Male 1: One thing that I’ve learned about hand sawing is that your stance is really important. So, you want to keep the saw – I hold the saw with my pistol finger like your trigger finger out like this. And, get a good stance. Not too wide but one foot kind of in the back of the other. You want to keep your arm so your arm can move in a straight motion. And, I always let the saw do that work. A lot of guys will try to start off – they try to start the saw by pushing too hard that it jumps across the wood. But, you let the saw do that work and I would always use my thumb as a guide and I always start with one backward pull to get that nice little curve when you saw the rest. And then, you let the saw do the work. You don’t have to push too hard.
And it is where I cut down that line you did. That line, you try to cut straight. And, the reason that you have that line is as you are cutting down – if your saw tends to wander, you know where the set is too heavy. And then what I always do if the set is too heavy on one side, I just take a water stone of any grit and just kind of swipe it along real quick.
Male 2: So essentially, to remove that set and what it winds up doing is creating almost a razor thin line that always seems to track straight.
Male 1: Yes.
Male 2: If you are off at the beginning, you may have an angle but you are never really going to curve very much because the set is so thin.
Male 1: Some guys will take the set completely out of their saw. I don’t do that because the set is there to help remove the waste, the sawdust. So I will tell you completely out. And the other thing that you have to remember, since I was teaching for the first week of the students – this last two weeks ago – I think the students have come up to me asking, “My saw is not working well.” And I’m like, “Here, let me see.” And I marked a few lines and then bam bam bam straight down the lines. I’m not tooting my own horn but – I just said, “No, it’s not the saw man, you got to practice more to have your saw back.” And it is really true, it is about practicing especially cutting straight. And you want to cut straight – you know your duck tails, if you are going to hand cut duck tails, you would need to be able to cut straight.
My other little tip that I like is when you are cutting duck tails, you always mark the base as far as you can go down. So when I cut, I always cut up like this at an angle so that I know as I am watching my saw here getting close to my baseline, I know that it is nowhere near but I’m not looking. As soon as I get close here, I just kind of tilt the saw forward and I pull the saw out and 9 times out of 10, you’re right on that line by the bottom.
Male 2: Great. Very cool.
Male 1: Next, we are going to look over some ingrain planning. In grain typically is just a pay in the plane. So, you could see – this is a beautiful tiger maple that mark used on his latest creation.
Male 2: That’s my backup boarding case. I screwed up really bad.
Male 1: Well, it’s beautiful. I haven’t seen a nice maple like this for two years. So on the end grain, I always like to use a block plane or specifically a low angle block plane. I have a nice pair of tusk #6 low angle jack planer, I think it is that I use too. But I always use a block plane.
Now, some of the keys to planning end grain is as you’re planning across, you’re gonna notice right here at this edge, it’s really fragile. So what a lot of guys will do is just come in and just slightly chamfer that edge, nothing too extraordinary. So then, you can plane down.
Male 2: That’s a lot of end grain.
Male 1: Yes.
Male 2: I did not pick the best board. Sorry about that.
Male 1: We were just focused on this side over here.
Male 2: Yes. That’s fine.
Male 1: We can’t that part because I can’t over there but you’ll notice that there is no real chip out on that edge and we are pointing pretty aggressively to get there. And so, before we go down, you got to come back – if you need to plane some more, you have to go back and chamfer that a little more and then keep going.
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