing.jpg

Oga - horizontal sitting.jpg

Nowadays the chainsaw and mill bandsaw, which also work with a pull cut, have replaced that saw. I have one but only out of interest. For ripping logs and billets I use a long bar and specialised rip chain.

In the workshop I use the bandsaw for any ripping that needs to be done and, if the job doesn't fit on the bandsaw, otherwise I use one of the smaller hand pull saws with a rip tooth. Where I am doing that I hold the wood in all of the orientations shown above, which is determined by the length of the cut and width of the wood. If possible, I prefer to sit.

I've got a few hand made japanese saws and two maebiki. The trouble with the maebiki is the toothline is wide (heavy plate) and they need to have considerable set to prevent bind. The kerf is just big compared to western saws and the volume of cutting slows things down.

I think their aspects would be an advantage in semi wet wood. I'm not physically conditioned to be able to use the smaller toothed dedicated rip saws well enough. Stan c sent me a custom saw to try when I challenged a forum to find a japanese rip saw that could match a western saw in hardwoods. He had a pair made and the saw was good, but not faster than a disston (less fast for me but flip flopped for japanese carpenters in Japan, but Stan said he was also faster with a western saw).

Someone else tried it and bought it. It's a shame more resharpenable saws for hardwoods aren't imported, though. Stan's custom saw at cost was $750, but semi production saws could probably be made for what western boutique makers charge for a mission copy that isn't as good as a disston.

Originally Posted by D.W.

I've got a few hand made japanese saws and two maebiki. The trouble with the maebiki is the toothline is wide (heavy plate) and they need to have considerable set to prevent bind. The kerf is just big compared to western saws and the volume of cutting slows things down.

I think their aspects would be an advantage in semi wet wood.

Agreed, as Stan explains in the following article he wrote on them. They were primarily used for breaking down green logs into boards. He also covers their advantages over the western style pit and frame saws.

Japanese Handsaws: The Maebiki Ooga 前挽大鋸 – Covington & Sons Tools

The plate on mine are about the same as on my larger (5 & 6ft) western style crosscut saws at about 1.75mm tapering down to 1mm and with a little less set than on those, so the kerf is also a little less. I will often use my larger crosscut saws if I'm feeling in need of some exercise or prefer to avoid the noise from the chainsaws. But, other than having a go with them out of curiosity, I wouldn't bother to use the maebiki for ripping logs... just too much effort for my septuagenarian muscles!

BTW, most maebiki have the deep whale (Oogo) humpback for the advantages that provides in the way they are used, but not all do. I have a madonoko maebiki ('madonoko' translates as window, which refers to the deep gullets between the sets of teeth). This is similar to large western saws. Those are needed to hold the long curly shavings that the raker teeth make when rip cutting.

Madonoko Maibeki.jpg

This pattern isn't all that different to many larger western log handsaws. Here is an example on one of my saws...

Tooth set on 1-2 person saw - 2.jpg

They do make smaller versions of the madonoko for workshop use, but I have no idea how it would compete with a disston or framesaw using a repurposed bandsaw blade... The Big Monster Madonoko Saw | Craziest Hand Tool That Will Open Up Your Mind! - YouTube

Anyway, I raised the maebiki more to talk about sawing orientations than the maebiki themselves.

If I'm repurposing bandsaw blades for use in my framesaw I open up the gullets further with a dremel. They don't need to be as deep for crosscut work, which is what I use them for, but I find larger gullets make the going easier when doing deep cuts by hand.

Thanks, Neil. I appreciate the time you've taken to post. Stan's response to my challenge to find a Japanese rip saw that would match a disston in hardwood really opened my eyes. He had two bespoke saws made by a guy who will not make saws for most people and I gathered that the difference wasn't saws, but orientation. Which is what Stan found, that we could work the disstons faster but the Japanese guys the opposite.

But beyond that, the saws were understated works of art. Practically indestructible and instantly applicable to 8/4 hardwood.

I still want to use the maebiki, but I need to find a log. They were very inexpensive coming directly from Japan vs buying from a reseller here...$50 each on average. They will allow one man lumber sawing, which is what I like about them.

When I used the bespoke saw that Stan had made, the biggest hindrance was that I stood on the wood and wasn't in "pulling shape". My hamstrings and shoulders were on fire within a couple of minutes.

Going back up to the original drawing, the angle at which the workman is holding the saw is very similar to what I was taught for using a modern Western-pattern (that is, not Japanese) rip saw: about 60 degrees, measuring from a horizontal line.