About six or maybe seven years ago I went to an auction sale on Hwy 22 between London and Strathroy Ontario. It was a cabinet maker who was going out of business. From what I gathered from various people at the auction, he had started out well but when times got a bit hard as they no doubt often do for any small business, he had to supplement his income as a finish carpenter.
Seems there was, and probabaly still is a fair demand for qualified and capable finish carpenters and he found increasingly that he was getting more and more of his income from that, and worse spending more and more of his time doing that and he could not take on any sizable cabinet jobs due to time constraints.
So he decided, perhaps helped in his decision by his creditors, who knows, to sell off the cabinet stuff. He had a home made vacumn press for veneering a lathe he built that had a five foot bed on it, and a fair bit of really nice lumber. It was almost sickening to see a pile of thick cherry go for a quarter of it's real value.
The nice thing was that, there were no antique dealers or casual types there for the most part as there were a number of competing sales that day. So it was mainly die hard woodworkers both amateur and professional and since as a group we seemed to speak the same language a good time was had by all. It was probably the most fun auction I have ever attended.
Now to the subject of the post, I bought a shop made coping saw similar to what Bob Smalser offered a tutorial for on here last week. It was of a nice brown coolur wood, not sure what, and had 1/4 inch band saw blade. I doubt at the time I ever intended to use it, perhaps figured on hanging it on the wall, or something.
Well in my current project I needed to do some coping saw work for the decorative parts of a plinth for a blanket box. I tried, yet again, to do it with a metal thing I bought from Lee Valley with frankly poor results. Then this morning when thinking of Bobs thread I wondered about that saw, and found it and looked it over. The adjusting knobs turn the blade to pretty much any angle you want, so I thought it could not be any worse than what I had already done.
Started the first cut and it was no better, but as I got near the end of the frist cut something clicked inside my head, and I started making sense of this thing, and found I could follow the lines I had done quite easily, amazing, while a rough cut it was remarkably accurate, and cleaned up easily with a rasp and wood file.
So on this saw is carved Phil 85, I assume that being the year he made it. To Phil thanks for the saw and I sincerely wish now, I had paid more than the two dollars I gave, it is really remarkable. It might have been the cabinet maker or maybe a friend of his hard to say now, but if anyone in the London area who reads this knows of a cabinet maker finish carpenter named Phil direct him to this post.
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Originally Posted by Ryan Cathey
