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I have a question for you all. A few years back I built a Roubo-esque frame saw in an attempt to conquer hand tool resawing. Frankly, I’ve not had great success with it. It’s 4′ long, and sports an .032″ steel blade sharpened at 2 ppi. Rake angle is fairly low which makes the blade difficult to start. Once in the kerf, this thing eats wood fast. The problem with it is that it’s difficult to control.
I’ve made the easy fixes. And this wasn’t my first rodeo with frame saws. There are 2 pins attaching the blade on each end. The pins are strategically placed so that the tooth line sees a fair bit of the tension.
The problem I seem to be encountering is that the blade twists, seeking the path of least resistance. You can hold the line on your side, but you may loose it on the far side.
To help reduce the twist, I removed the upper pin on the far end, driving all the tension through the teeth (just above the gullets really). This helped somewhat, but not enough. I also tried extra tension. But I may be too mechanically sympathetic. The tensioning bolt is designed to put a stick thru to produce GOBS of tension. I could try that.
Other problem I’ve encountered is that when sawing veneers, the saw naturally gravitates to the weak side. Roubo’s illustration seems to indicate they began the cut in the sap and moved toward the heart with each successive cut (don’t have the image handy. If anyone’s got it and can email it to me, I’ll post it here.) Not sure how you stop this. Is it possible the saw in the image is set on one side only?
If you have experience with one of these saws, I’d like to hear it. The only other saw I’ve seen like mine is the one in the Hay Shop. Maybe Ed Wright has been through this and they’ll blog about it. If you’ve got any advice for me that you don’t mind sharing here, I’d appreciate it.
