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Most tools made of metal are marked with the name of the maker, a practice noted on saws from the 17th century: in the 1660’s George Sitwell, the Renishaw ironmaker had saws made for him at a forge in nearby Pleasley, marked with the names of his contracted sawmakers and then sent to London for local sale and export to Barbados. Some did not sell well, and were returned to London, rusty after months at sea, so Sitwell asked his London agents to clean them up and try again, concealing as well as possible their somewhat shop-soiled nature: do business methods ever change? These marks would have been struck on the saws with a punch that had been specially made, probably by a dedicated mark-maker; as marks had been applied to metal goods from the Middle Ages , this trade would almost certainly have flourished wherever metalworkers were present in considerable numbers, especially in London, Birmingham and Sheffield. Punching a mark onto sawplate had its drawbacks. It was done early in the manufacturing process, after the metal had been pared to shape and the teeth cut, and when it was still in its annealed, comparatively soft state. The thin plate, which until the 20th century was rolled hot from an ingot, was easily deformed and needed to be ground and smithed to remove the deformities and put in the tension that kept it straight; the punched mark created an additional deformity and removing this took additional time. In all manufacturing time is money, and when piecework rates were the norm it was the saw grinders and smithers who were losing the time and the money. Incidentally, one reason for the difficulty in reading marks on saws, apart from rusting, is that if the mark was struck slightly unevenly, the subsequent grinding would differentially remove the steel round the mark and make some of the letters hard to read. Another way of marking metal – etching with acid - became common in
the 19th century, and recent work in the Archives of the Sheffield
City Libraries enables us to document its progress. Amongst the vast
collections of business records in these Archives are the records of
the printing and engraving firm of James Bagshaw , which started in
1841 to produce printed transfers for marking metal,
finally going out of business in 1971, when, according to a note in
the Archives’ index, the materials for the process could no longer
be obtained. The process is not difficult, but must have seemed very complicated compared to a quick blow on a steel mark. First, a steel plate was made with the design engraved on it, and from this the special transfers were printed. The sawplate was cleaned and dried, and the tacky transfer pressed on. The backing was removed with a damp sponge, and the transfer wiped over till dry; a protective varnish (Brunswick Black was suggested) was painted round the edge and allowed to dry. The acid – different for different metals – was applied for 2-3 minutes, eating into the metal in the required areas but being prevented from doing so by the resist in the black parts; it was killed with whiting (chalk) or lime mixed thin with water, wiped over with a rag, cleaned off with paraffin and finally cleaned again with dry whiting or lime. There are several reasons why acid etching should have become popular, especially in the saw trade:
The earliest Bagshaw cashbooks show a very miscellaneous trade, mainly in one-off engraving – silver and plate, knives, flatware, dogcollars, coffin plates, letter boxes and so on. The first dated entry (some of the earliest are not dated) for a sawmaker is May 23 1849, for Marshes and Shepherd, and is quickly followed by plates made for Spear and Jackson; Hoole, Staniforth and Gray; W and S Butcher; and, in April 1850, for Taylor Brothers. The last name is the most significant in this context because they became Bagshaw’s largest customer by far, by 1887 meriting their own cashbook and in the 12 months up to November 1868 ordering no fewer than 6307 dozen ( 75684 for those of you without a calculator) transfers at a cost of between 3d and 10d per dozen. Although some saws would have had more than one transfer applied , most did not, and this enormous figure gives some idea of the vast numbers of saws the Sheffield industry was turning out at its peak. In fact these numbers seem to be the only ones so far noted that tell us anything about production amounts until the Board of Trade started its Census of Production in 1907.
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