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Of course it is true, the experts make fantastic tools. And yet there is something uniquely satisfying about making a tool yourself, especially one as subtly complicated as a handsaw. It affords you the opportunity to express yourself, to learn a lot, and to make something that is tailored precisely to your liking. That last part, though, the “tailoring” part, that requires a bit of understanding. Not just any old arrangement of saw parts will do. Research was a very important part of what I did. I read what I could find, like Holtzapffel and Grimshaw, and pretty much any website or article I could find that pertained to saws. And I consulted people who have already made saws. I wrote in to the Wood Central Hand Tool Forum and got some questions answered by the friendly people there—notably the professional saw maker Mike Wenzloff, Vlad Spehar of Spehar Toolworks, and Adam Cherubini. I also consulted the Norse Woodsmith web site, where Leif Hanson has documented how he made a batch of dovetail saws. I spent a lot of time sketching and mulling things over before I actually did anything.
Something I discovered early on was that the various design elements of a saw are like a puzzle in the way they interlock and influence each other. Some of it is kind of subtle. My saw plate, for instance, is on the thin side for a panel saw—.032”. I liked the idea of making the saw more delicate, as opposed to beefier, but in doing so I was concerned that a thinner plate might kink. So I thought about ways I could minimize the amount of force required to push the saw through the wood—I used very minimal set and kept the pitch relatively fine (11 tpi). The rake and fleam are then somewhere in the middle, 12 and 20 degrees respectively. And I haven’t had any problems—if anything I think the thin plate has resulted in a saw that cuts through boards surprisingly fast, not unlike having a thinner kerfed blade on your table saw. Making the saw required surprisingly few tools. I used a circular saw freehand with a cutoff blade to rough out my steel blank, and then I refined and cleaned up the cut edge with files. Using a circular saw for this job was a little harrowing and I wouldn’t recommend it. You could probably cut out the blank using a hacksaw, with the metal sandwiched between a couple thin pieces of wood for bearing surface. There was no step along the way that couldn’t have been done some other way.
For a handle I decided to use the basic outline of an old D-7 I’ve got that fits my hand just right, and to alter its decorative elements to my liking. The hang of the saw and the ergonomics of the handle were elements in the equation I chose to play around with maybe next time. I bandsawed out my handle and then shaped it with a rasp, and then with a little scraper I made from an old piece of a handsaw. I really dislike sanding, so the only sanding I did was a brief down and dirty session with 220. The scraper did most of the finishing work. I cut the slot for the blade with my bandsaw—its ¼” blade created the best fitting kerf for my saw plate. All of my other saws cut kerfs either too narrow or too wide. The placement of the nuts I simply did by eye, roughly thinking to put one high and one low, then situating them where I thought they looked nice and not misplaced. I did not use a third nut because I thought I would like to make a medallion sometime to put there. There are some requisite skills for making the medallion that I have yet to acquire. The nuts I used are homemade, mostly following the recipe detailed by Leif Hanson on his Norse Woodsmith website. It is basic drilling and tapping, and a little soldering, nothing to fret about if you haven’t done it before. To give them a nice finish I chucked them up in my drill press and gently let them spin against some 400 grit wet and dry paper. In the future I think I might like to try turning the screws from a single piece of brass rod instead of constructing them from two pieces. Now, the one operation for which I think a power tool was almost indispensable was the drilling of the holes to attach the handle to the blade. I love hand tools as much as anybody, but I probably would not try to do this operation with a brace, or even a handheld power drill, although if I had to pick I would probably choose the brace over the power drill—power drills can make mistakes so quickly. But in any case I’m sure people have done both and been successful.
When you decide to file in the teeth, you’ll want to be very careful on your first couple of passes so that you don’t create problems that you can’t fix by “pushing” teeth this way or that on your third and subsequent passes. I wasn’t as careful as I should have been the first time I did it and wound up having to start over. But after that, it is not much different than sharpening any other saw. For tooth spacing I initially used a ruler and a sharpie marker, but on my second time through I used an 11tpi cad page created by Leif and clamped it in my vice beside my blade. You could also use an existing saw as a template and clamp it beside your blank, but I didn’t have an 11tpi saw with which to do that.
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