Adaptive Curmudgeon

I said I didn’t want to go down the rabbit hole. Yet here I am.

I’ve ordered a 30″ bowsaw blade from Amazon (link).
It’s not what I wanted but it’s cheap and it’s what I can find. I’m reasonably sure it’ll work even if it looks less than cool. I’ll keep the more massive old blade until I can get it sharpened and in the meantime consider the saw “sporterized”.

There will be an after action report once Amazon delivers and I test the saw.

I started wondering about the age of this critter. I suspect chainsaws are what put bucksaws in the retirement home. Chainsaws got serious maybe sometime around WW2? So that indicates bucksaws went full Betamax around 70 years ago? (It’s just a guess.)

As an antique it’s worth jack shit. People hang ’em on walls in restaurants and stuff and it’s worth well under $50 as a wall hanger. Nobody gets worried about “provenance” if it’s just a decoration. Thus, I don’t know how old it is.

I did find this:

The Saw In History says “Fig. 22 shows an excellent type of this saw [bucksaw] in it’s modern form.” I take “modern” to mean “when the book was published” and that’s 1916. Mine isn’t exactly the same. I’m sure I’ve got the Walmart version that’s a little planer and it’s possibly slightly newer. Nevertheless it looks like 102 year old technology. Cool.

I’m all for preserving at least the knowledge of, and ability to use, old things. Hmm…. suddenly I feel like shooting some of my older rifles. No! What am I saying? Time to bring out one of my muzzleloaders and blast away at the 80 yard target (an old barrel). I’m sure the saw will approve.

Adaptive “Rabbit Hole” Curmudgeon

I wanted to add that I did a few (mostly informal) lumberjack competitions and they’re great fun. You know how it is. You’re 19, bulletproof, and inclined to whip that saw like you’re out to destroy all who oppose you. What a hoot! It was like this kid (source), but bigger, hairier, booted, bearded, and… OK fine I didn’t look anything like this kid. 

One thing I discovered is that a two man saw will seriously jack you up; especially if you were cutting wood like a rabid weasel. (And why wouldn’t you be cutting like a maniac? Is it not competition?) The next day I’d wake up with aches and pains the likes of which people should write an opera. Plus there was a hangover. There was always a hangover. Eventually I drifted to a competition where I seemed to do better with damn near no work; axe throwing. In my opinion, everyone should wail on a two man saw with an equally rabid partner at least once in life.  But then get over it and maybe chuck polearms or something.

I love me some hand tools but I’m in a different era of life where I want to efficiently cut shit without going into testosterone overload. Therefore I salute this dude, who’s old but wearing a kilt and still cutting wood. If you can wear a kilt non-ironically you’re clearly badass (link to source):

I’m calling him an official badass.

While searching about two man crosscut saws I stumbled across this:

Lindsay Daun competes in the Jack and Jill Double Buck competition with her partner Dave Jewett (not pictured). The two won the event with a time of a 7.18 seconds. The Jack and Jill contest consists of a man and a woman and the first team to saw through the 20-inch white pine log wins.
Photo by Ackerman + Gruber

Seven seconds for a 20 inch white pine. Not bad.

I also found this:

You know you’re turned on. Admit it!

Isn’t that the most American photo you’ve seen? A two stroke, rediculously overpowered, human monster truck of awesome that’s also feminine and bad ass. A few days ago I was posting about the cute Korean curling skip with the owl glasses. I’m pretty sure the chainsaw girl above would kill and eat curling lass for breakfast. Yee haw! I haven’t been to a lumberjack competition in years. Maybe I need to get out more?

I’ve been busy and haven’t bought (or built) any saw parts yet but I did find this photo. It’s a two man crosscut saw:

This is a giant Frankenstein’s Monster scale version of my little buck saw. As you can see, it’s not like a regular handsaw. The cutters are in pairs, one cuts the wood fiber on the right of the kerf, the other cuts the fiber on the left of the kerf. Like two little knives that slice the wood but don’t remove it. Then the rakers come along. Those are the v shaped things. The pointy end of the raker, whichever one is moving forward, chisels out the already separated wood fiber. The very very deep gullet gives space for the resulting sawdust to ride all the way to the edge of the log without gumming things up. The cutter teeth and rakers work identically on the pull and the push stroke. It’s a bi-directional saw.

A normal handsaw has teeth like image. (I have no idea where this image came from, it just emerged from GoDuckGo image search… if it’s your image please tell me.) These teeth only cut one way:

Because nothing in life is simple, there are a few old timey saws that cut like the two man saw above. Check out this bad boy:

Holy shit! It’s sawzilla!

By the way, there’s a dude who’s selling that saw. I don’t know anything about his business other than he has several variants of sawzilla and thus he’s cool.

I got a lot of good advice about just using a replacement bow saw blade. Either that or using a bandsaw blade and cutting to length. (Bonus points on that last one for being super adaptive!) Since I’m kinda’ digging the idea of restoring this saw I did some checking myself. Here are some more details.

#1: It’s a bucksaw. When I search on DuckDuckGo “bucksaw” turns up a zillion photos of exactly what I have. (You’re not searching on Google are you? You gotta’ watch out for Google. They’re evil motherfuckers… I’m just sayin.) Lots of people use bowsaw and bucksaw interchangeably but for my purposes if it’s old and wood and looks like a pioneer would use it, then it’s a bucksaw. If it’s not old, not wood, and a pioneer would throw his heavy bucksaw in a lake as soon as he got his hands on this lighter modern device, it’s a bowsaw.

#2: It’s way thicker than a bowsaw. I’m talking here of thickness of the blade, not merely length.

#3 I estimate it’s 1 7/8″ thick. A regular bowsaw is a lot thinner. Though I suppose there’s no reason the thinner bowsaw blade won’t work as well as the thicker bucksaw blade. The only thing doing work are the teeth. The only drawback is that it won’t look right. 

#4 Lengthwise I estimate it’s 29 1/4″ from “pin to pin”. I still haven’t figured out how to remove and replace those pins. On the one hand I don’t want to totally trash the cool old saw. On the other hand I want a working object and not a wall hanger. If I wind up with wingnuts and a bolt I’ll just have to face what I’ve done. (I’m no wimp about messing with old stuff so long as it’s cheap. Don’t ask what I’ve done to some old Mosin Nagants.)

#5 I’m not sure but I don’t think bandsaw blades will do. The bucksaw has cutter teeth and rakers. The bandsaw has no rakers. I think for human powered cutting, I need rakers to get the sawdust out of the kerf. (Also, either the photo sucks of my bandsaw totally needs a new blade too.)

#6 I’m starting to decode the cutter teeth count. My old bucksaw has 2 cutter teeth between each raker. My modern (cheapo) bowsaw has 4 cutter teeth between rakers. This bowsaw blade is $11 and 4 cutters per raker. It says it’s for green wood: 

Thus I suspect 2 cutters/raker is for dry and 4 cutters/raker is for green.

#7 Update: SHIT! This example has no rakers and it says it’s for dry wood. My raker theory is shot to hell. (It’s still $11. At least things aren’t getting too expensive yet.)

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:
And even a monkey like me can replace the blade:

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.