Short version:

I have a thumbhole DH that has been machine refiled to 7 point rip. It
still has a "9" or a "6" stamped on the heel of the blade, depending on
whether you read it handle-up or point-up. Can someone tell me which way
it is supposed to read? I would like to know if it was originally a 6
point rip or a (far rarer) 9 point crosscut.

And thank you, Pete Taran and Eric von Sneidern. The amount I've learned
from the Disstonian Institute and the VintageSaws site is incalculable.
Most of the actual information below is from these sites. The gloating,
chuckling, stretching my scales out on my gleaming hoard deep in the
caverns is my own doing.

Now lets go back across the street, but get there by going around all
four sides of the square.

Long version:

I'm beginning to think that maybe I have an eye. The Thursday before
last I didn=E2=80=99t get to my email until midnight, and when I did I
found that Michael S. (Nick Naylor) had forwarded an announcement of an
estate sale in my neck of the woods. It was full of superlatives: an old
couple who were collectors of many things (for instance adding machines,
electronic equipment, toys) and who owned an apartment building which
they didn=E2=80=99t so much rent out as fill up; multiple apartments all
filled with Stuff; =E2=80=9Chundreds of tools=E2=80=9D were mentioned,
so many that they didn=E2=80=99t even try to list=C2=A0 them.=C2=A0
Three day sale, 9-4 Friday and Saturday, and 10-3 Sunday. That=E2=80=99s
where the shoe pinched. I had a student coming by on Friday afternoon,
and Saturday I had been looking forward to my first meeting of the
Society of American Period Furniture Makers---=C2=A0=C2=A0=C2=A0not that
I make the stuff, but I do like looking at it. (Great meeting, by the
way, both looking at furniture at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in
San Francisco and seeing Joe Jerkins' shop afterwards). There was no
realistic way of attending the estate sale unless I got there at the
very beginning, less than eight hours away. I was forced, against my
nature and my usual practice, into the only successful yard/estate sale
strategy: Get There Early.

So I pried my eyes open, short of sleep, and stumbled out the door in
the middle of the night (8:30 AM on Friday) and made the long trek out
to the sale site (four blocks).=C2=A0 They said they were only taking a
hundred people at a time, but I was 53 in line, so that was OK. As I
passed the entry I asked a guy where the tools were, and he said
=E2=80=9Ceverywhere;=E2=80=9D so I dithered a moment and then followed
wise instinct: I headed down. At the back of the sloping site was the
basement utility room.

Was it up to the ad? Well, it wasn=E2=80=99t Aladdin=E2=80=99s Cave.
There were indeed hundreds of tools, and they were, if not everywhere,
at least in every apartment. The problem was, they were mostly trash,
with a thin scatter of good stuff here and there. The estate sale
company had opened up five of the six apartment units plus the basement,
and there was stuff in every room, but it wasn=E2=80=99t crammed to eye
level the way it would have been if a real packrat had piled things in.
Trust me. I know packrats. Still, I did better than OK, through brunt of
unwillingly following the Only Successful Yard/Estate Sale
Strategy.=C2=A0 I went through the whole place twice quickly by ten and
loaded up; it is an indication of the number of buyers and the thinness
of the tools that I was able to carry and buy pretty much everything
that I saw and wanted, eleven items that they priced at twenty bucks the
lot (almost nothing had a price on it; they would take a glance at your
pile, shove it around just a moment, then name a ridiculously low
price.) When I realized how little they were charging and had paid my
double sawbuck I walked rapidly home, trying to keep from dropping
things, unloaded, and came back with the bag I forgot to bring for my
first run. Filled up with a bunch more stuff, mostly trivial but one of
the best tools of the day in that load, and the cost was fourteen
dollars. As far as decent tools went, the place was pretty well panned
out by 11 AM on Friday, though a lot of trash remained. And there was
still lots of other stuff. I went back on Sunday and got taken down a
peg: they were charging $10 for all you could carry, and I thought I was
covered but it turned out that all those CD cases were empty, and the
steel tommybar was too big for the press I need it for. Still, the whole
weekend's fun was only $44.00

The best item of all, because rarest in the wild (though maybe not the
most valuable monetarily), was a bookbinders roll without a handle,
small (only 2=E2=80=9D diameter instead of the usual 3=E2=80=9D-
4=E2=80=9D) but with the fragile working face undamaged; it was made by
a major toolcutter, Hoole Machine and Engraving Works after they moved
to Brooklyn, which dates it after 1898. This is only the second time in
thirty years that I have found a binder=E2=80=99s finishing tool in the
real wild, though they aren=E2=80=99t that rare in a bookbinder's sale
or a tool dealer's stock. The value of this one tool more than covered
the first batch for me. Oh, things weren't hurt by the #5 frankenplane
with a Type 11 body and an ugly aluminum handle (the handle will pay for
half the weekend's fun), or the tinsnips with 4-1/2" blades that I need
for roughcutting binders' board, or the lather of wrenches, auger bits,
files, dividers, hammers, and other little backups for things I have
already, or the five CDs of Richard Zimmerman playing ragtime, or the 50
DVD set with over half-a-dozen movies I wanted anyway. In other words, A
Very Good Weekend.

The gloating comes from the saws, though. Down in the basement, in the
first room I went in to there was a pile of half-a-dozen trashed
handsaws. I don=E2=80=99t have many saws, because I prefer bow saws to
hand saws and because backsaws (oh, I could ever so easily develop a
real backsaw problem) rarely turn up in the Bay Area, at least in the
venues I go to. But one handle looked right in the middle of a bunch of
handles that looked wrong, so I picked it up and brought it along. This
is the second hand saw I have paid money for, though I inherited a
decent Simonds and two Warrented Superiors. The new chum was crusted
over with rust and as dull as any saw I have ever touched, but as I
worked my way through cleaning and putting away my stash I checked it
out a bit, initially in The Disstonian Institute

http://www.disstonianinstitute.com/d23page.html

The saw is a 22-inch panel saw hand-filed 11 point crosscut. The
pattern of the saw nuts and the wheat carving showed it to be a D-23,
and it has the 1896-1917 medallion. It was rusty enough that I didn't
think I could save the etch, but I went through the motions (razor
blade, 400-grit wet-and-dry with a dead-flat maple block and Liquid
Wrench) and it came up nice and clear, though a bit faint in places.
The etch has the "23" surrounded by the "D," confirming the early date.
A nice saw to use (I like short handsaws), a bit better than average,
though not quite top-of-the-line or (as so far described) overly rare.
I sharpened it, with elation as related in an earlier post today,
tightened up the nuts a bit, cleaned the handle with alcohol (leaving
some of the remaining shellac, but unfortunately taking off some
thickness) and put it on a peg. And I did the same with the 12" No. 4
backsaw from 1917-1940 that I found on my second pass through the
basement, at the very back of the sloping, dirt-floored, neck-bendingly
low-ceilinged rear room of the basement, covered with dirt and
superficial rust but functionally undamaged (the etch on this one
didn't come up quite as well as the D-23, though it is there).

I hadn't checked out Pete Taran's site, what with all the other tools I
was squaring away, but after I posted earlier today on my experience
in=C2=A0 sharpening these saws I decided to re-read his sharpening
instructions, and that led to wandering around his site a bit.

http://www.vintagesaws.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1_7

It turns out that early D-23s (before 1928) are rare, and that most
(Pete says 99%) of all D-23s are 8 or 9 point crosscuts. And rarest of
all are the ones Pete believes are the earliest production, with a
doubled notch on top of the handle and an asymmetrical handle cutout.

http://www.vintagesaws.com/cgi-
bin/frameset.cgi?left=main&right=/museum/d20fm/d20fm.html

So my 22-inch early-production 11-point D-23 is... not common... in
several ways. I still mean to use it, though.

Not done yet. When I returned for a last look around the sale on Sunday
the very last thing I put in my bag was a crusted handsaw blade that I
and everyone else had passed up because the handle that seemed to go
with it was real crap, and I assumed that the blade was crap too. I
grabbed it the last day as scraper stock. When I got home, however, and
had done most of the cleaning and identification on the other two saws,
I looked at the rusty blade and figured I might be able to ID it, at
least in part. It had holes for five nuts, so it was not a Warrented
Superior, nor even one of Disston=E2=80=99s cheaper lines under their
own name. I could also see the shape of the handle in the rust on the
blade. The back top of the blade was shaped in a quarter-circle with a
3-1/4=E2=80=9D radius, which means that the slot in the handle does not
penetrate to the top, which Disston called a =E2=80=9CCover-top=E2=80=9D
handle. It was, that is, the plate of either a D-8 (produced 1875-1955)
or one of Disston's real top-of-the-line models. Chances are its a D-8,
of course, since that was the most popular single model. No etch left;
and it was repeatedly retoothed and machine-sharpened until the blade is
only an inch wide at the tip, about the limit you can manage with
machine retoothing, I gather (from Kirk's demonstrations at the last
BAGathon). Still enough left for hand sharpening, though, and better
than I would want to use for scraper stock. And it's a real kick to tell
myself that I can recognize high quality when just the rust-covered
plate is left. At this point, I know what to look for (five saw nuts
were only used on high-quality saws, though not all of those); but I
didn't know that when I grabbed what must have been the last tool worth
having in that apartment building, two days after the field was panned
out down to the rock.

I've had good luck with saws, for someone who hasn't bought many. My
first real backsaw (broom-handles don't count) was an 8" #4 that looked
like it has been left on the woodpile for thirty years. Grey, cracked,
loose handle, thick crust on the blade... well, I was charged $3 for it
by a dealer who I never knew to undercharge for a tool (or overcharge,
in fairness, just top edge of fair), so that will tell you. When I
finished the long job of reconditioning that one it was so sweet it
hooked me on backsaws, though it is still pretty fragile due to deep
corrosion under the handle. I keep it as a standard of comparison, not
for real use. Waaal, that one is datable from 1871 (plural Sons on the
handle) to 1876 (split nuts), and it has a medallion from a different
pattern than the one the Disstonian Institute shows for the period (mine
has a clear break in the name "Diss ton," unlike the one Erik shows).

And (we're coming back to the point of this posting, after the long walk
around the park to let me boast) when I looked at Pete Taran's site
earlier today I also looked up the one hand saw I had previously paid
money for, a thumbhole D-8 currently filed 7-point rip. I bought it
fifteen or twenty years ago because I like the thumbhole and because it
was sharp, but I bought it from a tool dealer at one of Dave Paling's
greatly missed Tool Swaps, and I wouldn't have paid a lot of money for
it (bottomfeeder, me) so I never thought of it as rare. I thought (till
a moment ago) that it had 8 teeth per inch, in other words that it was a
9-point saw, and it had the normal point number stamped into the blade
below the handle, a "6" or "9" so I just assumed it was a properly-
stamped 9-point saw. Then when I looked at Pete's site I learned that
thumbhole D-8 ripsaws were only made up to 7 point, and that a 9-pointer
would have to be a (very rare indeed) D-8 crosscut, and I got all
excited and enthusiastic and wrote this whole long posting (well, some
of it was written last week, about the estate sale, but not completed
and nearly abandoned).

And then I had to go and spoil it all by actually measuring the teeth on
my D-8. It is filed as a 7-point rip, not a 9-point, so there is nothing
out of the ordinary there. It must have been retoothed, since it started
out as a 6 or 9 point saw, but unless the number is the wrong way up
there is no reason to suppose that it was a rarissimum 9-point crosscut.
Egg all over my face. Taken down a peg, cut down to size. Jumping to
conclusions that my violin with a "Stradivarious" label is a
Stradivarius.

Still, I would like to know: should the point number at the base of a
Disston saw be read with the point upwards or the handle upwards? Just
out of curiosity, you understand. And if it turns out that I have the
rare on I shall start to regard The X-Files as a documentary.

Tom Conroy Berkeley


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