Pedal-powered saw

Originally published at: Pedal-powered saw | Boing Boing

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Apparently, if you use it for too long, you end up with sore feet.

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I’m sure that sounds better with an English accent.

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Very, very cool. Given how many of those old exercise bikes I see laying around, and those old saws in antique shops, I bet this could be done on the cheap. I wonder if having a 2-5 lb. weight on the other end of the saw would help?

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I wonder how the mechanical output compares to time-tested, manually-powered woodworking tool like a treadle lathe.

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That’s all fine and good, but what is the pyramidal metal frame on the circular stand???

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That’s interesting. How do you pronounce “saw” differently to “sore”?

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American (and Canadian) English:

British English (or at least some varieties):

“Saw” rhymes with “sore”, or almost, in British English, but not in American.

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I pronounce saw withount an R, and sore with one.

But them I’m not a native speaker. My teacher long long ago tried to teach me british english, but it has probably drifted to US english mixed with german and dutch over the years :wink:

On I side note: that movie is painful to watch. He really needs to sharpen the saw. It could go so much faster. I can still feel my arms from using the hand saw to cut down my firewood last week.

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There you go, bloody Pilgrim Fathers taking the fun out of everything :face_with_hand_over_mouth::face_with_hand_over_mouth::face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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Yes, we Brits know that sore rhymes with saw. From the links to ‘saw’ I gather North American ‘saw’ is in fact ‘sah’, so I assume North American ‘sore’ is in fact ‘saw’.

??

Last winter, some friends here in Minnesota got a pellet-burning stove for their deck, so they could socialize outdoors during cold weather in the pandemic. I tried to convince them instead to get a bunch of used exercise bikes, so we could all just keep ourselves warm while we hang out together on the deck, but to my disappointment they went for the stove.

:thinking: If they had a regular wood stove and some saw-bikes, we could saw up the wood we would use. Hmm, maybe we could even set up one of the bikes to grind flour to make some tea cakes on the stove, to serve the other guests :smiley:

They would never go for it, lol, but a gal can dream, huh? :woman_shrugging:t2:

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And if you keep using it day in, day out, you end up with big feet.

And you know what they say about people with big feet…

It’s hard to get a clear photograph of them.

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Basically “sore” rhymes with “door” or “more”, if that helps. To my ears, the NA version sounds the “R”,while the British version doesn’t.

I suspect ‘saw’ in a very west-country British accent may sound like it has an ‘r’.

I do not think it is the presence of an ‘r’ or not that makes the difference, it is the much more unsubtle vowel sound difference.

My father told me my grandfather had a saying “wood warms you three times, once when you cut it, once when you split it, and once when you burn it”. (My grandfather was a timber merchant, and in his youth was felling trees with hand saws and using a team of horses to take the trunks back to the yard. My father and I did once use one of his two man saws to fell a tree that was too big for our chainsaw.)

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