Re: RANT ON What's the difference between...
William Duffield, on the Cohansey
>...cutting up a saw and cutting up a log?
If we applied your sentimentality to woodworking, we'd all be living in log cabins or worse, busting our arses in stick chairs, eating off of plywood tabletops with 2x4 legs and aprons, and storing our possesions on split rails or particleboard planks stacked up on concrete blocks.
Don't be any more afraid to cut up a saw than to cut up a fallen shade tree.
It's just material. You don't have a museum curator watching over your shoulder. Just use a little discretion. Newer saws incorporate better steel, which Disston somehow thought would make up for the economic elimination of split nuts, skilled craftsmen, nibs, elegant etches, efficient and comfortable handle shapes, taper ground steel, apple and beech handles, recessed medallions, etc. Just understand what you are doing, and what it is that you are doing it to.
Newer saws are likely to have much better steel, ugly or even cruelly misshapen handles, less elegant or even inelegant shapes, or a hangdog hang. They are also less likely to have been improved by an artistic bucolic scene painted on them, which you will have to remove. Again, use discretion--The barn in the painting just might be the ultimately collectible Dead Horse Forge.
Another caveat: some time after Satanley bought Disston, induction hardening of individual teeth, after cutting, sharpening and setting, was employed. This required a different steel formula, and it makes new teeth cut better for longer, but makes maintenance of the teeth by the sawyer problematical.
NO TNAR