Saw questions (longish, with added comments)
Bill Houghton, September summer in Sebastopol, CA
>I'm doing some tool simplification/shop reorganization as an early project in my retirement. I spent today redoing my saw storage (explained below), and have some questions:
1. I've got lots of saws - "lots" doesn't mean "Toddly," more like 25. Some of the saws I've somehow acquired over the years are pretty sorry. If a saw blade is so rusty it's deeply pitted - some of them actually look more like they've had bark beetles than just mere pitting - and is not anything special otherwise, is there any point to cleaning it up? Is the steel useful for anything else?
2. One of the saws is a Woodrough and McParlin saw (the people who made the Panther saw except this one's not a Panther saw). It's in decent shape, fairly clean, handle in tolerable shape except missing two of four sawnuts. Do non-Panther saws from this company have any special value, or do I have a user saw? I've heard the steel on these saws isn't up to Disston quality - true or false rumor?
My provisional saw storage: eventually, I want to make a saw till, but that's down the list a ways. In the meantime, since I live in earthquake country, whatever I do needs to be shake-resistant. My shop (ground floor of the old tankhouse, known to non-locals as a watertower) isn't finished inside, so I'm hanging the saws from the upper-floor joists. 9" long 9/16" dowels cut off an old clothes-drying rack, driven 1-1/2" - 2" into a slightly undersized, slanted hole, let me store 6-7 saws per dowel. I drive a nail into the joist above the dowel, about as high on the joist as I can work, then clinch it over a 1/2" section of light truck inner tube cut straight across the tube so it forms a big rubber band. The free end of this loops over the end of the dowel, with just enough stretch required to keep the saws in place if we get a shaker.