WHETHER OR NOT YOU DELVE DEEPER INTO A hand tool approach to woodworking and carpentry, there should still be a place in your kit for one or two handsaws. I suggest you try a pull saw of the ryoba type which gives you the benefit of two cutting edges, one with ripping teeth and the other with crosscut/universal teeth. There are some good buys out there but for my money the Vaughan/Bushnell brand of Bear saw is the real deal. Wow, what a good cutter! Hardwoods, pine, plywood, whatever, it just works smooth and fast. I use mine regularly for cutting dovetails by hand in the shop (on the rip side) and for tenon cheek cuts. I haven't found anything as good as this saw and if you could only carry ONE, this is the one (vaughan #250 bearsaw).
Close behind the vaughan pull saw is another saw that caught me by surprise-big time. Name a saw on the market with solid feel, carbon steel teeth that you can sharpen (as opposed to induction hardening which only sharpen with diamonds) and that is readily available nearly anywhere you go in the US. Additionally, the saw costs about 11 bucks. Yes, its a Kobalt back saw and it will surprise you as it did me after you file it once or twice.
1. clamp two strips of wood sandwiching the teeth in the middle and with about 1/4 inch above the boards. You have to support the flexible edge so you can file without undue vibration.2. File the teeth as shown in the Sellers video using an extra slim taper file which sells in most stores for under 5 bucks and lasts a long time.
3. Essentially, you want a passive tooth angle for the first little bit, say 2 inches worth of teeth. Then you lay the 3 sided file with one face aiming up and toward the front of the saw. If you think of a clock it would be about 2 o'clock. The idea is that you are making another face plumb to the teeth. If you enlarge the close up picture at right, you will see the rake angle on the teeth which is close to straight up and down on the leading cutting edge of each tooth
4. Now the easy part...as you file, just hold the file level with the floor, 90 degrees to the saw itself, Again, the file is crisscross to the saw any which way at a 90 degree angle. No funny tilt, and no "fleam" grind, no special angle, etc etc. After one or two filings, you have effectively turned every tooth (except the first little bit) into a mini chisel. The saw comes with "set" in the teeth. Set is the term for having a tooth slightly bent out past the plane of the steel side. The teeth alternate meaning every other tooth bends to the same side. Set in the teeth creates a kerf that is slightly wider than the saw itself and helps the saw not to bind in its own sawkerf. As in the Sellers video, I came back at the end of the process and very lightly peened the set flatter. This makes the saw (from what I could feel) more of a rip style cutter and slightly less of a crosscutter. That is, it rips very well and clean, but now it crosscuts less cleanly though still fairly well and fairly aggressive.
Now think about that last statement for a moment and let it absorb in your mind. The saw comes from the store labelled as a "miter back saw". If you think about it, it came with a split personality at best, and at worst, it means the saw wasn't really good at anything. In western tradition, a miter saw was a back saw (a saw with a metal "back" stiffener) meant to be used in a "miter box" at either right angle cuts or some angle up to 45. Depending on the quality of the saw, the care with which it was filed, and the user skill, the cut would be made with varying levels of smoothness and ease. File it a certain way, that is with angle or "fleam" and set the teeth out nicely, and the saw might make decent crosscuts, but probably would get more stubborn towards the miter or 45 cut. File the saw and lessen the set, as described above, and it gets more effective at the 45 cuts and ripping.
In my estimation, a back saw (called a tenon saw in the UK traditions) never was a good miter saw and never will be regardless of the filing and set. The finished cut always relied and still relies on the use of a miter shooting board to give a glass smooth finish needed to fit moldings and wood nicely together at mitered joints (at least in furniture grade work it does, and maybe a little less perfect in millwork jobs). So here is the main point of this discussion. What do you want your tenon (back) saw to do the most and do the best? If you are like me, you want it to be a good performer at tenon cheeks, dovetails, and angular cuts. Cuts I make at 90 are almost always someting I will do more work on such as dovetailing (and ultimately planing) tenoning, or perhaps will be hid in the assembly with other parts. If so, you want to follow the above summation of the Sellers method of sharpening a saw of this size and type. If you hand saw anything with regularity, then chances are you know the resulting cut surface is not done. You know you'll be making a swipe or two with a plane and cleaning up that cut edge surface. This is the essence of nice work in this category of cutting tasks. In reality, every cut is likely to have further work done on it, It's a matter of having smoothness where it does the most good or saves redundancy of effort.
In the machine world, it's no wonder guys have been clamoring after nicer cutting power miter saws.and smoother cutting blades for years. This has been driving the market for 30 years in the production carpentry world. When I started in the early '80s, it was quite something for the average carpenter to even own a power miterbox and it was usually something in the way of a 10 inch single bevel saw or perhaps he was bigtime and had a 14 inch saw like the old makita saw. I remember us using a block plane carried in our nail apron to clean up cuts when the cut was a hair off angle, or a hair rough. We made a swipe or two just freehand in midair on the joint and nailed the piece up. Very rarely did an architect or anyone else complain on the fit and finish of our millwork, so it must have been acceptable. I think they were as picky back then as they might be today.
I think you will be pleasantly surprised with this Kobalt back saw if you file it as described. It can cut acceptable dovetails depending on what you demand as a finish surface and your skill level with a saw. My saw has improved as a cutter with each successive sharpening. At some point, you may want a bit more set in the teeth and you'll need a saw set which you can buy new, or find cheap on ebay as I did. You may only have one or a few teeth that need straightened and the saw set comes in handy. All together, what if you have 11 bucks in the saw, 5 in a file, and 10 to 12 in the saw set? That's 28 bucks total and now you can make nice hand cuts for many years to come, When you get a back saw or any hand saw with "induction hardening" you have all the same issues I've described, and you can't do much about any of it unless you want to buy diamond files and other diamond cutters such a dremel wheels. If you try to bend set in a tooth, you may break the tooth since they are so hard they're brittle. Yes the saw stays sharp longer (well, really it stays in the state it is for longer which hopefully was sharp but not necessarily so!). After the saw then dulls, it is progressively less effective to use, and then is basically a throw away. That may be a good deal for some, but for me I'd much rather have something I can sharpen and maintain. I admit I might want a tough, cheap throw away for something nasty like laminate, but even then I would try hacksawing first, which I know from experience works well in the courser cut blades. (14-18 tpi)
In reality, the induction hardened hand saws make more sense to me for the softer woods like basic construction lumber (just don't saw into nails!) That way you maximize the value of the long tooth life, rather than smashing into something wicked like formica and synthetic materials that dramatically dull any saw and turn your induction tooth saw into a throw away. On a regular carbon steel toothed saw, you could in reality wear the teeth down to nothing and recut them again restoring the saw and almost getting a new tool. (Paul Sellers does this in one of his videos by filing all the teeth flat and cutting new ones and then sharpening them. He does the whole process in maybe 2 hours or less!) I carry a DeWalt hand saw for construction lumber type cutting and it does a great job and shows minimal signs of dulling.
I should also mention that the mitering and crosscutting function in moldings and finish wood is an area where Japanese pull saws really REALLY shine. Start with either the Vaughan or Shark brand and I can almost guarantee you'll love them. Here again, they end up being throw aways, but they cut so nice and so fast, there is nothing like them and it seems to be worth it. You can get replacement blades in most brands at lower cost than the whole saw, and the blades change out in seconds. I think for a field carpenter, away from the shop environment, Japanese saws are a must have item for finish work. Gosh, how many times have I marked cuts on finish product or a door trim and made the cuts free hand and I ended up with tight, SAAWEET looking miters or joints. No cords, no miterbox, no noise, no mess, just quick, clean and professional. Much of what I have written here is old news to some of you, but hopefully I threw in something of use to you.
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