Today I Filed a New Saw

It took me two minutes exactly to sharpen a 10" saw with 190 teeth.When it was done it cut as well as any premium saw I ever used and I have used the best of the best. The thing is this. Buy any saw from any maker, use it for lets say 40 hours and by that time it will need sharpening. So it's no use telling me how good a saw is out of the box because after using it for a short time it must be resharpened. Here's the other thing. A saw should never be dull when you sharpen it. People tend to leave it as long as they can and often until it almost stops cutting before the resharpen. That's a bad thing to do. One, it takes much longer to sharpen when left undone for too long, two, and this is more important, the sides of the teeth no longer sheer as the saw passes into and through the cut and this leaves unsharp edges to the shoulders or knifewall, three, it takes much more effort, four, it's slower.

Every woodworkers should master the art of sharpening handsaws of every type from the small gent's saw up to the 6 ppi handsaws. Another thing is this. Saws that come from the makers are rarely if every sharpened to task. Remember that they are usually some kind of engineer and mostly found a niche to make something to sell. Mostly they don't work with wood. When you learn to sharpen a saw at first you sharpen in a general pattern. After a while, not fifty five years, you learn to change angles and tooth bevels to suit, a) the task, b) the wood species, c) the wood type with regards to grain density and fibre type.

It's definitely bad practice to sell saws improperly sharpened in my view. But then again once you've bought any saw by any maker you must sharpen it shortly after anyway so what does it really matter in the scheme of things. I have always striven to give my customers the very best no matter how much they paid for my work. But that's me.