Carcass saw


Mcdavid

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I am looking to add to my saw collection (dovetail, husky rip and vintage panel) and could use a carcass saw. The veritas is only $80 but then tack on shipping and it becomes nearly $100. Looking for more around $75 with shipping, less would be better. Does anyone have any suggestions? If it helps my dovetail is veritas too.

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If money is a worry you can buy a cheapo backsaw from the hardware store, rework the teeth and make a wooden handle for pretty cheap.

Otherwise LV has been doing free shipping promotions more frequently lately, just wait a bit.  They often have saws for the refurbished/seconds sale they have around cyber Monday.  My wife bought be their dovetail saw at such a sale and we couldn't actually find anything wrong with it when trying to figure out why it was a second. 

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11 hours ago, prov163 said:

You might be able to find a used saw on eBay and restore it.  Get in contact with James Wright who's a member of this forum. He's helped me out with saws. Good guy. 

A lot of people talk about resharpening saws, having never done it, that sounds like an awful lot of work. Does it require some special tools? hand filing all those teeth, even if it only takes a few strokes each still seems tedious. Is it easier than I'm thinking?

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Eh that's no more sensible than sending out your plane irons, unless you just don't have the time to learn.  You'd have finished sharpening in the time it'd take to pack the saw and drive to the post office, and get a second saw done in the time it took to drive home.

His site seems to be down at the moment but Blackburn tools has what I think is the most helpful articles on saw sharpening and tooth geometry. 

Like freehand sharpening a chisel, the first time takes a while, but once you get it down it is faster than anything else. 

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I don't buy it.  I've never tried sharpening my saws so I'm definitely not speaking from experience, but from what I've seen, sharpening saws takes vastly more both TIME and SKILL than sharpening a plane iron or a chisel.  Any monkey can do that.  To sharpen a saw you have to have a lot more knowledge.  And then there's all those little teeth.  I'm falling asleep just thinking about the tedious task.

Anyway, you know what they say about skinning cats.  You go ahead and spend your time on that, and I'll keep working on this here project...and wasting my life on the forum. :D

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I've sharpened a saw once just to see if I could do it.  Without a proper vise it took maybe a half hour to do a rip saw.  I haven't tried a crosscut saw yet as I don't have one to practice on.  If the teeth are in decent shape it generally takes just a couple of strokes on each one.  The saw I did had enough set to not need more after one sharpening, although a saw set is something I would like to add to my collection. 

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I agree with Eric, at least at this point of my woodworking development.  I would rather pay someone to do it with excellence than to do it "pretty well" myself.  Someday I may want to learn about fleam, but it ain't now :)

Again, contact James Wright through the forum.  I bought one saw from him and just sent him an old Disston #7 I was given and he's sharpening and resetting it for me.  Or send it to Eric and he'll send it to Lie-Nielsen for you :)

 

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14 hours ago, C Shaffer said:

I fear the learning curve. That puts it as a separate hobby. Likely it's doable. I'm cheap enough I'll try it. I have no doubt it will cost me as much time as paying for someone else to do it. How many reps before that flips?

I had a few dull backsaws that were my grandfather's.  After reading the stuff at Blackburn Tools I bought a saw set (The Stanley 42X is popular on eBay and therefor expensive, the Eclipse style ones like Lee Valley sells are cheaper and just as good; vintage are bronze, new are aluminum) .  For the backsaws I didn't even build a saw vise, I just used some jaw protectors on a machinist vise.  I got a few cheap taper saw files at the hardware store, file according to the materials I'd read (you could, for example, look up a saw on Bad Axe and use the same angles on a $5 backsaw from the big box and it'll cut just as well... maybe just dull faster if the steel is worse).  Chalk the file, sharpie the teeth and get going.  First saw took two passes to be sharp.  The second saw took two passes before I decided to switch it to rip and then that just took two more.  I then bought some vintage hand saws for a few dollars at a garage sale and they were a little more work due to condition but not any more than fettling a neglected plane.

 

Not knowing what you're doing works well enough because any variability in the teeth makes it cut more fluidly:  like why a hand stitched rasp is smooth to use. 

 

Cost in time is hard to decide... is it worth 20 minutes to have the saw back in action versus gone for a week in the mail?  Maybe, but if you're only woodworking on the weekend anyhow, maybe it cuts into shop time less to hire it out.  I fit my hand tool sharpening in on weekday evenings when I don't actually have time to get in on a project. 

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  • 3 weeks later...
33 minutes ago, Mcdavid said:

Thanks for all the advice! I think I'm going to go with the veritas. A bit cheaper and matches. I am learning how to sharpen saw teeth but it seems to take me a while.

 

On 9/21/2016 at 11:27 AM, Isaac Gaetz said:

A lot of people talk about resharpening saws, having never done it, that sounds like an awful lot of work. Does it require some special tools? hand filing all those teeth, even if it only takes a few strokes each still seems tedious. Is it easier than I'm thinking?

I think it depends on how much you want to learn, and how much you care about what you do!

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