A handmade home for woodworkers and admirers of woodworkers. Our community icon is a planter box made by @Captain Aggravated, the winner of our summer '24 woodworking contest. Congratulations!
After researching the medallion on the handle I found out it's a 1940s Disston D8 26" 10TPI crosscut saw
I tried to follow the process from this video https://youtu.be/cN8yMAXp54s for the most part. Haven't done any sharpening on it yet. Still need the tools.
Rex's videos are amazing for learning woodworking using hand tools, you might want to check Paul Sellers' guide on sharpening too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fNosQU1Ujg
I haven't watched Paul's long video on sharpening. Just the short 10 minute one. I really liked Rob Cosman's video on it. He showed how you can put your file throught a piece of wood to help you keep your file held at a certain angle. Then he drew some 60 degree marks on his saw vise. Having both of those helpers seems like it makes the process fool proof
Paul has 2 videos one for crosscut saws and one for rip saws, both are amazing. In one of them he grinds the teeth flat and recut them from scratch, it's a very comprehensive guide on saw sharpening.
I never sharpened a cross saw, and only restored one rip saw, so not a master craftsman, but even with my limited experience I managed to get the saw cutting like butter. So it doesn't have to be perfect, and the teeth don't need to be completely identical, they just need to be sharp.
Looks good, how did you deal with the rust?
I just used 150 grit sandpaper then I rubbed some wax all over it to keep it from rusting again.
In the video from my other comment the guy does 150 grit, 400, 800, 1200 or something like that. I didn't do a ton of sanding on the other side. Planning to come back and do a little more work on it. There's some cool stuff etched on the other side about Disston and more saw info. I've got some more research to do for figuring out how to remove the rust while preserving the writing.
I used renaissance wax, but after seeing fine woodworking post on preventing corrosion i might go with using the CRC stuff they picked. (https://www.finewoodworking.com/2012/05/31/the-best-rust-preventers need to sign up to get the PDF 😭)
Nice work...I just finished restoring an old panel saw. Good elbow grease with steel wool and WD-40...