How to Saw Correctly - tips and tricks with a Japanese Pull saw

one of the most common questions I get is I'm having trouble sawing and do you have any tips for me on how to be better at that and I do and in fact it's something that took me a long time to learn the things I was doing wrong and once I learned the correct way to use a Japanese pole saw things really change for me and my woodworking got better my ability to get things more accurate got better and so I wanted to put together a video and kind of give you all the tips and tricks I know about using Japanese saws and how to get really accurate results now the brand that I like to use is SWE's an which I did a video about all the types of Japanese saws I'll link that right here it's a good watch because it talks about all the things that are available to you and one of the reasons I like them is they are actually made in Japan you know a lot of these saw companies they just buy their saws off Alibaba and put their name on it but they actually make really high quality stuff they stay sharp forever much longer than anything else I've ever owned they are very fairly priced and I've been talking them recently and pretty excited to announce they've named me their American ambassador Sweezey and it's not new to me I've been using these for a long long time and so one of the benefits of that is I am going to start distributing some of their stars through the cats Moses store so I look for that announcement I'll be stocking some of my favorite versions of their saw in my store so you can get your dovetail jig and your saw and get those all in one package so let's get into kind of the main types of saws that I use and of course these will all be linked below these are all saws that I really like including a couple new offerings from suiza and they just released that are super low price but have some really good benefits to them so let's talk about those so these are the types of saws that I use these are my two favorites this is they're folding Japanese dovetail saw you've seen me use this exclusively in all my joints of the week and this is their solid handle dry oba people always correct me I probably am saying that wrong but Rio but we're gonna go with it the great thing about all of these is the blade is replaceable and not only are these Japanese saw so inexpensive for the quality that you're getting like this is thirty-six bucks this one's 42 ish these are only 24 this this is their new lineup that they just made this sort of a lower-priced version of these but the amazing thing about this new dovetail saw they have for only 24 bucks is the rigidity of it and that's the reason I love this folding saw so much is this is so rigid and the weight of it really helps when you're sawing you don't want to put any downward pressure and the weight of this really helps your cut go pretty fast so I really like that the other great thing is that the blades are replaceable so you can get the replacement blades for very inexpensive and you just simply take out the screw there's a little another screw on the back you did this you just stick the new one in there just like that so it locks in just like that and the best part about it Rio bow saw is you can do this I think I do that every time I pick that song so now that we have a fresh blade on this one let's talk about what these are for so dovetail saws are different as in you're doing both sort of cross cutting and rip cutting with a dovetail saw but the teeth are incredibly fine here because you want a very very fine thin thin cut so these cut even a lot lot finer than even the cross cut side on a Ryoma this is the cross cut side more teeth because you're going across the grain it has a lot more cutting to do as opposed to the ripp teeth which is when you're going along with the grain it goes a lot faster because the wood is easier to remove so let's talk about how to cut correctly in the best ways to improve your skills sawing is just like any sport that requires accuracy for example when you're shooting pool and by the way I'll beat anyone eat at a game of nine ball except Jay Bates he actually smoked me he's really good at pool when you're shooting pool your arm is a pendulum nothing else moves just your elbow just your arm in a forward pendulum motion same thing when you're shooting darts your arm becomes a pendulum or bowling your arm is perpendicular to your body and goes in a straight back and forth motion same thing with sawing when you're sawing you don't want to be soaring across yourself or this way or moving your arm around you just set up like a pendulum and you adjust your body to it you're just your stance your shoulders everything so that your arm could move in a straight line and that's gonna give you the best chance of success so why don't we come in here I'm going to show you how I start to cut and keep it square so a Japanese pull saw cuts on the pulse trunk so usually I would use a marking knife if I was doing dovetails but this is a good way to practice I would make a series of these all around and so what you're gonna do is you're gonna use your thumb and your thumb is gonna help you start your saw and that's going to keep it from wandering around because when you first start your saw has a tendency to kind of jump around so I set my saw right where I want it to be and let's say this is the waste side of our line here so that's the side of this line we want to cut on now what I do is I stroke and then blow off the sawdust guys come on get your mind out of the gutter stroke and blow and you start lowering your saw down as you go and it helps you get with that line and then while you're doing that you keep your saw square and the best way to tell if your saw is square this is a trick I learned from William Inge that just was the such a game-changer for me is look at the reflection of the wood if the board looks like a board should be then you're good to go but if it starts to turn like that then you know your saw is not square same thing with this way you can see the reflection changes so if you kind of keep your eye on that reflection it's good and then you're going to look down the saw sort of like this you're not trying to appear over it you're just sort of looking down the middle of it with both eyes using your eyes to see where you are you're going to use your thumb you're gonna set it right where you want it to be and you do your first stroke backwards and then I'll blow any sawdust and I'll tilt my saw down a little bit more same thing ensuring that my reflection is staying square just like that you can just continue and with Japanese saw see if you use one or two hands I am a big fan of once I get my cut started I'll use two hands and just create that same pendulum motion so now you can see and literally right next to my pencil line the whole time and the most important part is this kind of first quarter inch because if you're not square there it's going to start to veer off and this is deeper than just about any dovetail you would ever cut but you can see here I'm right next to our line down here I'm God not even a hair's width off of it but that's about as perfect as you need to be for cutting these kind of cuts that's rip cutting with a dovetail saw so let's talk about different types of cuts maybe Tenon's and cross cuts and how to get stuff square and we're going to be using the shooting board that we made in our previous video that video will be linked right up here in the corner there but that's one of the ways to unless you're maybe Paul sellers to get something dead square after you cut it in case you're not right on because hey we all want to be perfect but we all know that woodworking is about fixing your mistakes not not making them okay so a Rio saw is the saw I probably used the most except for joinery this is my dovetail saw and you know pretty good joinery saw but when it comes to most other types of things including most join area like Tenon's I like to use a Rio but saw one because you can go very very deep there's no back on the sauce so you don't aren't limited by the two and 7/8 step that is I believe at the end so you could cut all the way through let's say you were resawing a board with the rip side or cross cutting a big piece of wood like we're going to show you in a minute but when you're rip cutting you do it the same way a great little trick that I like to use is I start it with the cross cut side so I'll get my saw where I want it just like that and then I'll go to my rip side and because these teeth are a little hard to start especially if you have softwood you can get some kind of tear out in the beginning so then you can go to your rips off and you can see how much faster that cut and I'm just using that same pendulum motion than I did before sorry I wasn't trying to get that square it was pretty close but I was this sign all right so let me show you how I cross cut with the rabbit in I'm going to show you two ways okay so I want to show you what good sawing looks like and sounds like and now that's a paul sellers tip paul sellers is always preaching listen to the sounds of woodworking and the sounds will change as you're about to cut through a piece the the sound will get lighter and you'll know that you're about to go through so you can kind of stop and not slam into your bench with your saw and also you can tell if you're sawing correctly so I'm gonna draw a line here and when you're cross-cutting you only need to draw the two faces that you can see and that's gonna help you get started and I want you to listen to the sound of the sawing and in a second I'm gonna show you bad sawing and what that sounds like so I'm gonna put my microphone actually right by this so you can get a good feeling for what it sounds like okay so same thing that we did with the dovetail cut we're gonna start right on the waste side of our line and in fact I will pretend the wayside is on this side so you can kind of see what I'm doing here and we're going to just start by pulling towards us below make sure that I'm staying in my line I'm using my thumb to guide it listen to the sound change get a lot deeper pretty cool huh so now this is what bad sawing sounds like so I'm gonna push really hard into the cut here like I'm trying to force it down no we're good okay so here is my favorite technique especially when I was learning and I still do this all the time when I need a dead accurate cut and so what I like to do is let's say we're cutting this here and we need a dead clean cut for a tenant I'm gonna use my marking knife and like we always say a good joinery is done with a pencil great joinery is done with a marking knife and I'm gonna just make a knife wall here do it nice and deep then we're gonna transfer that here and then using our chisel we're just gonna create a knife wall and normally I would do it on this side line but for the sake of not blocking your view I'm going to take my chisel and look at this it's just gonna pop off right at our knife line and just like that look at that that's a perfect spot for our saw so when we go into it here look we're even it when I pull it's gonna like force my saw right into that line and then you can do that all the way around or just on top here somebody is this new suiza andreyeva and look at that when I hold my fingers or my saw to start to cut it is literally forced right into that and then you only have to worry about being square up and down look at that perfect and so normally this knife wall would be on your waist side we did on this side for the video but if you look at this yeah it's good enough for a ten in that is dead square all right let me show you another way where you could be ultra careful and be you know a little one of those better safe than sorry situations what I like to do is start slightly away from the line and then use a shooting board so let me show you that let's say we need this piece to be dead perfect so what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut away from my line just a little bit here so you can see now you can see here I cut right next to my line we're gonna use the shooting board that I made in that last video again it's linked here in your upper right hand corner and we're gonna get it down to this line now this is a way to ensure squareness ultra squareness and perfection and it's a great way if you're not an expert at sawing to have the same results that experts yeah so you can see here we just perfectly took our pencil on we've got a perfectly square board and we didn't even have to be good at sawing I mean I was in got a sixteenth away from that I could have been a quarter if I wanted to use my shooting board for longer but it's a very easy way to get stuff square now I want to show you how to cut a tenon using all those techniques but first I need my ride of a saw why thank you okay all week good job dog okay so here's every step I would take to cut a tenon first I'm going to cut down I'm gonna stay slightly away from my line because later I can clean that up with a chisel or a hand plane a rabbiting block plane or any hand plane and a chisel combined so I'm gonna stay slightly away from my line which allows me to clean it up and then I'm going to cut my shoulder but I'm gonna stick right on my shoulder line because we're gonna use that knife wall so I'm gonna use my thumb to get the cut started slightly away from our line as you can see I'm tilting back and forth and then it allows me to check and make sure that I'm staying on both my line that's on top and the one that's facing me then I'm using the kerf once it gets big enough to sort of guide the rest of the cut I'm just taking my time putting no pressure and making sure that it's staying on there and the great way about this is we're not cutting to our line so we can clean up any mistakes later if you start to veer off course like this you're gonna be okay because that's fixable there we go and I'm gonna stop just before my shoulder line now I'm going to take this board and that is when we're gonna use the knife wall track then we're just gonna take our saw and cut down to our other line now if you didn't complete your line remember you're on your line now so just be careful you don't overshoot that because you're gonna maybe have to snap that off there at the end so this is real easy now because it just goes right in there you don't have to worry about it you just have to worry about keeping it plumb to your board you know what folks I just realized I used the wrong side of the saw to cut down on that tenon I wasn't even thinking so you would have wanted to start it with the cross cut side and then flip it over and go to the rip my apologies so then oh that just pops right off and then you can use a chisel to clean that up or a block plane and then you would just check so you can see our line there so we want to start more on the inside now let's check and see how we did here perfect perfect perfect so that's combining all the techniques we talked about into cutting a tenon you would potentially do that on one the opposite side or three more sides to get a perfect tenant and remember just to go slow stay away from your line if you are not ultra confident that you're gonna hit it and adjust later with a chisel or a block play so hopefully you guys learned something if you have any questions or a tip and trick of your own please put it down in the comments I like to read every comment I get and respond to them so it's a great place to interact check out these new sauce from Suzanne they're freaking awesome and 24 bucks is a great deal these two are my favorite the folding line and the solid handled by Oba I'll leave links to all this oh and what I didn't mention was they're new flush trim saw which is super cool because the last one I wasn't really a fan of but this seems to be a huge improvement it's got a side for hardwood and softwood it's tapered which makes a big difference when you're sawing because the flat one's kind of sometimes you can get doubled up in there a little too close and that really helps with the flush trimming guys thanks for watching Paz way to support the channels head over to the cast Moses store and get a dovetail jig a stop bar maybe a t-shirt with the caps Moses on it thanks for watching guys stay safe in the shop and we'll see you on the next one [Music]

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 339,149

Rating: 4.889462 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, hand saw, how to, how to saw straight, saw, how to use a hand saw, hand tools, how to saw, how to use a saw, hand saws, japanese saw, how to make a hand saw guide, hand saw guide, how to cut wood with a hand saw, hand, how to cut wood straight with a hand saw, how to make a very long cut with a hand saw, handsaw, how to saw beam, how to saw wood, how to saw a straight line

Id: 9eLdh5IAhXA

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 08 2019