I want to show you how to sharpen a crosscut saw I get this request often
enough we've done rip saws and most of the saws will be sharpened in for a rip cut
because much of our work is furniture makers is for rip cutting not cross
cutting but on a building site on a construction site you probably will do
more cross cutting than rip cutting now that we've got to re sharpenable saw
we can cross cut with it we can resharpen it in about four or five
minutes most people especially carpenters should be able to sharpen
their saw in three or four minutes what I've done here is I've just taken two
sticks of of wood 2 inches by 1 inch I put a screw through here and between the
two pieces I've put a washer that just takes up the kerf or the thickness of
the plate so when I slide this in here I can squeeze it together in the vise and
I'm on my way but first of all I want to show you a little bit that we need to
discuss here what's the difference between a rip cut saw and a cross cut so
I'm going to bring these two pieces of Steel up side-by-side so that you can
see the actual teeth as you might find them in a saw you would find them in a
saw most Western saws we have a rip cut saw pattern and a cross cut in this top
one here we have a crosscut saw on the bottom one we have a rip cut saw let's
just look at the rip cut on its own first if you're looking at the side of
this plate here you can see you can't see that there are two facets on either
side of it that are squares because they are square to the length of the long
axis of the saw plate when you look at the cross cut saw on the other hand you can
see on this one you don't see anything on this side and nothing on this side
but when you come to the adjacent tooth you can see the side of this one on the
side of this one the same when you move along this way and this way skip a tooth
go to this one on this one this means that these teeth have been brought to a
pinnacle point we've actually done the same on these that you don't
see this side you just can't see it from your
side of the saw so you can see how this point and this point this point and this
point are the actual cutting points rather than chisel teeth and that's the
difference between crosscut teeth when you see the teeth from the top you start
to see how this dynamic works or you will actually learn that through the
sharpening of the saws so that's what we're going to show up and now I want to
show you how to sharpen a crosscut saw to a particular pattern here's my
crosscut saw it needs touching up you've been using it two or three months you've
been cross cutting with it and it needs sharpening so we line this up in the
holder just like this and then clamp it in the vise like this
now I'm taking oops not quite level I'm taking I'm going to start at this handle
end of the saw and what we're going to do the teeth on a saw plate are
staggered like this we're going to stagger the teeth like this they're
already set to that when you buy us all the teeth are going to be set like this
that means that one set of teeth are moving if you put it in the plate this
way one set are moving away from you the other set is coming towards you what we
want to do is sharpen the back of the tooth it's leaning away from us so in
this case here I'm sharpening this is the very first tooth here I'm sharpening
the back of this tooth then I skip a gullet and I go to the next one on this
one I'm going to sharpen the back of the tooth leaning away from me therefore
because the file cuts two facets at once I'm going to be sharpening the the front
of the tooth that's actually leaning towards me in the same stroke let's take
a look at that first I'm going to skip the back of this tooth here I'm going to
skip the first tooth this is the one that's leaning towards away from it and
this is the back of the tooth leaning away from me can you see this angle here
this is about sixty-five degrees and let me show you
what you might want to do is set something like this at the 65 degrees
and then run some lines onto a piece of card stock like this flip it over and do
the same again or you could simply put the lines directly onto here just do
them every one inch or so across here and that will give you the angle that
you want and then you can go in again here and do exactly the same that will
just give you angles to line up the saw file tooth as you're filing so
watch what happens here I skip that tooth I'm into the gullet here this is the
back of the tooth leaning away from me that's on on this side of the the file
so I angle this if you want to line it up with something like this then you
will be lining it up with the original pattern on the saw on the fleam so there
we go so we take one two one two one two
so we're skipping every other tooth from one end of the saw to the other the file
is level across from front from my hand to the second hand the file is level
across but when you look from the top looking down onto this you'll see I'm
trying to follow this pattern move it along a little bit keep it in line with
the back of here I'll keep this card stock I don't really need that
anymore and I don't need to get hung up on this
angle because the edge is going to be sharp and the pinnacle tooth is going to
be sharp so don't get hung up on it if you find yourself drifting losing
concentration on that angle is not going to affect the the the saw too much just
have something to aim for when you're doing this and I think that will
help you to focus on what you're really trying to do is get the file deep into
the gullet follow the present angle of the saw all the way through yeah I can
feel myself drifting off a little bit so I've corrected it this is where it would
be handy it's much handier right on the on the holder really but this works too
is working great I'm bringing this back into the main body of the vise just
because I can see it more clearly it's more solid in here and I can see from
here I can see but when you've got a saw that's been used for a month or a few
days even the steel oxidizes on the teeth and and so you can see from the
new shine where you finished off and where you starting over again you do
want to avoid can you see how this is aligning up with this wh at you want to
avoid is going too far this way and making that pinnacle too too thin having
to angle the point and so on so there are things that you look for to correct
yourself
that's that so where do we go now this is the next thing now you've got used to
filing at that angle you have to do an exact opposite so we take this out flip
it over bring it into the vise and now it becomes less comfortable because we
just got used to that other angle and bang there you go you got to get used to
another angle so this time we're going to be filing the back of the to clean it
away from it again so this time we're going in here like this check that one
too taking this the same length of file stroke taking the same way keeping the
same angle means that you're creating each tooth equally to one another if you
took one stroke off o ne and three off another then you'd have what we call
sergeants and suppers or calves and cows that means you have a big one or little
one not much good really so develop good habits now ah hear that I went in the
wrong gullet and I took a foul stroke do I do anything about it forget it just
move on you made a mistake don't do it again
good strong firm stroke
moving along the plate it feels more awkward at the moment but by the time I
get to this end my body will be adjusted to, I lost my tooth... it feels good feels nice and spiky
looks nice I'm looking for that gullet light the last gullet I did this saw has
seven points to the inch and there is a decision you have to make whether you do
enough cross-cutting to warrant owning a saw just for cross cutting but bigger
the teeth get say a five four six seven point saw you really do need to have a
dedicated saw for cross and then one for rip cut once you
get finer than ten points per inch so you can stay with a rip cut for cross
cutting all the way through so 10 12 14 16 18 20 you can just sharpen for a rip
cut it works perfectly well but as the teeth get bigger they're taking bigger
bites you need to have a dedicated saw
and there's the one we wanted that was the last one so now we have a crosscut
saw sharpened ready for action and this works great so this would be a saw that
I might use on bigger pieces of wood I'm at Cross cut I don't know two inches and
thicker still you can cross cut thinner than that let's take a look see what we
got here
it's definitely easier to cross cut with a crosscut saw and the nice thing is you
can sharpen this for a hundred years and it'll just go down in thickness but
it'll still be big enough wide enough rigid enough to cut wood so yeah a
hundred years saw, perfect