Japanese saw for resawing?

[Andy Kev.]

If there's one job I heartily dislike it is resawing hefty bits of wood. For instance I've got two four foot long by 6 x 2 inch pieces of American Walnut that I'm going to have to do (to get 6 x 1). Up to now I've used a normal rip saw and find that although I've got a bit better on soft wood or shorter bits, I tend to wander terribly on hardwood, especially the bigger pieces.

My question is: would things be easier if I got one of these super duper, black belt, zen master Japanese saws? The Ryoba seems to be the type in question. Ideally I'd like to just be able to wave it in the general direction of the wood which would then in a fit of terror seperate itself cleanly down the middle.

(I believe that a band saw is the conventional solution but I'm trying to keep my electric gear to a minimum.)

 

[Paddy Roxburgh]

Personally I find it harder to keep on track with a ryoba saw than a western saw. It gives a lovely clean rip but only has minimal set and is hard to correct if I go astray, also the plate is a bit wobbly as it is so thin. Fine for short rips but not resawing. I find my 24" 4 tpi rip saw, with a fair bit of set on, a lot easier. I'm no expert but I rip in the vice and drop my hand (so the front of the saw is pointing in the air. If the board is wide then I turn it around at intervals. I also never try to rip to the line but a bit away and then plane to the line which gives you a margin for error.
hope that is of some help, Paddy

 

[Bluekingfisher]

Suffice to say, the most important aspect for ripping is having the saw (particularly if hand sawing) properly set and of course sharp (No sh!t Sherlock), Getting into the right position and taking your time with long steady strokes of the saw is also key. Besides, no matter how accurate you are, you will find it very difficult to produce two 1" thick boards for 2 x material, taking into account the saw kerf and any wandering off your desire line.

You are your own man of course, however, you risk losing two valuable and expensive boards if you get it wrong. Unfortunately there is no simple solution to hand ripping. If you are confident and experienced with the appropriate saw then go for it. If you have doubts I would go the bandsaw route.

Good luck

David

 

[Bedrock]

If your 2" thickness of the American Black Walnut is the accurate figure, even with a bandsaw, there is no chance of obtaining 1" boards as a finished thickness. How critical is the finished dimension and how much are you leaving for final finishing?
As Paddy and BKF have said, you would probably be best with a well set up western saw, and considerable practice, before setting out on some valuable timber. I have no direct experience of Ryoba saws on a ripping cut like this, but for some time, I was enthusiastic in using Japanese saws for most of my work. As I recall, they too required a learning curve, (and the usual pole handles take some getting used to), so I don't think that a Ryoba would be an immediate pick up and use.
Either way, you need to be sure that your weapon of choice is sharp and well set so that you know that the saw will not be the cause of inaccuracies. As a possible halfway house, a number of western manufacturers make a backless saw with a thicker blade and a Japanese tooth pattern, and a pistol grip, usually available for under £20. One of these would at least enable you to explore without a melt down in the bank account. They come in a variety of lengths, and you will need the longest you can find, given the 6" width of your material. If it doesn't work, it will be useful for any number of basic tasks needing a fast cut. I picked up a second hand saw like this for about a fiver, and it's surprising how often I grab it for a quick cut to rough dimensions.

Good luck Mike

 

[AndyT]

Some good advice in the posts above.

In my own limited experience of ripping, I found that a western style saw suited me ok. I soon realised that if you are deep sawing a 6" wide board, your length of cut is about 9" and you need a fairly coarse saw (3 or 4 tpi) to keep it clear of all the sawdust you will be making. Clamp the work in a vice on a really solid bench, and don't go too far before you stop and flip the board around.

However, I recently noticed that Jimi has been bigging up an impressive-looking Japanese saw over here: http://wkfinetools.com/contrib2/HendricksJ/letItRip/letItRip-01.asp - and perhaps if we talk about him he'll pop up on here again . (Mind you, I'd have thought a 300mm long blade would soon get lost in a deep rip cut, which could be a problem, but I've not tried one so could be wrong.)

 

[Andy Kev.]

Gentlemen,

thank you very much for the replies. I suppose it makes sense to not start with a new (to me) type of tool on a job which I already find a bit difficult.

As for the 1" thickness: the number is not meant to be precise for the reasons mentioned above. I should have just said that I intend to half it.

Dictum does a western style saw with a Japanese blade. It comes in two sizes: 42 and 54 cm. The longer one has the lower tpi. If anybody is interested it is called the "Turbo-Cut". Maybe that will be worth a bash or maybe I should just stick with my rip saw and get better at it.

 

[D_W]

You want a very coarse hand saw if you're going to resaw, and you want to cut your wood in triangles and flip the board so that you are cutting to a marked line in your view until you get to the point that you are more comfortable making a more aggressive cut.

By that, I mean, cut on the top of the board until have a slight kerf straight across, and then orient the board so that you're cutting down one side and not the other. Then flip the board and do the same. If you have a board 6" wide, you should be able to make 5 or 6" of cut per side doing this, perhaps more (I can't visualize it perfectly).

The saw is always cutting to a marked line on your side then and never through and wandering on the opposite side.

The biggest problem with most hand saws is that they were never intended to resaw.

The biggest problem with a large frame saw or japanese maebiki or something is that there is an assumption that someone is cutting on the other side of the long (either standing at the other end of a ryoba, or literally using a maebiki on the opposite side of the saw. Except for smaller logs which were rough-sawn vertically from what I can see in old pictures.

The popular blogger/book seller method now is to cut kerfs around the part of the wood you're resawing so that the saw blade rides in the kerf and you don't have to flip the wood. That is more labor intensive, though less risky.

I have resawn with eastern and western saws and found so far that for boards 6" or narrower, a coarse toothed hand saw (like 2 1/2 teeth per inch) is about the same speed as kerfing and using a roubo saw. For wider boards ,the roubo saw is faster and more comfortable to use.

I never really liked resawing or thick ripping with japanese saws. You just don't know what the tooth pitch was designed for in those saws (wet or dry wood, soft or hard).

There's not much out there, even antique, suitable for resawing - try finding a good 2 1/2 tooth (3 1/2 marked by disston) saw. I've found one saw like that, and the teeth were recut.

Even though it sounds like you're intending to roughly halve the boards, you don't want wander of a very high level of order, it creates a lot of work to clean up with a plane, and a line that has wandered is a lot of work to correct and ends up wasting your time.

 

[Adam9453]

I use the triangle method described above, as said, you're only ever cutting to the lines you can see. It takes a little longer but is pretty accurate even through quite large lumps of timber.
I don't have a bandsaw (operational that is) yet so I'm having to do all re-sawing the hard way at the moment.
Suffice to say, I will be a very happy rested person when I have a working bandsaw to resaw on.

 

[woodbrains]

Hello,

Have you tried a kerfing plane? You'll have to make your own, but Tom Fidgen has some plans for one and are fairly simply constructed. It is basically a way of slotting the timber all round at the required thickness and then the rip saw follows the path of least resistance. Looks a good tool.

Ryoba is not a great saw for deep rips, though there are Japanese saws specially for this. I doubt they will be inexpensive, though, and still a skill to learn. Shoji makers use them for ripping panels for the bottom of their screens. I forget the name, but they are similar to anahiki, which is a beam saw and might do as well.

I'd try a kerfing plane and a decent western rip saw, first.

Mike.

 

[MIGNAL]

I have the Japanese Turbo cut blade from fine tools. It's an excellent blade, no doubt about it. I made a frame saw for it but it proved difficult to use as a rip saw. I made mine like the ECE saws with the blade mounted at one side rather like a coping saw. I suspect that if it was mounted centrally it would have proved much easier to use. I also bought the universal blade when perhaps the dedicated rip blade would have been more suited. It's a little expensive and can't be resharpened. I ended up using mine as a crosscut saw for firewood! Far better than the Bahco bow saw and their blades.

 

[D_W]

Before adopting anything for resawing, I'd ask the people who are doing their tests how long it took them to rip something similar to what you'll be ripping.

For example, you will find people ripping boards 4" wide, but if you're intending to resaw something 8 or 12, you might find their setup lacking (you can resaw 4" wide easy cutting wood with a handsaw very quickly).

You'll also note that the multitude of people discussing resawing are making a try at something, and they never say whether they're successful or whether or not it's practical. A practical setup will cut a few inches a minute in a 6" board (if you think about it, on a 4 foot board, you still are looking at 15 minutes of ripping at least - double or triple if your setups bad, and though 15 minutes doesn't sound like a whole lot, it will feel like it).

I undertook trying several different resawing methods because I want to ditch my bandsaw (and on a mid-grade 18 inch bandsaw, never found resawing wide boards to be a very desirable thing - one wander and you've got something that at best, you set aside to use somewhere else at a later date if you can).

Also, you'll notice that there are a lot of videos of people using tools (like the kerfing plane) where they take a short video of the start of a cut, and another one just as they're finishing. You get no sense of how long it actually takes to do something like kerf a large board, or the troubles that you can have when you're shoving a saw blade through a narrow kerf and hoping the waste will somehow get out of the top of a cut.

Ideally, a frame saw with a helper let you get done quickly, resawing something like an 8 inch board 3 or 4 inches a minute and leaving you with enough energy to continue working after it. If you have no helper, you can kerf a board or learn how to use the saw by yourself if you can set up something to see the opposite side of the kerf while working. Kerfing a long board itself is not a 30 second process, and it adds a lot of time.

All of that said, If you've got four boards and you don't intend to do this often, just find an aggressive rip toothed western style hand saw, one that is sharp and do the triangle method I mentioned above and suck it up. The solution (making a frame saw, searching for a better saw, buying an expensive japanese saw, considering bandsaws, etc) will take longer than it takes to just lump it and get done with normal tools.

If you intend to do this a lot and want to make a dedicated frame saw (one large enough to do resawing will be too large to use for anything else, and one small enough to use elsewhere won't be very capable at resawing), bring the topic up again later. I learned a few things making one and can prevent you from having to do it twice.

Here is the culmination, by the way, of my experience with almost proper goods (far more proper than most stuff offered for resawing). I did have to make and hand file the teeth in the blade of the frame saw twice because I didn't do enough reading on the first go-around about the size and thickness of plate that I'd need for a large saw - and filing in 4 feet of 2 1/2 tpi is not a party - nor is the idea of waiting for someone else to stamp the teeth out of a plate for you - as practicality would have it with cost, if infrequent, I'd still stick with a coarse tooth saw. FWIW, a more common five tooth rip saw takes at least twice as long on a board like this and it feels like it, too - it feels like it doesn't have the balls to bite in).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1GHQwYoux0

 

[Cheshirechappie]

Some very sound advice so far.

A couple of things that really help when sawing are a good, stable but relaxed body position, with feet firmly planted some way apart, and keeping your head still. Then a light grip on the saw, and allowing it's weight to do the work. It also really helps accuracy (and in the end speed) to slow down - when you've got a lot of cut to do, it's pretty well automatic to go at it like a madman, which will wear you out and knock any semblance of accuracy into a cocked hat.

Finally, resawing can be beset with problems. Thick boards - even quartersawn ones - are frequently less well seasoned in the middle than at the outside, so resawing them can result in distortion. The pragmatic answer might be to keep the 2" stock for something that needs 2" timber, and buy some 1" boards for the job in hand - unless you're really stuck.

 

[Bluekingfisher]

Some very sound advice so far.


Finally, resawing can be beset with problems. Thick boards - even quartersawn ones - are frequently less well seasoned in the middle than at the outside, so resawing them can result in distortion. The pragmatic answer might be to keep the 2" stock for something that needs 2" timber, and buy some 1" boards for the job in hand - unless you're really stuck.

Interesting, I have just started reading one of James Krenovs books. Unsurprinsingly, he has begun with his love of wood and his continued search and acquisition of various species of timber. Most of the timber he has procurred is eventually resawn, he does actually make mention of this at lenght very early on in his book and even recognises himself he has identified resawing early on. He does, however state the importance of ensuring the wood is properly seasoned. And so far as I have read, most of his timber is air dired rather than kiln dired. He describes kiln dried being akin to steamed or cooked food whereby it loses some of its natural beauty essential for fine furniture. The great mans words, not mine. I digress somewhat. So, on that basis, if you are confident your timber is seasoned, take your time and give it a go.

David

 

[D_W]

Air dried wood is definitely nicer to work with hand tools, at least in some species.

Most commercial kiln dried wood is definitely changed and more than just the moisture content, but you have to know what process was used to dry the wood (some processes, maybe most? permanently alter lignin and make the wood less flexible). I've heard several proponents of using commercially dried wood suggest that it's more stable to moisture changes than air dried wood, which might be the case. But maybe that matters more now because we have less ability to get wood oriented the way we'd like it to be oriented.

(I don't know what natural beauty of the wood would disappear except perhaps in some cases where steaming wood changes colors or makes wood look more uniform. I think visually a lot of that is probably opinion rather than fact - what look you want - and even then, most wood and finish doesn't look the same after UV exposure, anyway, and wood that changes no color paired with finish that is ultra clear and never changing tends to look pretty sterile - that's just another opinion, not fact. I don't know the context of krenov's stuff, I've never read the books).

 

[Bluekingfisher]

Air dried wood is definitely nicer to work with hand tools, at least in some species.


(I don't know what natural beauty of the wood would disappear except perhaps in some cases where steaming wood changes colors or makes wood look more uniform. I think visually a lot of that is probably opinion rather than fact - what look you want - and even then, most wood and finish doesn't look the same after UV exposure, anyway, and wood that changes no color paired with finish that is ultra clear and never changing tends to look pretty sterile - that's just another opinion, not fact. I don't know the context of krenov's stuff, I've never read the books).

The point he made was, much of the natural colour changes when timber is kiln dried, there is also noticable loss of shimer and sheen from the timber once planed.

Whether this is true or not, or merely an opinion is neither here nor there, however having been dried in a kiln the structure of the wood is bound to change, as any "cooked" natural matter would be. I guess akin to steaming vegtables in a pot, much of the natural sheen has diminished leaving a dull bland & structurally changed piece.

I would be happy to accept his word/opinion though, I believe he is qualified to offer the statement.IMHO.

David

 

[Racers]

St Roy does resawing here http://video.pbs.org/video/2365554429/ from about 6:30 on.

Pete

 

[DiscoStu]

I wouldn't even consider ripping by hand. A bandsaw is the place to be. Especially if you don't enjoy it. I understand that people enjoy hand tools, but if you're not enjoying that aspect then get a bandsaw. My bandsaw is probably my most used tool. I use it for all sorts of stuff that I never envisaged before I bought it. I thought I'd be using a table saw all the time and the truth is it barely gets used.

 

[Andy Kev.]

Thanks again to all of you for taking the trouble to reply. I think Cheshire Chappie's notion of taking it slowly is a good one (always a sensible idea) and D_W's mention of the speed at which this process is meant to go is worth bearing in mind.

I can get access to a table saw and it occurs to me that if I plane up the pieces all square, I can get the world's deepest kerfs on the two long sides and then take it nice and steady sawing away the two inches or so left in the middle. This will feel like cheating but it should help with getting decent results.

 

[D_W]

Thanks again to all of you for taking the trouble to reply. I think Cheshire Chappie's notion of taking it slowly is a good one (always a sensible idea) and D_W's mention of the speed at which this process is meant to go is worth bearing in mind.

I can get access to a table saw and it occurs to me that if I plane up the pieces all square, I can get the world's deepest kerfs on the two long sides and then take it nice and steady sawing away the two inches or so left in the middle. This will feel like cheating but it should help with getting decent results.

If your table saw is accurate, it's standard practice ,and other than being a bit smokey, the results are great every time I've seen it. i've got a power tool only friend who never uses a hand tool except to do exactly what you just described. He'll have my bandsaw if he ever gets off his duff and comes to get it out of my shop.

I do like bandsaws a lot, though - just figure that to really get the point and shoot kind of cheese slicing experience that some folks describe, it's a lot more than what it cost me to get an 18x jet saw.

I will never come close to matching it in speed, though, but working with a mid-grade bandsaw to resaw something that is important is an experience that does involve some pucker factor and wondering about where the middle of the bandsaw blade may be wandering outside of your sight. Not so with a hand saw, and I don't dump $40 every time a band breaks.

For what it's worth, I did use a japanese saw last night to rip a try plane blank. Beech isn't really the best thing for most japanese katabas, but this is a saw designed for heavy ripping and not a high volume machine made saw. It took me longer than it does with western saws, but the accuracy is fine. Every time I use a japanese stone except for one, I always feel like the tooth profile was not intended for what I'm sawing. The only exception was Stanley Covington on another forum lending me a saw that a smith had made (the smith made a pair) that was specifically for hardwoods. It cost $750, so it's not like I was going to get the other saw of the pair that was made. But it was a nice saw, and I don't think anyone could've broken anything on it - a completely different animal than most joinery type and lightweight saws sold to us. I got the one I used on ebay for $40, and it's not in the same class, but it is well ahead of any impulse hardened saw I've used as far as ripping goes.

As far as the resawing, I watched roy's video, and that saw looked very light and with aggressive hook to the teeth. it was grabby in borg pine. I'd say this much having built a saw and also having chased down a coarse tooth western saw. If you're using a saw and it does anyting other than make you physically tired (if it binds, if it wanders, if it skips around, digs in, etc) then there's still a lot of improvement to be made, but it's probably not worth the effort unless you're going to do a whole lot of it. There is a wide range of things that work, but the range of things that work well is pretty narrow. In your case, I think ripping with both sides makes a lot more sense.

 

[Andy Kev.]

Having received so many replies to this thread I thought it only fair to show what happened in the end. Firstly, as mentioned, I took it to a table saw which left me with a roughly 2 1/2" bit in the middle to saw out:

I was never going to show a picture of that saw as it is the only tool I have ever made but more to the point damned ugly, but it does have one saving grace in that it works (the point of the thread was to see if there is anything better). Must remember to take a spokeshave to it as those edges are murder. The sawing yielded the following:

Then after 15 mins of planing I got this:

What was interesting was that while I'd got the original board to dead square (although I hadn't bothered with the ends) one of the two daughter boards took on a bow immediately on resawing. They're both now at the bottom of a small stack and have until May to dry out thoroughly and I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the bow goes.

Apologies for the pics being so wide on the screen. I haven't a clue how to reduce that.