Anyone got advice about old saws? Recently I was messing around with this:
Finally! A tool that doesn’t want to update it’s goddamn driver every ten minutes.
I’ve no idea how old it is, but I do know that it’s not sharp. I want to buy a new blade.
I’m well aware that the blade can be sharpened. There’s enough metal there for another 100 years. However, I know what’ll happen if I try to sharpen it. I’ll go down a three week voyage of discovery on how to sharpen old saws. I’ll wind up with a head full of all sorts of errata and buy 6 flat files and a custom raker gauge shipped from England. I’ll wind up doing research and freebasing old Foxfire books. It’ll never end.
I have to keep from going off track. (I’m well aware that using a wooden bow saw when I have a radial arm saw is already going off track but hand tools are cool!)
A new blade on the old frame is my proposed compromise with the modern world. Old saw, new blade, sounds like magic. How hard can it be? Anyone know where I can buy a new blade? Obviously, if it’s too expensive then a new blade is a deal killer. But one can hope. Also I hope it’s easy to pull the pins or rivets or whatever the hell is holding the blade. (I’m not yet clear on that.)
It’s super easy to do these things with a modern bow saw:
Incidentally, locally it’s almost cheaper to buy a new bow saw (which comes with a blade) than the blade itself. So I have a couple bow saws hanging around, tending to replace the whole saw because I need it in a hurry and why not spot an extra few bucks to get the whole shebang rather than just the blade? BUT… I’m too cheap to throw out the old frame which is perfectly good. So I just hang it up in the barn and think about other things. I’ll rectify that sooner or later. Online the bow saw is about $20 and the bow saw blade is about $10.
One more thing:
No matter how cheap you are, never mess with a dull box saw. It’s just too damn much work. There’s cheap and there’s stupid; cutting wood with a dull saw goes beyond stupid and descends into self torture.