The Skokloster Saw

In 2014 Roald, one of the blogger of Hyvelbenk (Planingbench) postet some pictures of a saw from the 17th century found in the Swedish Slot od Skokloster. (Klick on the link, to see them.) And a bit later he postet even more pictures. I'm interested in saws of all kind, so I asked him for more pictures. We talked a bit via E-Mail, but then we forgot about it.

Early this year, Jimmy Hendrix, connected me with David from Ageröd Snickeri. David, too, has visited the Tool Sanctum of Skokloster and wanted to make some replicas of the saws. He send me some pdf of the saw blade. I thought I could do the filing by hand, but if there will be more people want to test a saw theat looks like 17Th cntury we should use a more reliable copy method.

I asked Gerd Fritsche, who not only make fantastic planes, but sells saws and saw parts, too, to laser the blade for us. If you laser a blade, ith get's brittle at the edges. You can't set it nor you cant file it. Easiest way the handle this is to bake the blade in the oven to straw. After that filing and setting is possible. But you have to deblue the saw. I found the hard way, deblueing isn't that easy as I remembered. A lot of acid, autosol and elbow grease was needed to come to this:

still a bit blurry, but no fear th saw will get sharp later

Today I finished the filing, setting and testcutting. The problem is, there are no handles yet. The blades will be send to David and get their handles in sweden. This is may solution. An old cocobolo handle, that wasn't sellabe and some c-vises.

The first trial was ugly. The saw needs more set than I thought  and more sharpnes.

And the handle needs to be lower (it is at the original saw) more like at my table saw.

That has to be enough until i get the sas back wit the handle. The saw it sharpened without fleam like te saws of that age. at 15° Rake you can us it crosscut as good as rip cut. Not perfect, but in the woodworking of that ager you will hardly see any sawn surface.