Thread: The troubles of the back saw slot.

The troubles of the back saw slot.

One of the most difficult areas I find, an I don’t think I stand alone hear.
Is making a neat tidy mortise for the back to slide neatly ,but tightly into a Saw handle.
It’s a tricky one, your working on material generally any wear between 20/23 mm thick.
You need the mortise to be dead centre in your Saw handle and parallel to the sides of the handle,it needs to be approximately 30 mm long 10/15 mm deep.
(All above measures pulled from thin air lol)
This is traditional done by just either sawing your walls as much as possible before hitting the back of the slot, then chiseling out the waste with a small chisel.

Problem I find is ,making sure the top of mortise the area were the spline sits proud or flush ,depending on how your making your saw ,can look average if it’s a bit crumbly or your not exactly square.

So ,this has been something that has caused me many minutes of lost sleep.

An till now.
I present too you my fine friends an enemies.
The saw handle holding vice thingy Mk1(Don’t buy Mk 1 ever there always WIP)


The vice is your standard couple of bits of 32 mm MDF made into a couple of large L sections, but the critical point on these is ,the tops must be square and parallel till each other.

Now , I think I’ve hit the gold mark,
While spending an evening window shopping on the net one night, I finally came across a long metal end milling cutter
6 mm by 100 mm long .
And 6 mm is a fraction narrower then a 1/4 inch(0.23)


So ,if I fitted the milling cutter into my trim router(it snugged up nice an tight with the collet)an made a simple centring attachment
I could route out the slot [emoji41][emoji41][emoji41].

Now ,the reason I needed a long bit was ,due to the distance from the top of the vice jaws to the bottom of the mortace.

Remembering on most traditional back saws ,
there is a funny hook thingy above your mortise slot[emoji85] (sorry I should have measured that [emoji849])
So with no further to do I asked Sal if she would like to be the first person to use my new crazy gizmo, I took a few dozen steps back for safety,
No ok I did it, an the first try was dismal it had a step on the side,

So I chucked the first bit of timber in the bin an tried again,yes success an as they say a pic is worth a thousand camels[emoji849].


An just a few more pics for prof of concept an using my other soon to be finished saw and it’s back,



My apologies that I should have taken some better shots showing the router in place extra.[emoji85][emoji849]

So I think I may have over come, one of my own little personal problems in live, I’m quite chuffed with this.


Cheers Matt,
I may paint it RED next weekend so that it works faster.