Here’s a tip from Raney Nelson at Crucible Tool. When we make our lump hammers we need to cut the excess wood above the eye after the handle and head have been wedged together. Typical flush-cut saws are too slow for production work. And they are usually so thin that they kink easily.
So Raney took an inexpensive Ryoba saw from the home center and removed the set with a few swipes of a sharpening stone.
Today I had a ton of tenons to flush and decided to do the same to one of our hardware-store Ryobas that is not quite good enough for fine joinery. I removed the set using a DMT diamond stone (the red one). It took about five swipes on each toothline.
I was concerned that the diamond stone wouldn’t work well stoning the impulse-hardened teeth (which are file-hard). The diamonds had no problem with the task. The detail shot shows the amount of metal I removed to remove the set.
The saw works great for flushing tenons. It’s about 11.4 times faster than my old flush-cut saw and powers through oak tenons.
— Christopher Schwarz
11.4 times faster is the new 6’3-5/8″
Exactly. Accurately. Precisely.
Great idea. I’m sure that with 5-10 minutes daily training sessions, you could up that 11.4 to at least 11.8 to 11.9 within a couple of weeks.
Good reminder that if you can’t find a tool that does what you need, you can often take something close and tweak it the rest of the way.
I received my lump hammer today and just wanted to let everyone know that it was even better than I expected – very high quality workmanship. Thanks to the guys at Crucible.
Did you tried hammering the kerf on a small anvil before swiping with waterstone? In that way most of the material is kept in the teeth and the teeth last longer.
No, I didn’t.
Another one that occurred to me was the trick with the paper in the vise, but only put the paper on one side.
Do you remove the set from both sides of each tooth line or do you want to keep the set on the side facing away from your work?
I removed the set from both sides. Having teeth set to one side makes the saw wander in the cut.
I had trouble with hand made flush cut saws until I bought one with a hardwood tooth profile. No problems flush cutting quickly in years.