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5 Exercises to Improve Hand Sawing

3 comments
a couple of years ago
Hand Sawing     Techniques

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Improve Hand Sawing by Just Sawing More

OK maybe that is oversimplifying a bit too much.  A bit of focused work is a more effective way to improve hand sawing.  Really though the average project doesn't have us sawing continuously for very long.  So many things interrupt the sawing bits that it is hard to build any kind of lasting muscle memory.  Certainly the idea of 10,000 hours to mastery has merit but think about how you have to stop and restart so much in the average project.  Think about how different sawing dovetails is from sawing  a tenon or a dado or sliding dovetail.  These 5 exercises focus on sawing fundamentals that will improve your ability to saw in any situation.  The biggest takeaway here should be learning to smoothly start a saw.  Improve hand sawing by focusing on staying loose and slowing adding in a bit more control until you are working to a line and able to break up complex layouts into different parts.  That is what these exercises will guide you through.

  • Loosen Up: just get moving and focus on moving the saw easily and getting out of its way.  Smooth sawing is key.
  • Relaxed Control:  channel that loose feeling and refine it by starting the saw smoothly on the push stroke.
  • Controlled Accuracy: now focus that control on a line.
  • Get Specific: layout a joint and learn to divide your cuts into parts.

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Phil Harris

Trying to decide between Gramercy bow saw and 8 inch Knew Concepts fret saw. Is it realistic to use one saw for dovetails and curves in 4/4 and 8/4 lumber?

    Shannon

    The Turning Saw will be a much for flexible tool than a fret saw. Cutting anything thicker than 3/4″ with a fret saw is terribly slow even with a more aggressive pitched, skip tooth blade you just can’t move the sawdust fast enough and the saw bogs down. A turning saw will work better even with a finely pitch blade because you have twice the blade length and more ability to remove the dust.

Ross Martin

Just stumbled onto your site and watched this video. Haven’t done the exercises yet, but will definitely go through them. Thanks for the tutorial and (teasingly sarcastic) thanks for making me go down the sarlacc hole of “sawing the ears off a gundark.”

The geek is strong with this one… 🙂