Hand Rip Sawing

[pedder]

Late to the party, but want to add my 0,02 €.

Even with a sharp saw I'd expect to take one cut about half an hour and 0,2 l of sweat. Two hand grip!
I would join the teeth an file them with about 5° rake. Derust before sharpening.
You would need more set with the rust. The main tip in sharpening a rip cut saw is to set as less as possible without the saw binds in the cerve.

Do you really need to cut small strips? Look at the Roubo Benches from Lost art press. All done from one solid piece of wood.

Cheers
Pedder

 

[Jacob]

..Derust before sharpening. ....

Well yes brush off loose rust but I wouldn't waste any more time on it. Linseed oil on a very rusty saw quickly polishes up with use and you end up with a dark brown to black shiny low friction finish like teflon, with only the teeth shiny from sharpening.
With a lot of use you eventually start seeing a grey glimmer of steel on the blade.

 

[DoctorWibble]

Since no-one else is I'll jump right in and say it. Yes, you're mad!
Why put so much effort turning nice wide boards into common 4 bys? Laminated benches are for people who cant get hold of or cant afford wide boards or slabs. Going the opposite way is perverse. You'll likely need to do 30 or 40 very long rips. And that's only the beginning. Then you'll be doing days and days of hand planning to ready the boards for glue up and days and days more to clean up the glued up parts. Your laminated tops are likely to be all over the place (hand ripping) and might be little thicker than 3" by the time you approach flat. Built this way your bench could become a bigger project than the workshop you're putting it in.
Do the sensible thing and build a design optimised for the wide boards you already have like a traditional English bench. Or at least keep your options open until you get a feel for what you're taking on. Like ripping the waney edges and making some legs before you fully commit to a laminated design.

 

[Jacob]

Yes you are right! I hadn't really looked at the OP's plan A.
A waste of excellent wood and a lot of unnecessary hard work!

 

[devonwoody]

Or purchase 3x 6"x2" softwood and a 6"1" for the top from a builders merchant and save hundreds of pounds in chiropractist costs over the next few years.

 

[DoctorWibble]

Fitz have you watched the Maguire video series on building a traditional planked bench? He uses redwood for his but your sycamore should be even better. Maybe not a common wood for benches these days (the standardising influence of the internet no doubt) but I think it deserves to be, its a lovely wood. We'd love to see some build pictures whichever way you go.

 

[DoctorWibble]

Not a workbench but gives an idea of what a planked sycamore bench top could look like:
http://coreymorganwoodworks.com/projects/live-edge-sycamore-conference-table-with-i-beam-base/

 

[ED65]

In my experience, an old saw sharpened as a rip saw, will out perform a modern hardpoint. Although current saws are very cheap and very sharp, they are optimised for cross cutting, which is far more commonly done by hand than ripping is.

I agree with this in principle but to be fair are we talking same TPI?

I just had cause to test this out on a crosscut saw that I converted to rip and while the rip saw tracked superbly well I was surprised to discover that my S&J Predator and Stanley saws with similar tooth counts both cut faster. A rip saw should rip with maximum efficiency, but some modern saws cut on both the push and pull strokes which it appears can offset the disadvantage of their cross-cut lineage.

 

[AndyT]

Ed, in my case, no, the hardpoint saws I have are probably about 12 tpi but my ripsaws are 4 tpi and 3 1/2 tpi. The last session of ripping I did was in thick timber where it was a challenge to clear all the sawdust and big teeth were a necessity.
On thin stuff I'd just use the bandsaw unless the board was too big and heavy.

 

[bugbear]

In my experience, an old saw sharpened as a rip saw, will out perform a modern hardpoint. Although current saws are very cheap and very sharp, they are optimised for cross cutting, which is far more commonly done by hand than ripping is.

I agree with this in principle but to be fair are we talking same TPI?

I just had cause to test this out on a crosscut saw that I converted to rip and while the rip saw tracked superbly well I was surprised to discover that my S&J Predator and Stanley saws with similar tooth counts both cut faster. A rip saw should rip with maximum efficiency, but some modern saws cut on both the push and pull strokes which it appears can offset the disadvantage of their cross-cut lineage.

Well, that the advantage of an old rip saw, isn't it. Rip filed, and 4 TPI!!

A modern cross cut at 4 TPI might well (as you say) compete with it, but such a creature does not exist.

BugBear

 

[Jacob]

I've often ripped 1" redwood boards OK with a 6tpi hand saw more or less filed for cross cut. Anything much thicker or harder and you really start to need a rip saw 3 to 4tpi and filed rip fashion.

 

[D_W]

5. Am I mad for thinking about this, how long should I expect a 2" thick 8' long rip in sycamore to take?

Late to the commenting, but I'd say once you're good at ripping, it's been my experience that a cut like this will proceed at about 1-2 feet per minute if you're getting after it with two hands.

I prefer on a wide board like this to sit on the board and rip with two hands with the tooth line facing me for the following reasons:
- it's easy to keep the saw vertical
- you're using two hands to power the saw
- you're not bearing your weight on the non-sawing hand
- the wood is held down by your rear, so it's not going anywhere

It's dissimilar enough to other operations in the shop that I can saw and then plane without tiring the same muscles in both activities.

4-8 minutes of this will have your "juices flowing" (as a former employer of mine used to say about mixing mortar on the dry side in a wheelbarrow with a hoe).

If you're working by hand, I'd agree with the other folks that you do as the folks did when this was the norm, and that is use the stock as it is whenever possible and go to extra trouble of dimensioning more only when necessary.

Lastly, on the saw, I would hand file the teeth just as they are until the broken tooth was full height or close again and then set the saw and use it. I like the progressive tooth size, and the only issue with it is people using a tooth cutting machine to stamp out new teeth (which you shouldn't have to do - the rest of those teeth look not too far off). I have one additional suggestion before going that far, though - often a very old saw that's got a broken tooth will also be a saw that is a candidate to break another one off when setting teeth. You may wish to just touch the teeth up a little bit (after removing at least a large percentage of the rust and getting the plate smooth) and then reset the teeth to where you want them. If a tooth breaks off when doing that, then set the saw aside and try to find something more modern (early 1900s or late 1800s) where production was more standardized and the hardening of the saw plates were more consistent from saw to saw as well as within the saw.

I'd hate to file those teeth to depth and then break two teeth off setting them. It's happened to me twice - both very old saws, and both already had a broken tooth when i picked them up. As I was becoming flush with saws, I switched to not buying any saws that had broken teeth since those broken tooth saws have a much higher probability of frustrating you by breaking more teeth.

 

[jimmy_s]

I wouldn't bother with the thought of using a cross cut saw - it will take an eternity. I have ripped 3" stock before (once - and have no intention of doing it again); the biggest problem I had was keeping the cut vertical as the blade can run off on the undersiide.

 

[D_W]

I wouldn't use a crosscut saw nor a newer style saw with the japanese type teeth. Nothing rips like a real rip saw, not even the most aggressive of the "turbo" combination blades. They will rasp on the end grain instead of severing it, and that's wasted effort.

 

[Fitzroy]

You guys are awesome! Saws files and saw set ordered. Thanks for the suggestions on the workbench series to watch. Regarding the worktop I hear the idea of using the boards as is, and I'll have to think about it once I get the boards back out the stack they are in. I'll start by taking the waney edges off and see what I am left with.

Whatever happens I'll do a wip and deffo a stop motion of me ripping one lengthways. 8 mins sounds unbelievable, I thought you'd all be saying 20mins to 1/2 hr per cut!

Fitz

The boards are local bought from a chap who took a tree down in 2007, had it planked then it sat in his barn since. They are not the most uniform nor straight, hence the idea to make a laminated top from the bits I can salvage 4x2 from.

I also need to get them out the spare room as swmbo is pushing to get it decorated.

 

[D_W]

You'll find the ripping around the knots to be pretty exciting (OK, you might find it to be torture). there is another good option if you have a circular saw, and that is just to get a piece of foam insulation and sit them on the floor and strike a line on them and rip them. For the very knotty ones, that'll be more tolerable than hand sawing.

That said, it's a good experience to rip by hand, and it'll really give you a better idea of the variability of the wood from tree to tree as well as all the way down to within each board.

My experience is it's entirely doable to do all of your ripping by hand on things that we think of as medium hardwoods in the states, like cherry and oak. When get up to ripping things like ash/hard maple/beech, it takes about twice as long and can be a bit grabby on saws that work well with cherry.

 

[PAC1]

I cannot help thinking what a waste of Sycamore and effort converting it. Why not get something more utilitarian for the bench top and save the Sycamore to make something that shows the beauty of Sycamore.
My first bench was made from Redwood with an MDF top.

 

[woodbrains]

I cannot help thinking what a waste of Sycamore and effort converting it. Why not get something more utilitarian for the bench top and save the Sycamore to make something that shows the beauty of Sycamore.
My first bench was made from Redwood with an MDF top.

Hello,

If the sycamore were beautiful, clean boards, then I might agree, but I doubt from the look of these, that they are, so a bench seems like a good use for them. Sycamore is regarded as a weed tree, so it is hardly wasting prime furniture wood. It is only that if it has been stored and dried to retain its white colour. (Or has spectacular fiddleback figure!) If the tree was felled during the winter and dried stood on end, then the wood might be OK but I doubt that happened, in which case your sycamore will be stained and unattractive for furniture. If you have it in your head to make a bench, then make a bench. Perhaps buy a circular saw though!

Mike.

 

[Fitzroy]

Aye, the wood ain't the best, but it only cost me £150 quid delivered, and being new to woodwork i saw that it provided me a great learning opportunity. Beggars can't be choosers as they say

F.

 

[Fitzroy]

Saw resoration details in another thread. Got one of the boards down and marked it up, so there's the challenge, 8' of 2" sycamore.

Each cut took about 15mins, the saw was great but I found it was wandering slightly. On the upper face I could control the direction but the underside was deviating slightly resulting in the cut departing from vertical. I adjusted the set marginally on one side of the saw (in fact I used the same setting but just an extra squeeze on each tooth) which seemed to solve the issue. The cut also kept closing so had to jam a screwdriver in to keep it open. End result.

Due to the saw wandering the edge was nowhere near square but wedged the board in my pile of sleepers and took the worst away with a big woodie. Then managed to pass it over my planer, too bloody heavy to be honest but made lovely shavings.

I think I can get a 1 3/4 thick, 10" wide 7' long board out of this so I'm now thinking about the bench design and to laminate or not. I've a 9" wide planer and 3x9", total 27", is very tempting as would be way less work!

Cheers Fitz

PS. Click below if you want to see a middle aged man in action!
https://youtu.be/aw_eGRuAJ7Y