You know who else enjoys a nice cold brewski at a block party?
That’s right:
You wouldn’t want your mom to have to worry about fighting off a bear now would you? Really only the Bear-B-Gone Freezolator 3000 will do. Sure, it weighs 200lbs but it’s worth it for the security.
Yes. My understanding is that 1) You’d have to use abrasives, not steel files, to sharpen the hardened teeth and 2) Only the teeth are hardened. Maybe only the tips of the teeth, even. So even if you did apply some next-level sharpening skills and abrasives to a dull saw, you’d expect to wear through the hardened tooth tips and get into an unpredictable mismash of hardened, sort-of-hardened, and non-hardened metal. The re-sharpened saw wouldn’t be the same.
The main disadvantage of these saws over conventional western push saws is that if you’re trying to accurately follow a line you’ve drawn on the wood, the pull stroke covers the line with sawdust. So yeah, the solution is you blow the dust away. That’s it!
And the proof that they work is: japanese furniture has been around for many centuries longer than japanese electricity.
A friend of mine is a Japanese ‘living national treasure’ in woodworking, and I have noticed a Z saw lurking among his more traditional saws!
Cutting on the pull is less prone to bend the blade, so it can be thinner and make narrower cuts. The steel itself isn’t particularly cheap, and individual replacement blades cost about half to almost as much as a new saw, but at least it’s more environmentally sound to only replace the part you need to and, as others have noted, the teeth will retrain their sharpness for a long time with proper use and storage (away from excessive moi…humidity).
Pull saws are a godsend and whoever decided to make “western” saws cut in the wrong direction was nearly as daft as the legions who followed the decision.
Welcome to happiness.
Everyone I’ve ever known who used a pull saw or who I got to try a pull saw had basically the same reaction…Where has this been all my life?
I by no means spend all day sawing stuff, but I always use one of those Irwin ryoba when I do, and sometimes it is plastic.
Most often I cut acrylic, and it blasts through that. With softer plastics, especially HDPE, binding is a bit more of an issue, and it’s harder work; I assume it would be better to have a different tooth pattern, but even if you can buy specialised Japanese hand saws for plastic, I doubt it’d be worth it.
One thing I would say is that every time I replace my saw, it’s not because it’s dull but because it has too many broken teeth. Cutting hard plastics is probably worse for that sort of thing – I’ve never cut polycarbonate, but if I did I would be careful to go slow.
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