The Truth About Saw Sharpening

If there's any false macho in woodworking, this is it.

When I was a fetus of a woodworker in the 1990s, a long-time hand-tool woodworker tried to size me up with a series of questions.

Q: “Do you cut your dovetails by hand?”

A: “Yes, I don’t know any other way.”

Q: “Do you finish surfaces with a plane or sandpaper?”

A: “Usually a plane and a scraper”

Q: “Do you file your own saws?”

A: “No.”

And like that, the interview was over. He gave me a brief scolding on the matter. (“Filing saws is the difference between the pikers and the people who really care about the craft.”) And then he would have nothing more to do with me.

I have since learned to file my saws. But whenever beginners ask me about saw sharpening, my advice is: There are about 4,000 things you should learn first before learning to file saws. And I stand by that statement.

I use my backsaws and panel saws almost every day in the shop. And my saws need sharpening about every five years. The steel in modern saws is so much better than it was 100 years ago, so saws stay sharp for a long, long time.

Here’s a real-world example. I bought a Kenyon-style sash saw from Mike Wenzloff in about 2006. (It was the second saw he ever made.) During the last 17 years I have filed the saw twice. It’s a 10 tpi rip saw, so it’s easy to file.

As I finished building the Romanian cupboard this month, I wondered if my Wenzloff saw was cutting slow. I compared its speed to another tenon saw we have for students, and I confirmed my suspicion. I then took a close look at the saw teeth and realized it was time to reshape them back to consistent. As I have about 300 more tenons to cut for “The American Peasant,” I had a choice.