woodworking Woodworking is the skill of making items from wood, and includes cabinetry, furniture making, wood carving, joinery, carpentry, and woodturning. History Along with stone, clay and animal parts, wood was one of the first materials worked b ...

and

carpentry Carpentry is a skilled trade and a craft in which the primary work performed is the cutting, shaping and installation of building materials during the construction of buildings, Shipbuilding, ships, timber bridges, concrete formwork, etc. C ...

, hand saws, also known as "panel saws", are used to cut pieces of

wood Wood is a structural tissue/material found as xylem in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants. It is an organic materiala natural composite of cellulosic fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin t ...

into different shapes. This is usually done in order to join the pieces together and carve a wooden object. They operate by having a series of sharp points, called teeth, of a substance that is harder than the wood being cut. Hand saws have been used for thousands of years. Egyptian hieroglyphics exist depicting ancient woodworkers sawing boards into pieces, and ancient bow saws have been found in Japan. Cut patterns on ancient boards are occasionally observed to bear the unique cutting marks left by

saw blade A saw is a tool consisting of a tough blade, Wire saw, wire, or Chainsaw, chain with a hard toothed edge used to cut through material. Various terms are used to describe toothed and abrasive saws. Saws began as serrated materials, and when man ...

s, particularly if the wood was not 'smoothed up' by some method. Twenty-four saws from eighteenth-century England are currently preserved.Olmert, Michael (1996). ''Milton's Teeth and Ovid's Umbrella: Curiouser & Curiouser Adventures in History'', p.178. Simon & Schuster, New York. . Materials for saw blades have varied over the ages.

Bronze Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals (such as phosphorus) or metalloid ...

saws were likely used before

steelmaking Steelmaking is the process of producing steel from iron ore and/or scrap. Steel has been made for millennia, and was commercialized on a massive scale in the 1850s and 1860s, using the Bessemer process, Bessemer and open hearth furnace, Siemens-M ...

technology became extensively known and industrialized. The most popular material for handles of hand saws is applewood; in the early 1900s 2,000,000 board feet of applewood were used annually for this purpose.Burks, Jeff (2015). "Woods Used in Saw Handles". Lost Art Press, Traditional Hand-tool Skills". blog.lostartpress.com. Sometimes cultures developed two main types of saw teeth: the cross cut saw teeth and the rip saw teeth. These cut into the wood using different mechanisms. Crosscut saws have sawteeth that are shaped, often with a metal file, in such a way that they form a series of tiny

knife A knife (: knives; from Old Norse 'knife, dirk') is a tool or weapon with a cutting edge or blade, usually attached to a handle or hilt. One of the earliest tools used by humanity, knives appeared at least Stone Age, 2.5 million years ago, as e ...

-like edges. Crosscut saws are meant to cut perpendicular, or against, the wood grain. Rip saws, on the other hand, have

chisel A chisel is a hand tool with a characteristic Wedge, wedge-shaped cutting edge on the end of its blade. A chisel is useful for carving or cutting a hard material such as woodworking, wood, lapidary, stone, or metalworking, metal. Using a chi ...

-like sawteeth and are meant to cut parallel, or with, the grain. Wood fibers are contacted by the teeth and 'ripped' apart from the bundle of other fibers. It is common that people do not recognize the difference and use saws both ways. However, a rip saw is much faster than a cross-cut saw when cutting with the grain but leaves a very rough cut, often with splinters on the surface, and has more difficulty maintaining a straight cut when cutting across the grain. The cross-cut saw can cut in any direction but is much slower than needs be when cutting with the grain. The development of saws was also affected by several factors. The first was the importance of wood to a society, the development of steel and other saw-making technologies, and the type of power available. These factors were, in turn, influenced by the environment, such as the types of wood or metal available. Finally, the types of jobs the saws were to perform was also important in the development of the technology. Among

Basques The Basques ( or ; ; ; ) are a Southwestern European ethnic group, characterised by the Basque language, a Basque culture, common culture and shared genetic ancestry to the ancient Vascones and Aquitanians. Basques are indigenous peoples, ...

and

Australians Australians, colloquially known as Aussies, are the citizenship, citizens, nationality, nationals and individuals associated with the country of Australia. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or ethno-cultural. For most Aust ...

, traditional hand sawing has generated rural sports. The Basque variant is called tronral.

References

External links

How to Sharpen a Saw Blade
, article on how to sharpen a handsaw yourself {{Woodworking Hand tools Saws Woodworking hand tools de:Fuchsschwanz (Säge)

See also

References

External links