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Like many of you, I am extremely interested in what the craftsmen of centuries past understood about tools and built into them. I tend to be more artistic than scholarly, though, so the things I learn tend to get assimilated and reemerge in a form that usually is not an exact replica of what I learned. Once I felt comfortable that I would have a functionally sound saw, I started thinking about the saw’s appearance. I really love the clean lines and look of the old 18th century saws, like those found in the Seaton chest, so I opted to go with a similar blade shape, only with no nib. I altered the D-7 design of the handle as I described earlier, and then I turned my attention to doing some etching. Etching Etching was a surprisingly difficult topic to find much how-to information on. In fact, researching etching was a task just about as big as researching saw design in general. Leif has some good information on his site, but what I had in mind to do was a little different. I wanted to freehand my design right onto the saw. One of the best sources of information I found were various books, websites, and forums devoted to the ancient craft of armoring. Those guys do some of the most exquisite metal work I have ever seen.
For an acid resist I used Rustoleum spray primer, and for an etchant I used ferric chloride. Be careful with ferric chloride, as it is nasty and does not readily evaporate. If you flick droplets of it around you will find them much later right where they landed, or you’ll wind up tracking them elsewhere. It took a fair amount of experimentation with pieces of scrap to find a resist that worked reliably without lifting off at all in the ferric chloride. I made a stylus by simply rounding off the tip of a 1/8” steel rod and drew my design into the dried resist. The inspiration for my design largely came from woodcarving. I enjoy carving flowers, ribbons, and acanthus leaves. The musical notes were inspired by details from some Grinling Gibbons carvings. I intended them as symbols of creativity caught in a kind of creative wind blowing out of the saw handle.
So that is it. Put it all
together and take it for a test drive. My saw pulled to
the right just a tad at first, so I lightly stoned the teeth on
that side, and now it tracks a line just fine. Making your own saw is a little bit like being handed a piece of paper and being asked to draw something you thought you were already familiar with. It forces you to go back and look more closely, a lot more closely, at this tool you use all of the time and perhaps even—gasp—collect. When we reach the point where we can use a saw with some degree of skill, I think it is fairly natural to assume that our success is due solely to our increase in skill. It is easy to overlook the role played by the saw itself—it has been hanging there on the wall with all of this understanding built into it just like any other machine or piece of technology, only this machine requires more from you than the pushbutton sorts of devices we have become accustomed to in our day and age. This machine has no moving parts—or, more precisely, you are its moving parts. You are the other half of the machine. So perhaps not surprisingly, building a saw from scratch made me feel as though I had caught a glimpse of this whole other side of woodworking that had been hiding in plain view, right here in my shop. Andrew Lunn January, 2007
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