Barnacle Bill Magazine March 2016 issue 3 | Page 36

36 The Bosun’s Mate Quality power saws were going to be too expensive. Maybe if I build a cedar strip boat in the future I might invest in a table saw but for my purposes at the moment it was unnecessary. Hand saws. Before we go on, it’s important to understand that hand saws of all types have different teeth arrangements that are used depending on what type of cut you are making. The two main types are rip saws and cross cut saws. Rip saws are designed for making cuts with the grain of the wood. Cross cut saws are designed for making cuts across the grain of the wood. You do get universal saws which can do both, sometimes called ‘carpentry’ saws. These can be very useful for general carpentry but for work which requires long straight rip cuts you are better off with a dedicated rip saw and for jointing or detail work you are better off with a cross cut saw. Another saw term you will see used is ‘kerf ’. A kerf is a cut made by a saw or the width of the blade of the saw. So a thin kerf saw will make a narrow cut with minimum wood wasted. The thinner the blade the more bendy it is and the greater the risk of bending the saw, breaking a tooth or snapping the blade so backsaws, both western and Japanese, have a stiffening strip along the top edge. The decision, therefore was to buy a set of handsaws and a system that would allow me to make long rip cuts easily as well as accurate cross cuts, key hole cuts and joinery cuts for joints. This would mean more than one saw as different shapes and teeth arrangements deliver different results. East vs west To those of us living in the west, and in particular in the English speaking world, there are two types of handsaw available to us. The ‘western saw’ and the ‘Japanese saw’. Both come in different shapes and sizes depending on the cut required but the essential difference between them is that western saws mostly cut on the push stroke and Japanese saws cut on the pull stroke. Each type has advantages and disadvantages; both, if used properly and of decent quality, should provide excellent results. Which to choose? This is one of those subjective discussions that takes up miles of columns in the wood working press and millions of gigs worth of forum debates. The bottom line is there is no right or wrong answer, each have their own advantages and disadvantages. I’m not going to list those by bullet point, rather discuss each.