Alan DuBoff
>Pedder,

I'd like to see, but I'm sure it's not hard to come up with someone that tried to sharpen a saw and failed. I think we can come up with folks that were successful at it, I would put myself into that category.

I will say that the first time I shaped a saw by hand it was pretty bad looking, but I always took filing pretty cautiously in the beginning and started of with very little removal to get a feel. That is what I recommend to others as well.

I think like anything, we can find both success stories and failures if we look, but that is no reason that others shouldn't try it either.

Heck, for that matter we see a lot of folks fail at cutting dovetails by hand, some folks just don't have enough skills within them to do it. OTOH, many, many folks have cut a lot of dovetails successfully, even those that have never done it before.

IMO, the tone of this thread is over exaggerated.

It's only a freakin' tool, after all...and not a very expensive one at that...

Regards,
Alan