22VIDEO See a great hand saw in action

In this video I want to talk to you about my favorite hand saw and I'm going to show you how to use it

There are lots of hand saws in the world and most of them don't work very well

This is an exception. I've used lots of different kinds of hand saws over the years, but I've never seen anything like this

Erwin doesn't pay me to say this. It's just a great saw. This is the 20 inch model. There is a similar one. It's 15 inches long

That's fine. I do like the 20 inch. You can cut faster with it because you have a longer stroke and you can get more done

But this has been used for a long time. It's not a fresh saw

I do have a brand new one right here. It doesn't really look any different

To your thumb, you can't really tell much of a difference. I'll make two cuts. One with the old and one with the new one so you can see how well this kind of saw keeps on cutting

But there's two reasons why it cuts so well. First of all, the shape of the teeth are more angular than the shape of most hand saw teeth

Coming to a pointier point. Now, do you notice how the teeth are darker in color than the rest of the body

That's because this is what you call a hard point saw. That's not a brand name or anything. That's a description and it refers to the metal of the teeth being too hard to sharpen

Now you might think that's no good. Traditional hand saws were sharpened

A special file, special jig, special person with lots of skills and they could take a dull hand saw and file it and it works well again

I have never seen a sharpenable hand saw that would work as well as this saw in terms of hungriness for cutting

But they still did work very well but they needed to be resharpened because the steel wasn't all that hard so the teeth didn't stay pointy for all that long

Hard points can't be resharpened so in a sense it's a disposable saw and I don't really like that

But it lasts so long that it doesn't really matter. You can go for years

Just even if this is your only saw, even just using it for the kind of small work woodworking projects that I'm telling you about here

But anyway, works great. Don't bother getting any other kind. 20 inch Irwin

They call it the universal hand saw. There's more information about this saw in the course

Now I want to show you how to use a saw like this properly. I just get this here

I'm going to make a sample cut. Well let's see. This end of the board has some cracks in it and some defects so I'm going to cut that off

Let's see. We need to go about this far to get rid of the defects

This piece of wood also happens to be cupped a little bit this way so if I have it here it can kind of rock a little bit

If I turn it over it's going to, well it's still going to rock a bit. Maybe it doesn't really matter too much but I will mark it

This is my combination square here. It's a mechanical pencil. Fabulous for woodworking actually

So I've got a line and I've got a saw and I want to cut accurately along that line

So the square let me get the line square in this direction. So I know this is 90 degrees

See if I can draw it so you can see it. I know that's 90 degrees because the square gave me that

What I don't know, what's a little trickier to ensure is that the cut is also square 90 degrees in that direction

There's a little trick for making that happen but it depends on having a nice shiny hand saw

So come on around. I want to show you how I use the reflection of the wood in the saw to help me get a nice square cut

For this demonstration I'm using the new saw because it's a little bit shinier than the old one

The old one would work fine for this but it's just going to show up better on the camera for you

Now this is where I want to start the cut. Now can you see the reflection there? That's the reflection of the wood here

And if I deviate from square in this direction you see how I've lost the continuity of the line

Of the reflection of the line. And the same if I do this. You know if I deviate from square in this direction I also lose the continuity

So continuity is what I want because when the reflection appears to go right through the saw

and align itself perfectly with the other side then I know I'm square in this direction

and I'm also square in this direction. And it actually works. So let me just try a few strokes here. Now when we're starting it's important to keep my eye on that reflection

Because now is the time when I'm getting the saw going in its slot if you know what I mean

I mean when I'm part way through the cut I have far less leeway to move it around because the cut

kind of guides the saw but right now there's no guiding going on. So I have to adjust this and

well it looks pretty good. It's going to waver a bit as I start to cut but I want to keep that going

Now you see I've made a good start and the saw cut is already starting to guide the saw

So I'm good. I'm in good shape as far as squareness goes. Now I want to point out something else too. Take a close look here

There's my line. I'm cutting on the waist side of the line. Ideally if I'm being really particular

I'm going to try to split that line. But if I'm a little bit on the outside of it that's fine

As long as I don't go on the inside of it. I want to be able to see pencil lead all the way along

the cut. I don't want to deviate in. If I deviate out that's less of a problem but it still is

kind of hard to get it back to the line because if the cut is just a little bit past the line

there's no way I can use the handsaw to fix that. The handsaw won't be able to hang on to its cut

It will kind of always fall out of the cut. But now I'm ready to go at this with a fair amount of force

And I want you to notice how far this saw cuts with each stroke. It's quite remarkable. It's

actually fairly easy to get something that approaches one inch of progress through a board

this thick in just about one stroke. So it's a remarkable saw. And one thing to keep in mind

the teeth are pointed forward on this design which means that the cutting action actually

happens when you're pushing the saw down. When you're bringing it back there's not a whole lot

of cutting action that's happening. So keep that in mind. It's the downward thrust

that's going to do the cutting and that's where you want to put the muscle into it. So let's get going

Pay attention to how much progress I'm making through the wood with each stroke as I go down

Notice also I'm almost through now and if I just kept on cutting it might be okay. There's not a whole lot of weight here on the waist side of the cut

But I don't want to take any chances and have it splinter in. So I'm going to slow down now

and I'm going to hold on to this to give it a little bit of support. There we go. Our nice cut

Nice and square. Now that's not a very fine saw so this is somewhat rough but that's as smooth as

that saw can cut and there are other ways there are ways of smoothening this that we'll get to

But for now that's what a good cut looks like. Let's try a little something here

Just to show you how fast the saw hand saw can be. I'm going to make another cut and I'm going to do it in real time. We're not going to edit anything out

I'm going to get it started and then you just see how quickly this thing goes through

This is nine inches of inch and a half thick wood. Who says hand saws can't do fast work? So just before I finish up let's see how good that cut was

So if you take a close look you see I didn't lose the pencil line. I can see it all the way along

Actually it might be get a little thin here but that's a good cut. I like that cut and let's just

see how it shapes up as far as squareness goes. Well it's good in this direction and I'm not

surprised because we laid out the line with the square. Trickier is in this direction

And can you see that? Quite good. That's what you want to see. That's a nice cut. I have to warn you about something

just before I finish up here. Do not get discouraged. I first started working with

wood when I was seven years old. I'm almost 58 now so I've had a half a century of experience

doing this stuff and I've always used hand saws at least for some of my work. So I've had lots and

lots of practice. You will not be able to do this right away but that's okay. You can just practice

and you know you don't necessarily have to just cut pieces of wood that you're going to use for

a project. I mean a chunk of wood like this doesn't cost very much and it's a pretty nice piece of

wood too so you could even practice on some scrap. It doesn't really matter. It's just the matter of

marking the line, paying attention to the reflection, and then hand-eye coordination

so you're just skirting on the waist side of the pencil line. Keep it up

and you'll have no trouble cutting like this too