Sawing a board from a log with a handsaw is not only possible, but quite an interesting venture.  If you can love your maebiki oga and snap a good and true line, board lumber will proliferate. I’ve been putting some pretty good hours on my maebiki oga the last week learning to use it, and I’m still far far away from proficiency, but have garnered some useful insight. Up in the Colorado rocky mountains there’s so much beetle kill pine that at least one person dies every year from a tree falling on them while hiking. Suffice it to say, plenty of logs can be had for the asking, assuming you can get them out. Right now I’m still sawing through the beetle kill that came from our property.  This is “blue stain” lumber.

I’ve seen a few pictures searching the interweb of Japanese kobiki at work. There’s lots of shots of sawyers starting the cuts at the top of the log, but nary a photo of finishing the cuts at the bottom. My work holding was really shoddy the last time I posted about using this saw, and I’ve definitely upgraded.

I made this ‘A’ frame saw horse from 5″-8′ pressure treated fence poles. Its tied together with cotton rope, with a few diagonal braces nailed on to keep it from racking side to side. I can start my cuts with the log lying at a shallow angle across the bottom rest. I also used a few pieces of heavy rebar and turned them into log dogs, also a necessity if you want to saw lumber. They do a great job of holding the lumber in place. I’ve been getting by with the three I made pretty well.

Standing behind the tip of the log gives a smooth start, being able to see the layout lines on the top and tip of the log. From there its quite comfortable to saw while seated under the log. I’ve been placing another piece of lumber on top of the log being sawed to stand on at a more comfortable angle and keep from smudging up my chalk lines. It also dampens the chatter that can occur when sawing under the log. I’d really like to get a sumitsubo Japanese ink line. Chalk just doesn’t seem to throw well on the irregular surfaces of the log. Canting off two sides of the log allows me to get a more certain layout, at the expense of the widest boards in the center of the log.

If my line starts drifting on the opposite side I’ll move to the top of the log and try to correct. I know I said earlier that wedges are your friends, and they are, but you want to use as little wedge as possible to keep the plate from rubbing. Open up the cut too far the saw may want to lay to one side and start cutting at an angle. Sometimes you can rescue a cut that is going badly off the line by wedging the board to an angle that allows you to correct back on the line. Just make sure that you’ll be able to straighten the saw plate back in line with your ink/chalk line once you’ve made the correction. The plate on this saw is so, so very deep, and it corrects like a super tanker at sea. You have to start reversing the direction of your correction before you actually reach it or you end up over correcting and binding as you saw drunkenly back and forth either side of the line.

Here is an eight foot log on the horse, finishing my cuts down to the end. I had to use two screws through the waste lumber either side at the bottom to keep the end from slipping off the horse when sawing. This log position is awesome, because I can saw letting the weight of the maebiki help itself in the cut. You can saw from either side of the log without having to flip it, as well as saw while seated on the back side. Any time you can sit down while slinging a big piece of steel like this, do it!

A good strong puff of breath keeps my line clear of saw-dust.  My poor western back is not used to working like this, and it takes some getting used to.

Its been a real challenge getting this saw optimally sharpened and set. Over the past week I’ve sharpened it about twice a day for a full day of sawing, but never adjusted the set. This lead to increasing problems tracking on my cut line and binding on the saw plate. As a shoji maker all of my saws have very minimal set, and I strive to keep it that way. But green lumber and a thick plated saw like this require much more than you’re theoretical .004″ tooth set.

So how much set does a maebiki oga need? Good question. There is so precious little info out there in English on hammer setting saws. You just have to get a cheap saw and give it a try.  I’ve been slowly adding set in with a hammer and anvil. My anvil is a piece of 4″ CR ROD 12″ long. It weight at least 50 lb, so makes a decent anvil for hammering on saw plates and peening rivets, whatnot. Probably could do some light forging on it if I ever get my forge set up.

The hammer is reground from a tack hammer. Its probably a bit light for the job. I’ve only found one picture of a guy hammer setting teeth on a maebiki oga and it looks like he uses a cross peen without ridges, peening at a right angle to the long axis of the tooth. That would allow the user to work with the saw plate supported on your lap. Why don’t I just find that picture.

The existent hammer setting marks on my saw suggest that the above photo and a straight cross peen were used.

However, this hammer does work just fine. The face is flat and the ridges are quite shallow, made with a couple passes of a swiss triangle file. I have the saw teeth resting on a straight chamfer at the anvil edge. I want to change it to more of a radius to match the smooth curve that hammer setting leaves in the tooth. I finally think I put enough set back in the saw. Now its just a matter of practice.

Sawyers unite! I know of at least two other woodworking bloggers who have talked about getting a maebiki oga. Do it! You’ll love spending all day to saw one log into boards! Best time ever. Seriously though, we need to figure this stuff out and document it. How many kobiki are even still alive in Japan anymore? And just try finding a partner to get on the bottom of your pit saw. Maebiki are the way to go.

My maebiki-oga, showing its back. The line that runs parallel to the tooth edge puzzles me a bit. If I had to guess? Perhaps its the hardening line. I’ve read that only the teeth were hardened on these saws. If you filed past it from use it would require taking it back to a blacksmith to re-harden the tooth edge. But this line isn’t visible from the front side of the saw.

The welding line for the tang? Honestly it looks a bit rough to me, but I’m not a blacksmith.

Here, a shot of the front of the saw. When I look at this I see bands of hammer marks, three rows, parallel to the tooth edge. Perhaps the tensioning of the plate? Or correcting a warp from hardening the tooth edge.

The tip of the saw slipped out of the packaging when it was shipped to me and was bent over very badly. I figured it would snap off when I bent it back, but its held on so far. The crack will grow with use of the saw and I’ll eventually lose it. This tooth also shows the original hammer setting marks, all on the top half/third of the tooth.

I know most of us have read that too much set on one side can cause a saw to pull out of line, but have you ever tried to purposefully create the problem? I put a ridiculous amount of set in one side of a cheap disposable rip kataba and sure enough, it pulls out of line despite my best efforts to saw straight. Hammer setting teeth have to be judged by eye for evenness, and its something that I’m still a little unsure of my ability to do well. I’ve been sighting down the flat of the saw plate at a very low angle that allows me to judge the projection of the teeth. Its easy enough to see teeth that are over or under set with respect to the ones next to it, but from the back to the front I’m not convinced I can judge it accurately. Ultimately its down to the performance of the saw in the cut, but there are other factors at play that confuse the issue: sawing technique, poorly snapped lines, twisting logs that move as they dry in the process of being cut.

Both of my yasuri are cutting-down files, and I use the diamond grit one as my Hatsuke-Yasuri. Not sure what brand they are, I bought them at my local Woodcraft store, and spent way too much because they come with a handle. I assume they came from JapanWoodworker, because Woodcraft recently bought them. My other maebiki-oga is the one with the tremendously hard couple of teeth in the middle of the tooth line. I haven’t worked with it yet, but I’ll attempt some audio if I can find an external mic for my phone.

Here’s another shot of the “chone-gake” chipbreaker teeth. I use a square file to maintain the chipbreaker at about 1mm down from the cutting edge, with a length of the chipbreaker bevel also 1mm long and 45 degrees to the Shita-ba that forms the tooth edge.

This is a shot from Des King’s book on shoji and kumiko work, which has a great section on maintaining kanna. I’m basically assuming that the maebiki-oga is taking a rough planing cut, and have shaped the chipbreaker accordingly. Des has this great blog we need to bug him into updating more often. His kumiko-zaiku work is just stunning.

When sawing with the grain you get these great curly shavings, nicely curled to fit in the tooth gullets. When sawing against the grain you don’t get nice shavings like this until your cutting angle is quite low, around 30 degrees to the log or less. The sawdust from sawing down end grain is much more accordion like, also compressed by the chipbreakers.

Ahh! Terrible loss of tracking to the line on my last log. What happened? I wanted to blame the saw, blame the lines, blame the log for moving on me, but its just my poor technique. Trying to saw from only one side of the log and not using a low enough angle to track well on the line. This is actually something that still I am wondering about.

The sawyer on the bottom of the log is leading in his cut with the toe of the saw. The cut from doing this is smooth and fast, but I’ve had all my troubles keeping on a line originate from sawing at an angle greater than perpendicular to the long axis of the log. The sawyer on the top is using a low angle cut, which feels very natural because the more of the weight of the saw is helping in the cut. They are both holding the handle of their saws towards the top, suggesting less pressure in the cut than the saw is capable of delivering if you pull from the bottom of the handle.

Pulling back over onto the line required sawing at a very low angle. This is something that I could never do with my 350mm rip kataba noko. Supposing you are off the line on the same side both front and back of the log. Lowering the sawing angle and pulling over hard like this creates a concavity on the board right of the cut and a convex surface on the left. The thin flexible saw plate of my 350mm saw would then start to follow the cup and I know from experience that it would in fact become more exaggerated unless enough wedge is used. The plate of the maebiki-oga is much stiffer and while this correction does produce the curves I described, the saw doesn’t bend enough to follow the curve. Once I was more than the plate depth past the correction the saw would run without binding while perpendicular in the cut.

The finished straight fletch cut, live edge boards. I learned much more about my technique from sawing this log without canting off the sides. Basically, I’d rather have accurate lumber than fast lumber. I’m humbled a bit, having to slow down and re-evaluate. The larger the log, the more important it is for accuracy to lead in the cut on the line that you can see, switching sides before over-cutting your line.  The saw really prefers to have at least 10 teeth in the cut. With all the switching back and for it felt a bit hoppy, even with the teeth freshly sharpened. Some of that tendency was overcome by sawing very flat, using a bit of speed on the pull stroke, and holding the saw higher up the handle. Smooth cuts remove the most material, and slow is smooth. Thus slow is fast.

The payoff for my week of work! Imagine how much I could mill if I knew what I was doing.  The live edged stuff is my favorite. Once I get my sumitsubo carved I’ll get another log or two to work on. I’d like to try some quarter-sawing techniques if I can get the right tree.

Rip sawing is one of those things that even devoted hand tool enthusiasts try to avoid. Compared to cross grain cuts they require more stamina, more positive force and control of the saw, and more attention to work holding. But how does one learn to use a saw?  A while back I decided to do all of my cross-cutting by hand, figuring I needed the practice. It still seemed like too much work to rip my stock to size. And its true, the joined panel work for my fuigo build has taken a tremendous amount of time to saw by hand, about 30 hours, maybe more. The intent is not to see how quickly the work can be accomplished so much as to understand and develop the fine motor control that accurate sawing demands.

As a student of music I spent many years of my life working to understand the whole body interaction that is expressed when playing a musical instrument. To a casual observer it may look like most of the work is being accomplished by the movement of the fingers, but that is just the end point of a motion which starts in the spine from the neck. So when I hold a saw I approach it trying to develop a technique, a relation between my body and the saw borne of practice. And too that end it really requires working the muscles to the point of fatigue, where things start to become a bit sloppy and you may finally notice muscle interactions that before were not consciously apprehensible.

This is a taste of the work at hand, 20″ wide douglas fir paneling in both 1/2″ (finished dimension) and 1/4″, resawn from 2×12. The best I can do from construction grade lumber to obtain vertical grain  comes from ripping the sides of a flat-sawn  2×12″.  Additionally if you’re really feeling like sawing you can rip the middle of the flat-sawn board into 1.5″ strips and re-join for vertical grain orientation. Its a seriously tedious way to make a panel, but you get a lot of practice with the saw.

I recently bought a copy of Iichi Hayashi’s “Reading Trees” (“Read Tree” If you’re looking for a copy on amazon). Its very frustrating to have a book in Japanese full of, from what can be seen in the illustrations, excellent information that is just out of my grasp. For example, take a look at this image, notice the thickness of the silk-line for his sumitsubo marking on the highly concave surface of the log. It probably does a better job to have such a thick line, more stored energy to push into the contours and get a clear line. Haha, look at the size of the karuko pin that secures the line! This is marking the rip cut of a master sawyer on a piece of log that is probably worth more than my truck, where no deviation in layout from a flat plane is acceptable. Needless to say, I’m working to fit more hours into the day for learning Japanese. I simply must be able to read this book.

At the opposite extreme from the previous photo is my own humble work, but with very thin pieces. The kerf of my 350mm rip kataba I used to saw these pieces is about 1/16″, fat for your average ryoba saw kerf.  In relation to the thickness of the material being cut I would much rather be using my 210mm saw. The problem arises with this kiln dried lumber. To start with, Douglas Fir is already a mobile and reactive wood. Add to that a fast kiln time (that didn’t even remove moisture to average environmental equilibrium) and you have a piece of wood that is stressed on the outside from the kiln.

So you plane a face flat and mark with kebiki for the cut. Even assuming a theoretical perfect planar cut the wood cups about 1mm or 2mm, while the saw is in the cut! Your average joinery saw simply does not have enough set to cut a straight line with wood experiencing such an obvious release of tension.  In this I mean the ratio of kerf to plate thickness. You could try opening the kerf heavily with a wedge, but that leads to its own problems. Save the fine saws with ultra-thin kerf for ripping your best carefully seasoned and stable wood.

My jack plane on edge is brilliant at squaring the edge of the pieces to be joined. I’ve used this same rail on the side of my planing beam with push style western planes and it is much easier with the Japanese plane.

I flatten and condition the surface of my planing beam before any major project, so the alignment between the two faces must be maintained parallel.

Every other piece for the panel is edge jointed on the opposite face  so that any small deviation from square cancels out. It becomes really important with these thin panels, where a small deviation will show up as a cupped panel that you don’t have enough wood left to make flat. In this case my glue up is at 3/8″ for a finished thickness of 1/4″. My clamps want to cup the panel in the direction of the beam, so I’m careful to alternate the clamping. Sometimes despite your best efforts the panel wants to join up with a bit of cup and in that case you can use the clamp to straighten it out. Another interesting example of where the problem is the solution, no?

Here I’m using my 270mm ryoba to rip the vertical grain sides from my 2x board. Oh, I made a sumishashi, awesomeness! Though…I cut it from laminate bamboo flooring. Cutting a board like this is a microcosm of what ripping a log is like. The angles of the saw to the work, the angle of the work to your body, very familiar.

One of the things that became apparent to me recently was how much of a drunken idiot my non dominant hand is. All this time I’m sawing with two hands thinking I had control. Really its the right hand desperately trying to control the wild oscillations of the left. To improve, I’ve been sawing with only my non dominant hand. I reach a point of fatigue very quickly, but there is no other good way to develop conscious muscle control. When you return to sawing with both hands your brain suddenly gives much more mind to what the left hand is doing.

Let us ignore my lame excuse of the wood moving as the reasoning for the crappy quality of the cut on this particular board, an eight inch re-saw for the piston head of the fuigo. The pattern of ridges left from switching sides of the cut is an obvious indication of some kind of bias in my technique. In this case (and in most of my ripping) I have a tendency to lean to the left while sawing, pulling the saw to the left as well. To compensate I have been subconsciously twisting the saw back to the right. The effect of a twisted saw plate in the cut is a cupped cut face on the left side, and ridges alternating as you switch sides to cut down the line.  I only recently noticed, and it wasn’t so much from reading the surface quality of the resultant cut so much as working to the point of fatigue where the pattern of improper tension became very exaggerated in my body and my hands.

In a discussion with Jason he mentioned the effect of gullet clogging on cut drift as well and it forced me to take a fresh look at my saw. I’ve put hundreds of hours on this saw now and never filed back the primary bevels, only hitting a secondary bevel on the top of the tooth. I seriously never noticed just how small the gullets were becoming. Its embarrassing to show this, but I’m sure we can all relate to becoming complacent with the condition of a tool. Cutting down the saw teeth forced me to notice how the set of the teeth was also at play. With the longer tooth length I get a better curve to the tooth when setting, and I think it results in less heat being imparted to the cutting edge (and thus a saw that stays sharp longer). Thanks Jason!

Once I started to correct my body’s tendency to lean over while ripping the surfaces of my rips became much, much better. No leaning over meant no twisting of my saw hand, and kerfs where I could actually get the saw plate to balance evenly. I try to remember, the saw is flat, it WANTS to cut straight if you can line your body up with the cut. The saw has only one proper planar orientation in the cut, it is your body that must orient to the saw, never the saw to the cut. I’m eager to apply what I have learned to my maebiki-oga. Happy Sawing!

About seven or eight miles further west up into the mountains from me, nestled between two north south ridges, is a nice little stand of trees by an aspen grove. The tree in the photo is midslope, west facing. Its also dead, killed by pine beetle like millions of others for miles around.

I didn’t get this tree today, but marked it “tree” for later felling, thanks to the generosity of some fine neighbors, who are building a new home on the property and will be getting some of the lumber once its sawn. I know its hard to tell the scale of the tree from the photo, I should have been standing next to it, but its about 2′ diameter at the base, massive compared to the stuff I’ve sawn up to now. This is just one of the trees that need to be taken out, there were several others within 50′ of the road that were begging to be turned into beautiful boards, and the stand extended further back by quite a ways from the road.

Did my first honest job of felling a tree today, something not small enough you could push it over, and it felt really great. Getting the tree to fall where I needed it to (and not on me!)

I didn’t want to take all of Janice’s day, so settled on two trees, three lengths of eight foot, that were small enough to get loaded in the truck easily and came on home delighted like a kid with candy. I wish I had a felling axe and a broad axe, maybe someday. Chainsaw screams at you when you use it, but its damn quick. And damn quick to cut off your face if you let it.

The sumitsubo is working much better with the new line. My silk keeps on packing down, I keep on adding more, where does it go…but at least I’ve gotten comfortable keeping the moisture balance right in the ink pot to give clear lines. I use my thumb to press on the silk as I’m drawing the line back. You can see where my thumb goes right afterward to hold the reel in place, with the middle finger to press the string to the mark.

Eat your heart out chalk line! Sumisashi for marking the end of the log after trimming with my madonoko which leaves a nice smooth surface. The ink line throws very well into the hollows, and did the best job I’ve ever seen on the oblique surface for the outside boards. You have to pull the line waaaay back compared to marking with an ink line on flat boards in the shop, give it enough energy to push into all the hollows.  You also can’t mess about with snapping the line, you’re ink will dry and not give a good line. It still misses small spots, but I use the sumisashi freehand to finish the line or go over any spots that are not dark enough.

Can you figure out from the picture what he’s doing? Even the best sumitsubo technique will leave gaps in the cut line mark, especially logs with heavy curve and irregular surfaces. Some of the fun stuff to saw though! You need an accurate way of sighting in the line to mark it with a brush where the line won’t reach. One of those things you could wonder about for a long time and not figure out, in “Reading Trees”  by Iichi Hayashi.

Thanks for reading, the sawing continues after the maebiki-oga gets a fresh sharpening.

Its funny, I had just been talking about needing a book with decent photos of traditional Japanese construction. My mother was up at the Library today, evidently there was a deal on books, $5 and you could fill a bag. She comes back with a couple sacks, among them “Old Barn Plans” by Richard Rawson, “The Timber Framing Book” By Stewart Elliott and Eugenie Wallas, and “Traditional Domestic Architecture of Japan” by Teji Itoh.  It deals mainly with the country home in Japan known as a minka. Its certainly not a timber framer’s book, but has a lot of great detail concerning the cultural and material influences that shaped the dwelling for rural Japanese.

This poto made me think of you Sebastian, and your hillside that you would see built well. The elevation changes on the left are quite dramatic, held together by what appear to be dry stack stone walls.

How about a cold weather structure? Thatching on the roof and the walls. I live in country that wants to burn, so when you build walls with straw it needs to be covered with adobe, but the lesson is the same, there are models of Japanese architecture for colder climates.

The broad expanse of gable would not look out of place in the mountains of the Midwest, though one usually sees vast expanses of glass in place of the shoji and amado.

I’ve looked at many diagrams for roof architecture, with its hewn natural beams and posts that support the rafters. Somehow a shot looking up into it tells so much more. The photo on the left really encapsulates the design ethos that tugs at the heart of those who love these buildings. The roof is straw, the eaves are fired clay shingle, the structure is wooden, the windows are fiber covered, the walls are clay, the floor is wood, stone, and earth. The are so many places in this world where people build with these same modest materials, and we call them mud huts.

My favorite design element, the heavy overhanging eaves. I can truly imagine living with such a space, enjoying the shade in the summer. The posts that support the outside edge of the roof allow for the wonderful raised veranda. It speaks volumes when a home has its main transit corridors around the outside of the structure and not through its heart.

Before structure comes skill, and a knowledge of the materials. A great way to do that is through hand tools, which never let you forget a knot or wonky grain. Today was the second meetup of the NoCo daiku study group. I’ve been sawing, so it was a great opportunity to examine some traditional techniques. Here Eric is doing a great job of showing how these saws are meant to be pulled to the center.

As it turns out, pipe strapping and some screws make an excellent hold down once the log has been sawn to the point where log dogs don’t hold.

I made a new handle for my maebiki-oga, quite a bit more length than the last one, and with a little bit more leaning back, less perpendicular to the tooth edge. Both the maebiki-oga and the larger madonokos are quite sensitive to how much power is put into the cut. They’re such aggressive saws that its easy to try to bite off more than you can pull back. The length of handle is really a lever. When you’re starting a cut or working through the cross-grain of a knot it helps to hold the saw above the tooth line, let the saw work under its own weight. The more depth of cut, the more power to the tooth edge, and one or both hands can move below the tooth line to let the handle work as a lever.  My previous handle was too short to allow me to use that natural principle of leverage, my wrists suffered as a result, trying to push the saw down in the cut.

Do I need to point out how cool it is that I can cut up logs while seated? It really is a whole body motion, yesterday my thigh was cramping something terrible, couldn’t tell you how exactly it was involved in the sawing motion, but it gets a workout.

Here’s Mr. Hayashi with an absolute monster of a maebiki-oga, long handle to match, with a hand grip that really saves your fingers from doing so much work holding on to the saw as you pull back. Even his foot position is worthy of note. Based on the saw dust streaming from the cut and the amount still stuck in the tooth gullets, he just pulled back with some serious strength.

Its a fairly simple matter for me to saw through and through, making nice 4/4 and 6/4 flatsawn  boards, but what about the coveted vertical grain? There are multiple approaches to getting the best yield of vertical grain boards from a log, I take the most straight forward.

My maebiki-oga looks especially nice in the light of this photo, really taking some character from the polishing of use.

This log is a bit small to make it worth quartering, but the huge spiraling split that’s down to the heart of the log fits rather nicely into a single quarter. There’s some serious twist in this log, but that’s really common with the winds we get up here. If I ever find a good stand of straight timber, my god, that would be heaven. Its not like the blue stain pine you find on the open market comes from better quality trees in Colorado, the stuff for sale in Sears Trostel, Fort Collins, CO is comparatively worse, and suffers greatly from what I see as poor drying conditions.

I take quarter-sawn literally. For some it has come to mean vertical grain orientation, where the annular growth rings are at an angle greater than 60 degrees from the face of the board. If you’ve been a woodworker long enough, you’ve probably come across the illustrations of various grain orientations relative to board placement in the log, or the different styles of milling logs. By directly quartering I am able to take boards off the faces of the quarters, alternately, until there’s nothing left. The best vertical grain, and the widest boards come off first, and then the angle of the annular growth rings relative to the face of the board starts to drop. Its not the best way to saw if you want perfect vertical grain on every board, but it wastes a lot less material than radial sawn.

One interesting variation of radial sawing that I would like to try is radially sawing a log for capboard siding, which removes the associated waste problem while producing a high grade product. For some reason I see a lot of wood siding products on the market these days that are flat sawn, actually re-sawn from dimensional stock. It would be a good use for some of these smaller logs that I come across, 10-12″ diameter, which would leave you with 5-6″ wide capboard with a live natural edge, very cool look.

Quartering the log went relatively fast with only two cuts to saw down.

And now we introduce the band saw. If I had a decent saw with a thin kerf compared to my maebiki-oga that was a bit smaller you’d probably be seeing photos of me sawing by hand. As it is I am simply not going to be sharpening after every board cut, too much frustration over poor quality steel. I’m on the lookout for good rip saws, but I want to pay for it with the proceeds of lumber that I sell, which will take a while…

The roller feed tables are really important. Actually I have only one at the moment, I’m using a camera tripod on the far left to support the quarter as the cut is started.

I tried to take my boards off with a fence on the saw table, but it tended to accumulate deviation from cut to cut, and was simply too difficult to use with only one person moving the quarter against the fence. Plus these quarters had several days to relax and warp a bit. Snapping a fresh straight line for every board and cutting freehand without a fence turned out to be much more accurate. I am really loving my ink line, finally getting the hang of it. Such beautiful dark lines! They are a pleasure to the eye.

I’m using a 1/2″, 3TPI bandsaw blade. My bandsaw has 13″ resaw capacity, but the 1HP motor makes me think that I want to not push the limits of the table’s capacity. This pine is quite soft though, and the saw handled it really well.

Don’t worry, I turned the saw off to take this picture. My mantra was, “Don’t cut your fingers off!”. The closest I’ve ever come to losing a finger was with a bandsaw, nearly cut the tip of my thumb off, but that was when I was a teenager and I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two from the experience.

I was worried that I would have to be reaching around the blade to wedge open the cut, but all the boards warped away from the quarter during the cut. I’m cutting all 4/4, just seemed the most useful size for me right now.  With 6/4 slabs and vertical grain 4/4 boards I’ll be able to make shoji!

If it wasn’t for grain runout from the twist in the log these boards would be really top quality. I suppose the sawyers around here would quarter saw blue stain pine if you asked them to, but I’ve never seen it for sale. For this 5″ x 8′ board, even at $3.00 bf this is only a ten dollar board once its seasoned. The flat sawn stuff sells for about $2.50 bf at the moment.

Your boards loose width with every one that you take off, eventually you are left with 1×1″ square, perfect for cutting stickers to air dry the lumber. If you’re building industrial size stacks of softwood to dry you want your stickers to be wider to help bear the weight, but I’m not planning on going that big. There’s really very little waste sawing in this manner.

All of the boards laid out so you can see what comes from one small log. Not too shabby, though the splitting ruined one of the quarters. Big timber, here I come!

I’ve been sawing over the past week the sections of big tree that by some miracle was able to be loaded in my truck. I started with one of the smaller sections, marking at 1-3/4″ on center, so making boards of 1-5/8″ after the kerf is considered. Really I think of this cut as 6/4, the thickness I need for shoji rail/stile. I was amazed to get such a good mark of the ink-line for the ouside boards. Some of it had to be marked in by eye with the sumisashi.

And, after a day of sawing, I came to the parting off. I’ve been told that the maebiki-oga looks almost cartoonish in scale. It starts to make perfect sense when you’re cutting through more than 12″. This log was heavy enough that I had to waylay my brother into helping me lift it onto the horse. It almost tipped over the whole affair in the process. I guess that’s how you know that the log is getting heavy enough to mill horizontally. Ideally one person can accomplish any of this stuff with a bit of ingenuity.

The sawdust makes sitting on the ground quite comfortable. Or kneeling for that matter.

If you understand the possibilities of the ramp you’ll save yourself a great deal of back ache. I almost, almost had a dumb moment and tried to lift the log up onto the cradles. Apparently I can learn!I keep on putting my cant hook in photos as well, hopefully you can understand how fucked you’d be not to have this tool and try to move heavy logs. I need some heavy towing chain and a couple log hooks though, I could definitely use some more tools.

For the next log I picked the largest one. Since it was slightly oblong in cross-section I marked my boards to maximize accurate marking surface as opposed to width of board. Somebody linked to a great video of a Japanese carpenter sawing a log: http://www.en.charpentiers.culture.fr/treesintohouses/fromtheforesttotheworksite/pitsawing/pitsawinginjapan?media

I want his trestles! Next time I pick up some timber I’ll be getting something smaller I can hew to boxed heart 8×8 for heavy trestles. Oh, wait that wasn’t the link that I was thinking about. In any case I used a guide for the start of the cut.

Should I point out how epic it is to be sawing horizontally? I don’t know, it like a revolution for me, not to be vertical. It really changes everything.

To cut off one board at a time, to really be able to focus on each board face cut, its dramatic. And useful! Not to be constantly moving the log. I’m cutting this one to 2″ slabs.  It took me quite a while to get a proper posture for holding the saw. The hand higher up the handle holds the saw plate itself. For the best control I laid my thumb along the back spine of the plate. Doing anything the same way for a long time gets fatiguing, so you have to change it up every once in a while, try new things. Your body figures it out or you injure yourself, so its fairly self correcting.

I was worried that having the plate ride against the lower side of the kerf would make it difficult to cut to the line. Oddly enough its actually easier to be accurate sawing horizontally. I mean, dramatically better quality of cut. Perhaps it is harder to put power into the cut with the loss of gravity assisting in the vertical orientation, but practice and training can overcome.

So, which direction do you start the cut from? I’ve tried top to bottom, bottom to top, it doesn’t matter from the saw’s perspective. What does matter is not pissing into the wind. What I mean is to saw such that the wind carries the saw dust away from the  plate. If it blows back onto the top of the plate it creates friction in the kerf, and that makes for a terrible time sawing. Binding of any kind, avoid it like the plague, be it from pitch build up, wandering off the line, warping boards, poor wedge technique. The sawing is fun and easy when the plate rides lightly in the kerf.  The only time its impossible to avoid a bit of binding is sometimes at the start of the cut before the plate is deep enough to get wedges in there. Sometimes the boards just really want to clamp together, other times its because you didn’t start the cut in plane and bind as you correct back to the line.  In any case, its a serious pain in the ass with the super deep plate of the maebiki-oga. A frame saw has its advantages too.

How could I not talk about sharpening the saw? I thought I had a grasp on edge wear with my maeiki-oga. The 16″ cuts for this log taught me a serious lesson. With an eight inch cut the maebiki-oga eats through that shit, even when less than perfectly fresh. Its a question of force per unit area, you know? So for a heavy cut, you feel it right away when the saw is a little dull. It took at times several sharpenings to get through a board, simply because a saw that is a little bit dull is no good in a heavy cut, it just doesn’t remove the material the right way. The knots are not kind to the edges of the saw either. Not to mention how much effort it saves. And my body always appreciates the rest to sharpen the saw.

Going through a knot? The saw will not let you miss it. I can almost draw the board for you while I’m sawing it.

Well, there’s more to it then that which I had hoped to convey. I guess in the end you’ll figure it out if you put the time into it. I struggle at times to find a context for the amount of time I’m putting in to learning the use of this saw. As hard as the work is physically, its almost beside the point, I just seem to love the kobiki work. My bandsaw blade gave up the fight today and I just sighed, went back to the wall and picked up my maebiki-oga. A century of life for a tool that just keeps on giving with every sharpening.

The best work holding is a heavy log. So, take one log and saw it in half. Easy right? With an asymmetrical pith it takes a bit of eyeing the symmetry to decide where to cut. I clocked this cut, it took two hours of sawing.

In this case there was quite a pronounced crook at the bottom end of the log. I was glad that I had sawn through the crook halving the crotch wood. Looking at the inside of the tree it was clear that the main trunk had at one time died, and a side shoot took over as the primary, so there’s some really wild grain at the bottom. Its the kind of thing that I should have seen when bucking the tree to length and cut around.

At this point it became obvious that my center line had to be moved to better orient to the grain, and produce boards without excessive taper.  I thought I would saw the quarters on my bandsaw so no board cuts were marked at the time.  Knowing what I do now, that my bandsaw simply cannot handle heavy stock with the blade I’m running, I should have gone ahead and marked two boards on each log half either side of the center line.

One of my neighbors, Tuck, dropped by and gave me a log. Now, this is the truck you want if you’re picking up logs! I’ve come up with a couple better ways of loading logs in my pickup truck, but this is what the pro’s use.

This reminds me, I was watching a video the other day about a guy loading a giant red gum in Australia. The loading process is not that remarkable, but the end of the video shows a really unusual saw mill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jprbiKIoZZE

Ever seen a giant circular saw connected to the boom arm of a bobcat? Wild stuff, I would not have wanted to be the guy standing there taking the video.

I added this simple back stop to hold the bottom of the quarters. I suppose I should pick something a bit more durable looking. If this were to break the log would swing back like a pendulum and deck me in the skull. Up to this point I’ve been simply screwing the log to the horse, but for a log quarter you end up putting too many screw holes into the bottom of every board you make.

Now knowing that I need to saw most of the quarter by hand I leveled one face and marked the ends for each board cut. Even though I had sealed the end of the log with wood glue the sumisashi gave a fairly clear line.

My other work holding solution, screws and plastic pipe strapping. Not terribly elegant, and I’m working on something better, but it works. Log dogs are great for holding logs in a given orientation, not so much as a hold-down device.

This is what a dull saw looks like. The teeth actually take quite a polish from use. Edge wear is just polishing of the steel.

The site that I linked to in my previous post, Carpenters from Europe and Beyond, also have video of many other sawyers. One of them:

Pit Sawing in Turkey

It shows a rope hold down with board and wedge. Its a simple concept that I would use in a couple different points of holding on my ‘A’ frame saw horse, pictured is my favorite so far. One of the problems I’ve had is the log pivoting over the horse when sawing beneath it at the start of the cut. If you think about it, I could use a variation of this for holding the log vertically in lieu of the pipe strapping. You can tell that I don’t go to any extra effort to make this stuff look nice, its all about function.  I also had to add an extra log cradle on the bottom rest to bring the log high enough up off the ground that I could saw underneath with a full comfortable stroke.

And! My wooden floor, how’s this Mark? Good old mother earth and a bed of soft sawdust.

The whale-noko needs frequent sharpening, thankfully its quick. Perhaps you can hear that some of the teeth in the center are harder than the others?  I start with a small square file to form both facets of the chone-gake. At the moment I’m using a 100mm yasuri to file the top bevel that forms the edge. This is a normal sharpening, only some of the chone-gake need adjustment, there’s enough set for many sharpenings, and the top bevel haven’t become too wide to require cutting down of the major tooth angles. I use a coarse diamond plate for jointing the tooth line. Soon to come, video of the saw at work.

The process of sawing a beetle kill pine log into 4/4 (1″) thickness boards, using an antique Japanese hand saw known variously as a Maebiki-Oga, Whale Back Saw, Whale Noko.

The work was accomplished over two days, starting with peeling and marking the log. It produced 58.78 Board Feet of lumber, a value of $165.76 at my local retail price of $2.82 per BF. For two days of labour, ten hour days, that works out to $8.28/hr of value produced. Not too bad for a hand saw, right?

Shooting and editing a video takes a great deal of time! Let me know if you want to see more, otherwise I have some sawing to do, haha.

You know, I feel I am standing at a cross-roads looking for where to head next. If I want to truly make a living doing things like this it means studying with the right person, an apprenticeship. I don’t mean that I want to apprentice as a kobiki, haha, I love it but no. I’ve realized that shoji probably will not work for me as well, the local market is simply not here and crate shipping large items is a serious hassle.

I’m a tool maker at heart, and I love the nokogiri. Maybe there’s something in that.

No, Black Locust Crotch is not some terrible venereal disease.

You may have dreams of lumber like the picture above.

But not have access to a $25,000 Woodmizer bandsaw mill. Pretty sweet machine though. Mark and I recently traveled several hours north to a place outside the town of Derby Line, VT, right on the border with Canada, to buy some white cedar. This is the guy’s saw mill.

All shed dried lumber, White Ash, lots of different Pine, and the fragrant aroma of air dried White Cedar drifting in the air. Dreamy, no?

It was the kind of place with such heavy tree cover that the road in was a skating ring of ice that not even studded snow tires could cope up the last hill. We walked in and had the proprietor give a helpful tow.

Back at Mark’s place I’ve had the time to lash together a new kobiki sawing frame from Black Locust poles I felled and bucked by hand with my madonoko. It was the first time I’ve had a tree barber chair on me from a poorly cut hinge notch and too slow of cutting through from the other side. If you’ve ever seen video of guys felling a tree with a two man cross cut saw and wondered why they’re sawing like the devils in them, its to avoid just such an occurrence. The hinge needs to be a certain width to break cleanly before the tree starts falling. Best to start learning this stuff on small trees.

This Locust wood is mostly in the open, which means a lower branching habit and not a lot of clear boules for typical board lumber. What is there is crotch wood, the kind of stuff Nakashima spoke so eloquently of and used to good effect in writing “The Soul of a Tree”.

And its the kind of stuff that I imagine lots of woodworkers happen upon and wonder how the hell to get it sawn into usable boards.

Here’s a small piece with the bark off, and I’m trimming the ends flush so that a level can be laid across. The blocks I’m working on are oak offcuts from the ‘free’ bin of Vermont Timberworks.

Starting with a plumb line on one face I measured out the thickness for the slabs to be taken off, in this case a 4/4 board in the middle to box in a heart check from the pith on the other end and two healthy thick slabs on either side.

You’ll notice that my boards are off center from the pith on the crotch side. While this means I’ll have a crossing pith on the inside face of my slabs it will also produce some interesting figure to the run of the grain.

With my layout done on either end and small notches cut on the edge of the ends with a pocket knife to register the string the ink line is used to snap straight marks on the convoluted surface of the log. One problem that arises is snapping a line into a deep hollow, the bounce of the string only gives you so much, and the farther back you pull the string to pluck it the more likely you are to pull to one side and produce a curve.

By stretching the string between the two ends you can use a level to drop a mark into the hollow and then snap from either end to that point. Presto, a straight line! I’ve seen this technique used to locate the mortises on koyabari for the posts that support the purlins on a Japanese roof.

Hang in there sumitsubo!

Very satisfying and rich, the dark marks from sumi ink.

Its helpful to understand the limits of what the ink line can do. A beautiful little protrusion like this is tempting to shave off, because I know I can get a good line. In this case I could extend vertical batens from my marks on the end grain and again drop a level into the hollows either side, but there’s enough of a mark that I simply sight down along the line and trace in with the sumisashi.

Ready for happy sawing!

Continuing from my last post, the rotten heart of this pretty little piece of Black Locust. There was a knot that healed over and decayed into the heartwood, something I didn’t think could happen with Black Locust given its reputation as exceptionally rot resistant.

So now I have slabs that are exceptionally…artistic. What would Nakashima have done?

And when you don’t sharpen your saw the cut can cup in the middle and binding, chaos, and pain in your arms ensue as you curse the very existence of the tree you’re sawing.

Mark Grable is fond of saying, “Know when to stop”.

And, “Sharpen your saw, its so easy, its a rip saw”.

Okay, okay, I’ll sharpen the damn saw when it needs it.

You may find yourself in a pickle needing to snap a line off the end of the cosmic void…I mean off the end of the butt of the log. Get creative with a level batten and some marks and you’ll be fine.

And finally, some video of sawing horizontally, sorry it took so long to the guy who asked.

Time for working with a new saw! This time its a 5-1/2′  two man cross-cut for felling and bucking, cuts on the push and the pull, with four cutter teeth to every raker. I’d been needing the use of a larger capacity saw for bucking logs prior to ripping with my whale noko, because my madonoko isn’t really meant for cuts over about half a meter. Now, I’ve made some pretty epic cuts larger than that with time and patience, but even after careful straightening by metate Mark my madonoko still wanted to wander on the opposing side of the cut, and it gets to be a real struggle to layout for boards on the end of the log when the surface of the end grain is concave.

I’ve resisted the idea of two man saws for the simple reason that its damn hard to find another guy to get on the other side of the saw. If you do, damn, that’s a good friend, I tell you!

But a saw like the one in the picture above can be used by one person quite effectively as long as the cut is plumb.

And! There’s some very interesting tools used in dressing these large saws accurately. The jig at the top of the picture above does three things. First, it can hold a file in a curved shape for jointing the tops of the saw teeth to the same level. Second is a pin gauge for setting the height of the raker teeth when peening over the hook. Lastly is another height gauge for finish filing the rakers to a consistent height, accurate to the thousandth of an inch. The tool at the bottom left is the setting spider, the subject of today’s post. How about some instructions?

Simmons Saw Sharpening Guide

And learn from the master filer I learned from, a fantastic set of videos that include a bit of hammer straightening of saws.

The spider is used as a gauge to accurately determine the degree of set in each tooth. Simple and brilliant, it immediately struck me that such a tool could be easily made and used on maebiki-oga.

You’ll catch this if you watch through the videos above, but basically the spider has a small difference in height between the long arms. Placed on the saw you see how it rocks back and forth. If the long arms rock the tooth needs more set, if the short arms rock the tooth is over set. Its important to note that this tool only works if the plate of the saw is quite straight, flat, and even of thickness.

I started by cutting a cross out of some mild steel a bit thicker than 1/8″.

I stuck it in a vise to bend the edges over, filed a flat land on all the feet, and leveled them to the same height on my diamond stone.

Then one leg could be lowered by grinding with part of the spider off the stone, checking how much material had been removed with a feeler gauge.  For the large cross cut saw the spider was set at about .012″, for my maebiki-oga I adjusted the spider to gauge .010″ of set, which with a plate thickness of .085″ gives me a kerf just under 1/8″.

Luckily the plate on my saw is pretty consistent and flat, so I got right to work checking my set. Up to this point I’ve been setting by eye by sighting along the plate held flat. If you have an oga saw with a rough hammered surface you’ll have to depend upon setting by eye. I still don’t completely trust the spider, but it is a great analytical tool to gauge how well I’m setting, and weather I’m actually seeing the degree of set correctly. As it turns out, I had over set one side and under set the other, probably due to the change in orientation of the saw when flipping it to peen the teeth over.

For setting teeth you need a small anvil, mild steel is okay, as long as it has a rounded edge that allows the tooth to make contact in the right spot. The teeth of a whale noko are hard enough that if you were to strike the tooth while unsupported you run the risk of breaking it.

With the plate held in your lap at a lowered angle to the flat  you can place the tooth line on the anvil and strike the upper third of the tooth.

I’m using a new hammer for setting, a cross peen with a ‘v’ shaped edge, not rounded, that is basically a large single edge version of a Japanese setting hammer. If you use too light of a hammer you find yourself whacking the tooth with a rather random amount of force. Adjusting the set within a thousandth of an inch requires control. Also, bending teeth back that have been over set on such hard steel is not an option, they just break off, so get it right or you’re stuck with an over set tooth until you sharpen it down a bit.

Happy sawing! I hope more people now are getting these big saws ready for the cut and avoiding the hassle of a chain-saw.

A friend showed up today and dropped off a chunk of birds eye maple that had split on him when he felled the tree. I’m not sure what happened to the rest of the tree, boy would I like to know! In any case I found myself in possession of a small piece of wood, and for sure it would make some fine bowls turned on the lathe, but I don’t have access to a lathe at the moment. Being highly figured wood, and a small piece at that, I figured the best use would be to saw into thin boards, either for veneer on drawer fronts or small presentation boxes. With birds eye grain the best figure is gained from flat sawing, not quarter sawing, which also happened to work out to give me the widest pieces.

The problem is, how does one saw an oddly shaped piece of wood like this without a large bench vise as I am accustomed to? I started by planing down the outside face until I had established a flat land worth converting into the first board.

A bit of the figure shows in the bark, as well as being quite obvious in the freshly planed surface, quite beautiful!

With one flat face I knew I could use a marking gauge to mark for the cut, but my end wheel gauge doesn’t have a large enough fence to register against, especially when the surface to be marked is sloping heavily away. Luckily the wooden straight edge I made a couple of days ago was at hand, and already had a hole big enough to pass the bar of the gauge through, now the first board could be marked.

I’ve thought of using a technique analogous to this for marking highly irregular logs, akin to the sled that an Alaskan chainsaw mill uses for aligning the first slab cut.

After marking with the wheel gauge I darkened the line in with a soft pencil.

And clamped the chunk of wood to the closest near vertical thing at hand, a ladder to the loft above. You have to move the clamps around a bit as you cut, and keep the kerf open where its clamped with some wedges, but it obviates the need for a large bench clamp. The same function would be served quite nicely by a 4×4 timber, and it could even be made free standing in the shop if you were to add some cross pieces at the bottom for feet.

The figure became more pronounced as I sawed through.

I titled this post “The Mini Sawyer” because this is basically the miniature version of what I go through sawing a proper sized log, same orientation, same dynamics of the saw at various angles to the grain. The crossing grain of the birds eye was quite noticeable when sawing, a bit like small pin knots but softer.

For those unfamiliar, the saw that I’m using is a home made Japanese style rip saw, re-purposed from an old western panel saw. The steel is nothing special, but I’ve done a lot of sawing with it at this point, and it does a good job because the blade is flat and I sharpen it frequently. If you’re into Japanese saws you may have run across mention of saws that hold their edge for forty hours, almost mythical stuff, I had to sharpen for every board I cut, sometimes it went dull a couple inches before the cut finished. You know its time to sharpen when the middle of the tooth line is dull and you start snagging on the outside teeth because of the increased pressure of using a slightly dull saw.

I started having problems with cupping in the cut and became increasingly frustrated until I noticed that I had sharpened most of the set out of the teeth, hadn’t been keeping track of that even though you’d think I know what I’m doing by now. Carrying enough set in the saw is seriously important for wide rip cuts in green wood, which as you can see from the photo above tends to cup when flat sawn, especially if the outside surface has had some time to dry and introduce some stresses in the wood. Sawing like this is fundamentally quite different from how a joinery saw is tuned for minimal set. Even the most skillful hand sawyer wouldn’t be able to track a straight line ripping boards in green wood if the saw was under set. How much set is enough? That depends, but generally its towards the maximum that the saw can handle for the thickness of the plate, I tend to run this saw at about 2/3 of maximum set because I also use this saw for seasoned lumber. Don’t feel bad about the wider kerf, its peanuts compared to the extra wood you’d have to plane off if the plate gets pushed around as the wood warps in the cut.

I stickered the boards as I cut them to keep the drying even, and stacked a couple of really heavy slabs on the hole affair to keep things flat as they dry. My stickers aren’t even in the photo below, they should be directly over each other or you could end up introducing warps into the slabs as they dry.

No band saw involved, no great fuss, just time, effort, and paying attention to the saw. Its your best teacher.

I felled a tree the other day and needed some low heavy trestles to bring the saw logs up to a height that’s comfortable to saw horizontally with maebiki-oga saw.

I didn’t want to worry about carefully preparing the lumber for joinery. Working from a center line allows you to use lumber that is twisted or bowed, but joints need to be housed.

How about a nice big log for the top of the trestle, plenty of space for driving dogs and not likely to walk around  when pulling on the saw.  I’m a fan of draw boring for pegging mortise and tenon joints.

Good work holding makes me a happy sawyer, and creates the most efficient conversion of human energy to the saw.

Height for the trestles are an inch or two below my knee, about 20″. Sawing being such a simple activity, one would assume that it is easier than in practice. In reality you will find that small details make a big difference, getting the log to a good height for sawing is one such detail.

Now if I could keep my ink line from freezing in this cold, haha.

There is an alternative for woodworkers to the Roubo style frame saw for medium scale resawing and sawing of smaller boards. Introducing the Woodmizer -1, haha. Its a 450mm rip saw with about 3tpi, made by MIG welding a tang to a western panel saw.

I’ve felt the need for a smaller saw for ripping boards. Especially as the piece of timber that you’re milling becomes lighter, a full scale maebiki-oga becomes very hard to use, simply too much saw for the cut. While I would love to have a frame saw I feel that a pull saw offers several advantages in comparison.

First, a pull saw is much lighter and easier to use when the orientation of the cut is less than perfectly plumb. Second, the tooth line is shorter, faster to sharpen, and fits the natural length of stroke for a single sawyer. Frame saws have a definite advantage of allowing two person use, which creates good efficiencies, but most of us are working alone, and three feet of saw blade is a stretch to use evenly.  Third, there is no problem running a pull saw through a wide cant, where a frame saw can only cut material that fits between the frame. The wider the frame the more skill would be required to make sawing smooth and comfortable.

As it turns out I cut  ridiculously aggressive tooth geometry on this saw. Over the course of trying it out I’ve basically tuned it back to a neutral rake angle by back beveling the teeth with a micro bevel. Any saw will need tuning to the specific species and quality of wood you are sawing. In my case the limiting factor in milling pine is the knots. The fastest saw is not the most aggressive saw, its the smoothest saw that you can keep running with ease and rhythm in the cut. If you waste a lot of time hung up pulling through knots in tortured jerking fashion its not a fast saw. I had to push the tooth set way way out, but the kerf is still about 1/16″.

MIG welding butt edged sheet steel is not easy. My first try at the tang weld quickly failed. Forge welding would be much preferable, but using MIG meant that I didn’t spoil the saw plate temper and it didn’t need much correction of plate flatness.

Somebody asked about my preference for an ink line over a chalk line. An ink line serves as more than just a snap line, its the pot you dip sumisashi in for layout. Plus, its not that hard to make your own.

The ink throws off the line better than chalk, and sumi ink is a rich and satisfying black colour, without worry of it fading or rubbing off.

The sumitsubo is a fiddly tool, I’m still learning to keep the ink the right consistency and the wadding just the right degree of wet. Sometimes I find the sumisashi quite difficult to give a good line, especially when marking with the grain. In the end the ink pot, bamboo brush, and Japanese carpenters square have been designed to work really well together and its worth the difficulties to learn their use.

My latest Japanese franken-saw greatly exceeded expectations. I know just enough about saws now to be dangerous. The handle is a little low to the tooth line but I wanted to keep the tang weld as long as possible for strength. But if you’re looking for a cheap way to put a saw together that can handle material out to about 12″ (although fletch cut at 12″ might make a bitch out of your kerf, quartersawing is more stable), its a viable option. The perfect saw in this range for green timber in my mind is a bit larger with a thicker plate, but for such an ugly saw it does still work, and at a fraction of the cost for putting a Roubo style frame saw together. What do you think?