woodworking saw
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[Music] [Applause] I’m Jonathan cats Moses and I have a saw problem today on our central skills series I want to talk to you about Japanese pull saws the reason that I prefer Japanese pull saws is for a couple reasons one I believe they’re easier to use when you cut on the pull stroke the saw does not bind like it does on the push stroke sometimes when you’re cutting with a Western saw the blade will bind in your kerf and it’s a little bit tougher when you’re starting out but then once you start using a Japanese saw you find that the blades are much thinner you get a much thinner kerf which means your mistakes are much less noticeable and I feel like I can get a lot more done with the Japanese saw as compared to a Western saw most of the saws on my wall here are from a company named Suzanne it’s a Japanese company they make the saws in Japan they did not sponsor this video I did not get paid for any of this I just really am NOT addicted to Japanese pull saws the other reason that I really like them is they have much higher backs Western saws sometimes have a back that’s as low as 3/4 of an inch and obviously I use a dovetail jig because I make one and you get a lot deeper dovetail cut with the higher that the back is on your saw we’re gonna take you into the bench and talk about these in a little bit more detail but basically we have our Rayo bows here they have these folding dovetail and Ryoma that I think are just the coolest thing in the world it adds a lot more weight and stiffness to it which is sort of counterintuitive but the the extra weight I feel like really makes cutting even easier then after the rail biz here I have three ryo bus’ and then this is a Catawba which is for rough dimensioning this is something you would use when you’re trying to chop up bigger pieces of wood and you need to make you know cuts that go deeper than the saw and then I have my dovetail saw here I have a folding one a 6-inch dovetail saw they make an 8-inch dovetail saw that has what they claim to be the thinnest blade on the market and it really is thin and then there’s a nine and a half inch dovetail saw which I love they have a flush cut saw this is a rio pass tile flush cut saw that is actually handmade in Japan I don’t use this that often because I love it so much but I got this in Atlanta when I was at the the woodworking fair and it’s really really a beautiful piece of work but then I have some other flush cut sauce here this is a panel saw this is from a different company I use this to separate out my cnc dovetail boards and a bunch of teeth are gone on it one of the things about Japanese saws is you don’t want to use it on pressed wood like plywood or MDF because it has a tendency to blow out the teeth you’ll see reviews on ABS Amazon from for Japanese saws and say oh I ripped out the teeth but that’s because they were cutting something they shouldn’t have the other great thing about Japanese saws is you can just replace the blade or you can even just get a new one you know I think usually they’re 30 to 50 bucks a piece and the blades are 20 to 35 bucks apiece so really you could just get and you saw if you wanted to spend just a couple more bucks so they’re very cost effective and honestly I think they’re a lot better than Western saw so let’s go into the bench and I’ll show you how they work so these are Rio buses this is a folding Rio ba’ and then a fixed Rio ba’ and you can just replace the blade by loosening this nut right here but the way that they work is they have two sets of teeth which is great with about Rio biz it’s like you’re getting two saws in one so this is the cross cut side you have more teeth because you’re cutting across the grain so you need to sever more fibers and then you have a rip teeth which are for rip cutting and that is going along the grain this way and so it takes less work to do that so it has less bigger teeth so that you’re faster when cutting now these are the saws that I use for most everything except for cutting dovetails dovetails I’ll show you that in a second but the best thing about Japanese saws one of the great things about Japanese saws is this little piece right here I need a video I’ll link it right here about a handsaw trick that everybody should know but this is a depth gauge so this last tooth is exactly level with that straight line there and so when you get down to a certain depth you can place your flat part here and then cut across and that’ll help you make sure the entire cut is down to the same depth without cutting any further so that’s on all Japanese saw as that is really neat let me show you how use one of these the way that a Saltworks this is a the ryaba again is you want to start and put your thumb and hold the saw blade right where you want it and sometimes I like to do just a little bit of a backwards push and that’ll create just a little bit of a curve for you and then you start cutting and when you’re cutting you can with a rabbit you can use one or two hands and I just look for the reflection in the saw you don’t want that board to look like it’s not a straight line if it’s a perfectly straight reflection it’s gonna give it a really straight cut and you pull towards you you let the saw do the work you don’t push down in any way otherwise your saw is gonna just start to go so I start going I look straight down the middle of the saw here and kind of peeking at the reflection on both sides making sure that that is a straight line and I’ll blow the dust away make sure that I’m still going into the line and I’ll just keep going ensuring that I’m still in the line and you want to think about sawing and your sawing technique like you’re shooting pool when you’re shooting pool you use your back arm as a pendulum you want your arms to move forward and backwards in the exact same way so I just keep working down that line I’m also checking the line that goes down the board here and I’m letting the saw do the work and you’ll hear it it’s just about to finish here when I slow down so I don’t slam the teeth into the workbench when I cut it and there we go and then if we look at that with a square and there’s a damn near square cut there and then I would just take this over to my shooting board and just get that a little bit more square but that’s how you cut with the Japanese saw so let’s talk about dovetail saw these are dovetail saws they’re different sizes and thicknesses these two are about the same but this one comes in folding which I really like the heft of as I was saying earlier in the back seems to be very stiff so I really like these folding saws and then this is their standard nine and a half inch Japanese saw both of these use the same blade which is 25 teeth per inch and it’s point-o 1/2 thick the blade and the kerf is 0.016 then they have this really cool ultra ultra thin 8-inch dozous key which does ookies a dovetail saw this is point this is 8,000 and then the kerf is 0.012 and these are great unless you’re going really deep for very shallow cuts where you need a super fine cut these are awesome but when you start to get shallow they’re so thin that it can tend to wander on you a little bit and then this is a 6-inch dovetail saw which is the same thicknesses as these nine and a half inches but it’s really it’s just smaller and kind of easy to use in small places I like to use the bigger ones a little bit better because I feel like I have more control over it going straight but these are great in in kind of smaller situations dovetail saw is these are the ones I use with my cats Moses magnetic dovetail jig and it’s great because you can get almost a full inch in a quarter below the saw back depth in your dovetails now dovetail saw is have what look like crosscut teeth even though you’re making a rip cut because you need it to be very very fine and the curve of your dovetail saw to be very very thin so I usually stick with the standard nine and a half inch dovetail saws but when I want to do really really thin find teeny dovetails I will use the eight inch super thin one but if you could only pick one and go with the nine and a half either the folding or the standard one the handles on the is this one is kind of a rubber polyurethane it’s it feels great in the hand the nine and a half inch comes with a very short katana wrap I believe it’s called its it’s a type of cane and these are great they last forever and they’re they’re all natural it’s plant based so it’s kind of cool it feels good in the hand and it’s sort of a neat thing that this is actually real cane these are all like I said made in Japan great saws let me show you how I make a cut with them so as with any time you’re cutting dovetails I would just use a marking knife and I really want to show you the difference in size of kerf between the nine and a half inch and the eight inch so you can kind of see what I’m talking about here so we’ll do them very close together here and again the way that I start my dovetail saw is I take my thumb I put it right in that and I kind of angle it the way that I’m gonna go with my dovetail I do a little bit of a backward stroke and then I’ll just slide my dovetail jig up to it and then just same kind of thing you want to use that same motion let it do the cutting for you and just cut down to your line and this is where that trick I was telling you about about the end of the Saw works great because in dovetails sometimes people will kind of get down to their line and then get down to their line and they end up with a little hump in the middle so what I like to do when I reach the end of my dovetails is I’ll put that little flat part at the bottom here and just do a little sawing make sure everything is cleaned out of there and then I move on to my other tails now I want to show you the difference in thickness of the ultra thin the eight-inch start it the same way and that almost fits in your marking knife line it almost is like you’ve already created a kerf for it but again same thing just let the saw do the work and you can see the the difference and thickness if you look at the sidewall here and it’s because my marking knife was actually wider than the saw but you can see the difference in thickness here the one on the left is the eight-inch ultra thin and then this is the nine and a half inch dovetail dozous key so you can see how much thinner that is but again this is probably as far deep as I would ever want to go with this one because it has a shorter back but to you know like I said you can they can get a little wandering on you if you go too deep with these so let’s talk about the Catawba and flush cut saws so these are the the flush trim saw as I have and this is the Catawba the Catawba is aggressive tooth that’s 14 teeth per inch and it’s designed for me it was what I use it for rough dimensioning when I just need to chop a piece off quick because it’s it’s much longer it sort of has a slight curve to it and with the aggressive teeth it’s a very very fast cutter in fact I’ll show you [Music] [Laughter] so I love this thing I use it a lot when I don’t want to take the time to find an extension cord and plug my circular saw in I’ll just do this to get a piece real quick and then these are my flush trim sauce this again like I was telling you is my handmade one that I bought in Atlanta by a Japanese artist I’m not sure who but flush trim sauce have no tooth set so you can take it’s very thin blade and put it flat on a surface and cut off things without scratching your surface like I there are no scratches in my bench here and it’s for for flush cutting I kind of don’t use this one very often because I love it so much and I don’t want to hurt it this one is by the same company Suzanne you can see the blade is like ultra ultra thin and because of that these plates are very very cheap to replace I’ve pulled out a couple teeth but that happens but they have no tooth set and you you can just rip through things when you need a flush cut and I mean they’re real easy to use it’s so much easier than using a rio beau which I’ve seen people to flush cut with because Rio burs have tooth set so you’re gonna scratch your workpiece when you’re using it so these are these are great so that’s that’s kind of the basics of Japanese saws I really prefer them over to Western saws because they’re more cost-effective the blades are replaceable they’re thinner and I feel like for the money you can get a lot more options I mean you know there’s only a couple hundred bucks where the saws I use all of them I do have a doubles of a couple but you know I I like Japanese sauce so I go out and pick yourself up one I’ll leave links down to these in the description they’re great saw is made in Japan and like I said this is not sponsored this is just my honest opinion so thanks for watching guys stay safe in the shop and have a wonderful day …
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