Monthly Archives: September 2015

A pair of small bow saws… building a replacement

I had a small frame saw from sometime back (from Gramercy Tools), that I had rushed through a build on (trying to shape it with power sanders) that was never really pretty. It did however work 100% so for several years now I’ve used it. The fact these break down with the removal of the suspension string and blade make them easy to pack in the tool box, so it’s a lot easier than porting the frame saw I finished a few weeks back. And these are for cutting curves, that was for re-sawing wide boards, so – not really a comparison hey?

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Bottle opener without the lathe

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Opener on the left is sawn and carved. opener on the right is shaped on the lathe, but with non-square material. (I think it works, but I really need to measure and mark the material to do this!)

I’d picked up a couple of the bottle opener kits from Woodcraft a while back, and intended to turn some quick handles to make the openers available within the family parties. However, something occurred to me when working on the re-saw – how nice an easy “shaping” the wood for the handle was using just a rasp and spokeshave. And I started to think – what if I just wanted flat handle on the opener, rather than a fully round one?

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Building a ReSaw-Saw… from HTW semester 4

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So a couple years back Shannon Rogers covered the creation of the Roubo style resaw frame saw in semester 4. And I purchased the metal and blades at that time and they’ve been moved around quite a bit since then. I recently got a spot between some projects, and decided to go ahead and do the Roubo style 4′ long, 4″ wide large saw to see how I can make do. I have lots of 8/4 cherry stock and my oldest daughter has asked for some wall units that would benefit from some book matched components. I figured since most of the stalk “could” be done on a bandsaw I’m covered if this doesn’t work out, but in the mean time it’s sure fun to try out these techniques. I’m pretty impressed to find out some manual operations are a lot faster than power tool operations – setup for hand tools is pretty easy sometimes, and sometimes a simple operation setup on the power tool is not.