Saw Shop Tech, questions and answers: bent blades, retempering knives, chisel handles.

Vern Burke, SwiftWater Edge Tool Works

Skowhegan, ME

It’s time to dip in to some of the questions asked via the blog and the service website and answer them!

1. (question about sharpening a bent blade)

Simply put, it all depends. Saws can reasonably be sharpened with bent blades, straight blade items such as knives can NOT be properly sharpened with any bend that involves the edge.

2. (question about straightening and retempering knives)

Simple answer, don’t even think of it unless you’re an accomplished smith with access to a forge. In most cases, bent knives don’t need to be untempered before straightening. The best quality knives are likely to break before they bend significantly in the first place so any bent knife is likely to be fairly soft and can be straightened cold with reasonable care.

3. (question about fitting handles to socket handle chisels)

Fitting a handle to a vintage socket handle chisel is a matter of lots of trial and error. I use sandpaper to shape the handle to the chisel’s socket, then I treat the handle with my boiled linseed oil formula, as well as putting a good slug of it in the socket before seating the handle. The linseed oil will swell the end of the handle, insuring a tight and long lasting fit.

Visit me at any of the following locations:

Depot St, Norridgewock, ME (Mondays)

Tractor Supply, Skowhegan, ME (Tuesday)

Somerset Woods turnout, Canaan Rd (Rt 2), Skowhegan,ME (Wednesday)

Arundel Flea Market, Rt 1 & Log Cabin Rd, Arundel, ME (Fridays)

Fryeburg Flea Market (Fryeburg Fairgrounds), Fryeburg, ME
(Sundays, Memorial Day thru end of September)

298 W Front St, Skowhegan, ME (all other days)

If you’re looking for a special tool, please drop me an
email and let me know and I’ll restore one just for you!

SwiftWater Edge Tool Works provides mobile sharpening services across Maine and mail in services around the world for handsaws, carbide blades, planer knives, hand planes, chain saws, knives, scissors, hair clippers, router bits, and almost any blade!

New in the Saw Shop: one man crosscut saw, Atkins #52 bucking saw, Kelly Perfect axe, Jersey pattern axe.

Vern Burke, SwiftWater Edge Tool Works

Skowhegan, ME

Just added a great new selection of restored vintage tools to stock!

Kelly Perfect Boy’s Axe. This is a vintage Kelly Perfect pattern axe with a 2 1/2lb head. This size axe is known as a “boy’s axe”. The profile of this axe is excellent for both chopping and splitting. Combined with the lighter weight, this makes this size axe a favorite for camping! The axe also has a new hickory 28″ handle with our dark linseed oil finish!

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$50.00

E-W Co Jersey Pattern Axe. This is a vintage 3 1/2lb Jersey pattern axe, marked “E-W Co”. This axe is a semi-wedge profile, suitable for both chopping and splitting and has a new hickory 28″ handle with our dark linseed oil finish!

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$40.00

42″ one man crosscut This is a one man crosscut saw with a 42″ long blade with a Champion tooth pattern. There is no medallion screw on this saw and any etch that might have been present is long gone so I can’t say which of the big saw makers made this one. The blade is clean, sharp, and set, the handle is one of the nicest ones I’ve done with our dark linseed oil finish and durable spar urethane clear coat. Hang this one on the wall as art or put it back to work!

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$75.00

Western style bucking crosscut saw. This is an Atkins #52 2 man Western style bucking crosscut saw, 6’6″ blade, lance teeth (lots of length, looks like it was never sharpened!), 95% readable etch, 2 restored loop type handles.

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$175.00

If you’d like to purchase any of these restored tools, drop me an email, give me a call at 207-399-7108 or visit me at any of the following locations:

Depot St, Norridgewock, ME (Mondays)
Tractor Supply, Skowhegan, ME (Tuesday)
Somerset Woods turnout, Canaan Rd (Rt 2), Skowhegan, Me (Wednesday)
Arundel Flea Market, Rt 1 & Log Cabin Rd, Arundel, ME (Fridays)
298 W Front St, Skowhegan, ME (all other days)

If you’re looking for a special tool, please drop me an
email and let me know and I’ll restore one just for you!

SwiftWater Edge Tool Works provides mobile sharpening services across Maine and mail in services around the world for handsaws, carbide blades, planer knives, hand planes, chain saws, knives, scissors, hair clippers, router bits, and almost any blade!

In The Saw Shop: restoring vintage tools, to refinish handles or not, that is the question.

Vern Burke, SwiftWater Edge Tool Works

Skowhegan, ME

I’m always pleased when I hear a customer comment on how beautiful my restored vintage tools are, but every once in a while, someone will take exception to what I do.

A lot of the people who are used to dealing in antiques are horrified to see me refinishing handsaw, wood plane, and other vintage tool handles and wood such as transitional plane bodies. For these folks, disturbing the original finish (or remnants of original finish) or “patina” (don’t get me started on “patina”) on anything old is a cardinal sin and destroys the value of it completely.

The first fact is that the tools I restore are done with the goal of returning beautiful and high quality tools the likes of which are not being made today to use. People (rightfully) won’t buy a tool that looks like garbage (no matter how much of a wonderful antique it might be) because it’s unusable in that condition. A handsaw with a rusty and crusty blade and a cracked and split gray weather worn handle might have the virtue of being “all original” but even the most ardent tool collector wouldn’t hang it on the wall, much less try to use it.

Second, leaving wooden tool handles and other wooden tool parts missing finish WILL end up destroying them. I just took a RARE Disston #1 (C. Bishop Special) handsaw in today to do a total restore for a customer (you never know what someone is going to bring into the mobile sharpening rig). Made between 1865 and 1876, this saw has an arrow straight blade, darned near perfect teeth, and, most surprisingly, a 100% bright and legible etch! It also has a handle with 5% original finish, a whole bunch of checking, and a nasty crack through the medallion hole that has also started a crack near the lower horn, threatening to split the entire handle in half. Leave this unfixed and the next thing you’re going to have is a rare blade with splinters instead of a handle.

Leaving vintage tool wood without finish allows it to expand and contract repeatedly from absorbing moisture and the drying out. Expand and contract enough and now you have a crack. Crack enough and now you have a pile of debris that used to be a handle.
I keep repairing 1 man crosscut saw “D” handles that show this, gray, weather worn, and tons of small cracks.

On the old Disston #1, I’ll secure the crack at the bottom of the grip with a hidden brass wood screw and seal the crack with Loctite Woodbonder. Once I’m sure the handle won’t split, I’ll remove the handle from the saw and repair the split across the cheek with Woodbonder again. After I seal the remaining larger cracks, I’ll sand the entire handle clean and smooth, coat it thoroughly with my linseed oil and stain combination formula (for a near duplicate appearance to the original finish) to “feed the wood”, and a textured spar urethane clearcoat. The spar urethane closely matches the appearance of the original finish, provides better grip, is highly durable, and is impervious to water and weather.

The purists can keep their disintegrating handles and other vintage tool wood, MY customers get a finish that looks great, looks original, but is comfortable to use and wears like iron.

I’m pretty sure I know which they’ll prefer.

Visit me at any of the following locations:

Depot St, Norridgewock, ME (Mondays)
Tractor Supply, Skowhegan, ME (Tuesday)
Arundel Flea Market, Rt 1 & Log Cabin Rd, Arundel, ME (Fridays)
298 W Front St, Skowhegan, ME (all other days)

If you’re looking for a special tool, please drop me an
email and let me know and I’ll restore one just for you!

SwiftWater Edge Tool Works provides mobile sharpening services across Maine and mail in services around the world for handsaws, carbide blades, planer knives, hand planes, chain saws, knives, scissors, hair clippers, router bits, and almost any blade!

In the Saw Shop: restored Stanley No. 10 1/2 carriage maker’s rabbet plane.

Vern Burke, SwiftWater Edge Tool Works

Skowhegan, ME

It’s not often I get a chance to show a before and after of something I’ve restored to give people an idea of just what goes in to doing this.

Here’s the “before” of a first generation (1885-1892) Stanley No. 10 1/2 carriage maker’s rabbet plane (aka smooth rabbet).

These planes are in great demand, scarce to start with, and even harder to find undamaged. I don’t think even a mother could have loved this one though. Rusty, crusty, 95% of the finish gone from the body, most of the finish gone from the wood, you couldn’t even tell what kind of wood the tote and the knob were, missing parts.

Here’s the after picture of the same 10 1/2.

I think Mom would approve of this one now . Thoroughly cleaned top to bottom, the body refinished, well sharpened, the tote and the knob turned out to be gorgeous Brazilian rosewood and treated to an old school linseed oil finish and clearcoated. This is a vintage tool that not only works great, it looks great too.

There is a world of beautiful vintage tools out there and I’m rescuing them one at a time .

As always, if you’re interested in purchasing any of the restored vintage tools I show here on the block or in inventory on the website, give me a call at 207-399-7108, drop me an email, or visit me at any of the following locations:

Depot St, Norridgewock ME (Mondays)
Tractor Supply, Skowhegan, ME (Tuesday)
Arundel Flea Market, Rt 1 & Log Cabin Rd, Arundel, ME (Fridays)
298 W Front St, Skowhegan, ME (all other days)

If you’re looking for a special tool, please drop me an
email and let me know and I’ll restore one just for you!

SwiftWater Edge Tool Works provides mobile sharpening services across Maine and mail in services around the world for handsaws, carbide blades, planer knives, hand planes, chain saws, knives, scissors, hair clippers, router bits, and almost any blade!

Saw Shop Tech: Vintage saw steel quality, the facts, the fiction, the marketing babble.

Vern Burke, SwiftWater Edge Tool Works

Skowhegan, ME

I had a special request to talk about the differences in vintage saw steel between different major brands of saws so here I am! I’m going to separate fact from fiction from marketing smoke from the practical view of the saw sharpener.

First off, I want to make clear that I’m talking about good old high carbon steel blades here. Chrome is an absolutely atrocious thing to put in saw steel. Adding chrome to saw steel to make it “stainless” makes the steel behave like a very thick liquid (I refer to it as “gummy”) rather than a nice hard solid. Using a file on chromey steel produces fine gouges where a nice high carbon blade produces an extremely smooth edge. I have yet to see any chromey saw that can come close to matching the quality of edge of a high carbon blade.

“London spring steel”, “Extra”, Disston certainly invented more than a few marketing terms to make their saw steel stand out from the competition in the mind of the buyer. The problem is, from the standpoint of the saw sharpener, there’s little difference in any of it. Disston saws uniformly file and set without difficulty and they produce teeth sharp and pointy enough to seriously bite you if you’re not careful about handling them (especially the 1 man and 2 man crosscut saws!). I’ve gotten sliced by Disston crosscut saws more than once and it was sharp enough that I didn’t know it at the time.

I also know at least one informal study has been done and the various “types” of Disston saw steel were virtually identical, bearing out my sharpening observations. Disston made great saw steel, the rest of it is marketing fluff.

The same things generally apply to Simmonds saws. At least Simmonds just advertised that their saws were made of “Simmonds Steel” and didn’t invent (and reinvent) bogus marketing names for it. Simmonds blades generally sharpen, set, and behave comparably to the Disston ones. Once again, just generally great steel.

It is worth noting here that Disston and Simmonds both made their own saw steel so there’s likely an advantage in consistency of the steel in these saws, but good saw steel appears to be just good saw steel.

The one vintage saw steel I have seen some difference in is Atkins “Silver Steel”. I’m not aware of the actual chemical composition of this steel, but the 6 1/2″ Atkins No.52 2 man crosscut bucking saw I currently have in stock seems to be a fair amount tougher than either the Disston or Simmonds crosscut saws. The Atkins seemed to take a bit more effort to file and definitely required more effort to set, but I certainly wouldn’t call it a runaway.

So, what to take away from this? In the end result here, there really isn’t enough difference in the saw steel to justify accepting or rejecting a vintage saw on that basis. Get a saw from one of the big three ( Disston, Atkins, or Simmonds ) ( or an OEM version ) and avoid the temptation of the shiny saw that never rusts and the evils of chrome and you’ll be just fine with the quality of the steel in your blade!

Visit me at any of the following locations:

Depot St, Norridgewock ME (Mondays)
Tractor Supply, Skowhegan, ME (Tuesday)
Arundel Flea Market, Rt 1 & Log Cabin Rd, Arundel, ME (Fridays)
298 W Front St, Skowhegan, ME (all other days)

If you’re looking for a special tool, please drop me an
email and let me know and I’ll restore one just for you!

SwiftWater Edge Tool Works provides mobile sharpening services across Maine and mail in services around the world for handsaws, carbide blades, planer knives, hand planes, chain saws, knives, scissors, hair clippers, router bits, and almost any blade!

Thoughts from the Saw Shop: Misconceptions about restoring and maintaining old tools.

Vern Burke, SwiftWater Edge Tool Works

Skowhegan, ME

“Refurbishing an old axe is much cheaper than buying a new one. All you need is about $2000+ worth of shop equipment and the space to keep it, and you can have a good, solid axe for $3.”

I just ran across this comment on a YouTube axe video and it had me shaking my head. Of course, the video had me shaking my head too. Using an electric angle grinder to polish a vintage axe head and multiple metal wedges in a new handle are just simply atrocious things NOT to do.

It amazes me the people who think you have to have a building full of expensive equipment to work on vintage tools. The old timers would have laughed at anyone who couldn’t maintain their axe with just a good file or two, a selection of hand oil stones, and maybe a foot treadle or hand cranked wet grindstone. So, if the people who used axes all their lives day in and day out maintained them that simply, why can’t people manage it today?

For the same reason, we get garbage like this video. It gives me nightmares to think of someone grinding on a vintage axe head with an electric angle grinder in a silly attempt to “polish” it. Driving steel wedges as the main wedge in a wooden axe handle is one of the primary reasons I have to drill out and replace what should be perfectly good handles when I can’t pull and rewedge a loose handle because the steel wedges have rusted inside the wood.

The answer to this is that people don’t want to bother to take the time to do things the right way. It takes a bit of effort to get set up with the appropriate hand tools and practice learning how to maintain an axe with them. It also takes a bit of time to set up a vintage axe head the right way rather than just do a quickie hack job on it with an angle grinder.

In most cases, I use the same vintage hand tools the old timers used to do the job. My best oil stone is at least 150 years old, my anvil (for straightening bent blades and setting teeth, etc) is a 100+ year old family heirloom, etc. I set the teeth on a modern weed whacker brush saw this week with a vintage manual saw set that I rescued from antique shop and restored that must have been at least 100.

So, what’s the take away from this? Misusable modern power tools + no training + not willing to spend any time on it will almost always create a substandard result. If you care about your vintage axe, saw, or other tool, either get the right tools and educate yourself how to care for it properly or trust it to a sharpener (like myself) who does.

And if you see an angle grinder hanging on your sharpener’s wall, run away.

Visit me at any of the following locations:

Elm Plaza, Waterville, ME (Mondays)
Tractor Supply, Skowhegan, ME (Tuesday)
Arundel Flea Market, Rt 1 & Log Cabin Rd, Arundel, ME (Fridays)
298 W Front St, Skowhegan, ME (all other days)

If you’re looking for a special tool, please drop me an
email and let me know and I’ll restore one just for you!

SwiftWater Edge Tool Works provides mobile sharpening services across Maine and mail in services around the world for handsaws, carbide blades, planer knives, hand planes, chain saws, knives, scissors, hair clippers, router bits, and almost any blade!

Mobile sharpening temporary schedule change: Arundel Flea Market, 04/06/12

Vern Burke, SwiftWater Edge Tool Works

Skowhegan, ME

Due to being somewhat under the weather, I’m going to be passing up my normal mobile sharpening service and restored tool sales run to the Arundel Flea Market on 04/06/12. I will resume normal scheduled service next week on 04/13/12.

In lieu of Arundel, I’ll be available at 209 W Front St, Skowhegan ME (home base) all day.

Visit me at any of the following locations:

Elm Plaza, Waterville, ME (Mondays)
Tractor Supply, Skowhegan, ME (Tuesday)
Arundel Flea Market, Rt 1 & Log Cabin Rd, Arundel, ME (Fridays)
298 W Front St, Skowhegan, ME (all other days)

If you’re looking for a special tool, please drop me an
email and let me know and I’ll restore one just for you!

SwiftWater Edge Tool Works provides mobile sharpening services across Maine and mail in services around the world for handsaws, carbide blades, planer knives, hand planes, chain saws, knives, scissors, hair clippers, router bits, and almost any blade!

In the Saw Shop, coming to stock: Stanley #10 1/2 carriage maker’s rabbet plane!

Vern Burke, SwiftWater Edge Tool Works

Skowhegan, ME

You just never know what’s going to come waltzing through the door when I’m out on the road with the mobile sharpening rig .

Today’s little beauty and this week’s restoration project is a scarce Stanley #10 1/2 carriage maker’s rabbet plane (aka “smooth rabbet”).

(not a picture of the actual plane, I can’t restore them that fast )

This is a timeline equivalent to the Type 6 Bailey bench planes (1885-1892) and is the first version of this plane. This is a 9″ long plane, almost exactly size matched to the Stanley Bailey #4 smooth plane (hence the “smooth rabbet” moniker). The original cutting iron has at least 3/4 of it’s length left and plane also has the sliding front section that opens and closes the mouth for softwood vs hardwood work without tearout.

This plane is slated to be finished and available by 04/10/12!

Visit me at any of the following locations:

Elm Plaza, Waterville, ME (Mondays)
Tractor Supply, Skowhegan, ME (Tuesday)
Arundel Flea Market, Rt 1 & Log Cabin Rd, Arundel, ME (Fridays)
298 W Front St, Skowhegan, ME (all other days)

If you’re looking for a special tool, please drop me an
email and let me know and I’ll restore one just for you!

SwiftWater Edge Tool Works provides mobile sharpening services across Maine and mail in services around the world for handsaws, carbide blades, planer knives, hand planes, chain saws, knives, scissors, hair clippers, router bits, and almost any blade!