My Journey Into Hand Saw Restoration (lots of pictures)

[Cory Waldrop]

This thread is about my journey into hand saw restoration. I have a couple of LN joinery saws but was looking for something more aggressive to compliment what I already have. I live in an apartment and do not have much room for a lot of big tools so a smaller panel saw was ideal for me. I love looking at hand saw restoration threads and am constantly amazed at some of the saw makers on here and the beautiful handles they create for themselves and their lucky customers. I wanted to try making something a fraction as nice to learn how to do it and to have something made by me that I can hopefully use for years.

A little while later I was perusing my Grandpa's tool lair sifting through the rusty metal things, the old blacksmith forge, the old brace and bits, when I remembered that he used to have an old saw hanging on his wall that was about the size of what I was looking for. I looked around and found the saw and sure enough it was about a 16-19" small panel saw with about 10 TPI. It was in good enough shape to restore and put back to good use so I took it home excited to have the project I wanted, and more importantly something of my Grandpa's that I could put into my arsenal and use for many years to come (providing I didn't screw it up).

Disclaimer: This thread will have A LOT of pictures. The purpose is not only to chronicle my progress, but also to show others of how I did things so that maybe they can learn how to do it and how not to do it. This is all a learning experience for me and my first shot at doing something like this. It has been a blast and I hope to do more in the future. I took all photos with my phone so some are slightly blurry. I also noticed that there are far too many pictures with my ugly feet in the background. I realize that some people are going to be put off by the number of pictures, as well as my feet. I hope it doesn't drive too many people off lol. With a few apologies out of the way, let us dive into it.

Here is the saw as I received (yoinked) it:

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As you can see it has a layer of rust, but still can be whipped into fighting shape. It was missing a saw nut and the handle had some cracks and a broken horn. I had already planned on making a handle from scratch so this was not a problem. The handle was a bit small for my hand, but I figured I could adjust the shape of the horns a little and it would really make a difference to how it feels.

The first order of business was to give it a soak in evaporust. I used a planter box lined with a trash bag. It worked out pretty well as you can see.

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I did not get pictures of it, but after I let it soak over night, I took some abrasives to it to hopefully get to the etching to see what kind of saw I had. I was able to make out the etching and was puzzled as I had never heard of it before. So after a little internet searching, I realized that this one wasn't a run of the mill saw. It had an interesting background that I didn't expect.

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It is my understanding that this saw was made for the "Buddy L" company as part of a tool chest collection made for kids. This threw me off because there is nothing about this saw that screams "kids toy". Come to find out, this saw was most likely made for the Buddy L company by Disston or one of the other major saw makers of the time. I know that complete sets are worth some money to collectors, but a lone piece like this isn't worth a lot. I thought it was cool that this saw was kind of unique in its history. This got me even more pumped up about the project.

[Richard Wolgemuth]

Thanks for sharing. I recently had the joy of the stamp/marking discovery. A buddy brought me what looked like a homemade machete and asked if I could clean it up (he knew I did the electrolysis thing). He had found it in the yard of his mothers place when they were cleaning it up and had actually run over it with the lawn mower. I cleaned it up and found it was marked Disston and Sons, who would have guessed. I have recently picked up some hand saws and I am about to begin my own journey of restoration, so thanks for the pictures.

[Cory Waldrop]

I had very limited supplies for saw maintenance so I looked toward Lee Valley for the answer. I purchased a couple of saw files, a jointer jig, the awesome handsaw file holder, two saw sets, a bastard mill file, a couple of handles, and the saw file holder. I know the jointer jig and file holder are luxuries, but I had heard great things about them and thought they would be very useful to a newbie like myself to get the best results my first time.... hopefully.

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I started working on the saw plate as I did not yet have the proper stock for the replacement saw handle. I worked on a makeshift saw vise and this is what I came up with.

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A slot cut in a 2x4 to fit the plate clamped in a vise. It worked well enough for my purposes. You can see the condition of the saw plate after sanding and cleaning. Looks pretty good.

I then set out to sharpening. After some research and watching videos I remembered.... Joint, Shape, Set, Sharpen...

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This saw did not really require jointing, but I did it anyway to learn the process. I used a fat felt tip permanent marker to mark the teeth to better see which teeth had been sharpened. It took several strokes to get the teeth filed down to nearly sharp before setting and final sharpening.

After a few afternoons of messing with it, I came up with what I felt was a reasonably sharp blade with the teeth all looking about the same.

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I love how freshly sharpened teeth look. The geometry of a cross-cut saw is petty neat. Basically lots of tiny knife points.

Next I moved on to the handle.....

[Cory Waldrop]

As I said before, I decided to re-use the handle design with a few tweaks to the horns to better fit my hands. I didn't have any stock in the 7/8th's range so I reached out to creekers to see if anyone had any extra cherry, maple, or walnut they could send me. After only a couple of hours, I had 3 people offer to send me blanks for free or for just shipping. I graciously took them up on the offer and waited patiently as my presents arrived. I looked over the stock to figure out what I wanted to use. I had a piece of lightly curled maple that looked great, and I love walnut so maybe that..... but this cherry looks really good too..... ARGHHHHHH decisions. I didn't worry about the stock being quarter sawn too much, I just wanted something with character that had the grain going what I felt was the right way on the handle. All of the stock was rough so I picked a few boards and grabbed my scrub plane (a heavily cambered #5) and jack plane and went to town to see what I really had to work with. After flattening about 3 boards, I decided that I was going to go with a piece of cherry that had some sap wood that I thought looked really good and would compliment the design.

Here is the process:

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I used the scrub across the grain to do the initial heavy stock removal and initial flatness. After flattening one side, I used a marking gauge to mark a line just fat of 7/8". I darkened the lines with pencil and planed bevels on both sides that met with my marked line. After that, it was a matter of using the scrub plane to traverse cross-grain to bring the middle down to where the bevels met the scribe line. Stop just shy of the line and finish with the grain using the jack plane for a nice surface with no tearout. Then sit back and admire it. There were some worm holes and dark mineral lines as well as sap wood. Some call them defects, I call them character and worthy of being shown off in a project like this.

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For the handle pattern, I traced around the handle with pencil on a piece of printer paper. I cleaned up the curves and then used spray adhesive to temporarily tack the paper to the board in the orientation I wanted. I then used a sharp knife to lightly cut through the paper and into the board on the lines I traced. I filled in the light knife lines with pencil lead to darken them a bit. After that, I used a compass and approximated the diameters of all the curves in the handle design. I chose the closest diameter to the available forestner bits I had on hand. I drew them into the wood for good measure and to find the center point to help locate the spur of the drill bit.

Next on to drilling the holes........

[Cory Waldrop]

This is the time I wish I had room for a drill press and band saw. Unfortunately I do not have either so I will have to make due to more "primative" measures. To drill the holes, I used one of those vertical manual drill press guides and my cordless drill. I tried to set it up as square as possible, but there is always some degree of it being off a little here and there. No matter, I will clean everything up later if it isn't perfectly square. Besides, who is going to know anyway?

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You can see that the little "drill press" did a good enough job. I did use a backer board to help prevent tearout, but you can see that on one hole I had the work piece oriented over an area that had already been drill into a little so it tore out some. No matter, this is going to be rounded over anyway so it will be filed away and you will never know.

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I then used the saw plate and marked where the holes were located and also practiced drilling for the saw nuts. It took a few times to get an acceptable result. The key is the order of drilling operations. I have already forgotten the way I did them, but there is information on the web on how to do it if anyone needs to know. Using a drill press for this is soooooooooo much better than using the crappy manual drill press I have. But I got it done and it didn't turn out too bad.

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Earlier I had chucked the saw nut and medallion into my cordless drill and used fine sandpaper and a little flitz metal polish on a paper towel to clean and polish. You can see the before and after. Looks almost like new other than the scratches and dings lol. The medallion is a "Warranted Superior" logo. I think it might have been made by Disston. If anyone knows more about this stuff, I would love to hear about it.

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Here you can see that I have cut the slot into the handle blank and drilled and fit the top saw nut already. This picture shows that with the top saw nut installed, the bottom hole lines up perfectly. YES! SUCCESS!!!!

I wish I took pictures of cutting the slot for the saw plate. This was one of the more stressful tasks for me to do. I ended up using a marking gauge to mark the center of the blank on all sides that will be cut. Notice I left the blank oversized for this operation so I could cut and plane off all marks after the slot was cut for a nice finish. I used a combination of my joinery saws as well as a couple of other cheap saws I had accumulated over the years from the BORG to make the slot. The trick was to start the cut on all sides turning the blank mid way to cancel out any inaccuracies in my sawing technique. Eventually I ended up with a kerf on all sides and then connected the kerfs to saw out the middle. I would then stop short of where I thought the slot should end, insert the saw plate to check my progress, and saw more as necessary. As you can see below, the saw plate is not perfectly straight, but it is close enough for me.

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[Cory Waldrop]

Here I will show more about the process I used to cut the recess for the saw nuts and medallion.

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I first drilled the relief hole for the threaded shank of the medallion or saw nut. I insert the nut and clamped it tight so it would mark the wood where the OD would be. I then used a mixture of a carving chisel with the correct sweep (or close enough) and a small dremel router to excavate the waste. Finally you get a recessed saw nut/medallion. Be careful when using a small trim router or something similar that you do not cut too far. As you can see from the last picture, there is a tiny gap at the top of the medallion where I went a little too far. I am not worried about it too much, but I wish I were more careful. It is better to undercut and sneak up on it than go too far. The most important thing as you can see is that with the top saw nut and medallion installed, the final hole lines up!!!!! I did a little happy dance.

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Next I cut the saw handle to rough shape with a jigsaw. A bandsaw would be ideal here but I used what I had. Just stay away from the lines and clean it up later with hand tools to be safe. I quickly installed the handle back on the saw plate to see it finally take shape and look like a real hand saw. Now was a good time to test my sharpening job and the fit in my hand and test cut a few boards. I don't know the proper way to check for drift in a saw cut, so I just marked a square line and went to sawing to see what I got. It appears I was able to cut to the line well so I will call it good. I decided to open up the top horn a little because it was digging into the top of my hand and was really the only thing that I did not like about how the handle felt. I drew in a new line to cut to later.

[Cory Waldrop]

Now on to another aspect of the project I was worried about. Shaping the handle. I used a mixture of sandpaper, chisels, rasps and files, and a card scraper to smooth the curves on the handle. I am not really good at this part so it took me quite a while of working some evenings doing a little at a time.

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A card scraper works really well as it can be used against the grain direction too with good results. Just keep it sharp and adjust the pressure you use for best results. I used a compass to draw in the curve of the horns on the handle. I drew lines a little to either side of the center line and struck an ark on each line. This means the ark is not perfectly a semi-circle but has a little flat in the center. I got this idea from Isaac's blog (Blackburn Tools) about making a saw handle and it turned out well. A rasp made short work of shaping the curve.

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I borrowed another technique from Isaac to aid in the layout and execution of shaping the handle recess and back of the grip. I penciled in the lines on each face where I wanted to curve of the handle and finger recess to stop. I also divided the back and inside into 4ths for reasons you will see later.

[Cory Waldrop]

Hope you enjoyed the pictures of my legs and feet in the last post. You're welcome . That will not be the last you see of them.

Now on to the shaping of the handle curves. Isaac advocated using a systematic approach to creating the curves and I found it to be a great way to increase my chances of making the curves symmetrical. Basically breaking down a complicated process into simple steps.

Step 1 was to draw in the lines that I posted before this.

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Step 2 is to use an aggressive rasp to bevel and connect the line drawn on the face to the outside line drawn on the back. Do this for each side.

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Step 3 is to draw in a new line at the halfway point of the first bevel you just created. Then you file a bevel to connect the center line of the handle to the new center line you just drew.

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You end up with something like this. It is a faceted surface but it gives a very pleasing shape that is fairly easy to smooth out and stay symmetrical.


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Step 4 is to use files/rasps/sandpaper/scrapers to smooth the curve for the final shape. I used marker to mark the face and sanded until the marker was gone. I would caution the use of a sharpie marker to do this. Pencil may be best as a sharpie can soak into the end grain fibers and cause you to have to sand more than you want just to get the marks out. Lesson learned. As with any sanding progression, make sure to use the proper grit for the proper application. Basically you want to use your coarser grits until you remove all marks, and then use finger grits to remove the scratches of the coarse grits. It is easy to move on to finger grits before really being done with coarse grit stuff. Also a lesson learned. Eventually you will end up with a very nice shaped curve.

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Step 5 is to repeat Step 4 for the finger recess. This one I found to be more difficult because of the irregular shape. I used a set of riffler files I got on amazon pretty cheap for the initial rough process. Be careful using something so rough so you do not tear a big chunk of wood out. Do not press too hard and test it on scraps if you need to in order to become comfortable using it. The better quality files cut finer and may be worth the investment if I decide to do more of these.

[george wilson]

Your saw teeth look o.k.,but it's hard to tell from pictures not taken from the side view,and closer up. In one picture,the teeth closest to the camera look o.k.,but those farther away look like "peg teeth". Peg teeth look like pyramids,where the slope of the teeth is equal on the front and rear of the teeth. They do not cut well in either direction. It could be the angle of the picture,though.

In another view,it looks like "long tooth,short tooth" syndrome,where every other tooth is short,or seems that way. To avoid this effect,hold the file perfectly horizontal instead of sloping it uphill. Actually,the tips of all the teeth are the same height. The slop does make it look like every other tooth is shorter. BUT,it could be the picture,again,with the light reflecting back only from the flatter surfaces of the teeth,and not from the filed surfaces that are receding from the camera at extreme angles.

Can we see a picture taken closer up directly from the side of the saw?

Your handle is coming along nicely,and I think camera angles are the problem with seeing the teeth as they really are. I think you did well just getting some files that are actually hard enough to cut!!

[Cory Waldrop]

I used carving gouges to shape the sharp intersections as best I could. I could have done a better job, but they turned out acceptable to me. Eventually you will end up with something like this.... after lots and lots of sanding/scraping/filing.... The change in grain direction can be troublesome at times so take your time and work it out.

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Also be careful with your files/rasps so you don't ding up the faces of your handle too bad. I let one slip a few times and had to end up planing the surface a little to get the scratches out. The third picture is after I planed the surfaces to get out the scratches. Looking good.

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I decided to turn my attention to the bevels at the front now. I marked them with pencil and used a chisel to score the fibers to help prevent tearout. I used a very sharp chisel and worked my way down. Be very careful with unsupported fibers here and never take off a huge chunk at a time or you may tear a chunk out. I nearly did that and did cause a small fracture on one of the faces, but it wasn't bad enough to worry about. I rubbed some glue into it and clamped it for a little bit so hopefully it wont spread more.

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After sanding to 400 grit, I decided to use apply a couple of sanding coats of shellac to help aid in looking for places that needed more sanding. This was the fun part as I got to really see the grain pop. I love the way it looks so far.

[Cory Waldrop]

I had to find a replacement saw nut for the one I was missing. Sawmill Creek to the rescue. I posed in the classifieds and shortly had a replacement sent to me by an awesome member here. Thanks!

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About the same condition as the original saw nuts so it fits into this project. Ill have it shiny in no time.

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Now to test it for fit. First picture really shows the grain of this cherry, and of course the saw nut seems to fit. The saw nut and medallion are still sitting a little proud for my liking so a little work with the router to deepen the recess will be in order. I want them to sit about like the middle one in the last picture.

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I did a final sanding before applying the finish of choice. I decided to use Tru Oil for its durability and ease of application. I know it is used by a lot of people for saw handles so I want to give it a try. The last picture is after the first coat of Tru Oil. The first coat made the cherry look very soft and I look forward to building up a nice film. Not sure if I want to finish it off with wax or not. We will see.

[Cory Waldrop]

This is where I am at now. I will put on a few more thin coats of Tru Oil and figure out if I want to use wax or leave it alone.

I hope everyone enjoys the progress pictures. I know there are a lot of them. Hopefully they are informational. Feel free to comment on anything you see. I am always learning from the members of this community. I have to say that I am very happy with what I have made so far. I look forward to showing my Grandpa when I am done.

I will continue to post as I make progress and will hopefully be done soon.

[Cory Waldrop]

Richard.... It is pretty cool to uncover the origin of something old. I have really enjoyed it with this saw. Hopefully my progress and mistakes will give you some insight into your future projects.

George.... I will try to get some better pictures of the saw teeth. It is really hard to get my phone to focus on the right part when trying to take a picture of these teeth. It was frustrating so I just used the picture that showed it the best from what I took.

I did something stupid when I was cleaning the saw plate. In my haste to make it look pretty, I ended up sanding some of the set of the saw teeth out. After a few strokes I realized what I was doing and sighed and just walked away for a little bit frustrated. I figured since I already did that to one side, that I would just continue and finish up as I did. I didn't joint the teeth completely so there is still a little bit of that in the geometry of the teeth. I decided to leave it after it took quite a while to reshape the teeth with the little I did joint. This being my first time, I didn't want to get rid of the teeth completely and risk not being skilled enough to get them back the right way. I did notice that the gullets of some of the teeth weren't perfectly in line and figured it was because I held the file at a slight angle on some of them like you said. It didn't seem to cut bad when I tried it so I left it alone and will continue to practice when I sharpen it next.

[Joe Bailey]

you might find this old thread of mine to be of interest

[Cory Waldrop]

Joe,

That saw is in fantastic condition. What did you end up doing with it? Although they are small, they are certainly quality enough to be used as seriously as any other saw. Man I wish I had a tool kit as quality as the Buddy L tool kits when I was a kid. I just had one of those crappy plastic B&D fake "workshops"