I’ve been hand-ripping green applewood logs with a one-man timber crosscut saw, and I’d like to try one of these. I found one in Japan on eBay, buy it now. So I did! Just waiting for the seller to get back with shipping info. Expect pictures and full report on my blog. My wife will probably use it on my neck.

I think you pretty much summed up what I am going to try next. I really like the idea of at least a little positive rake angle and I think it might be feasible, but I need to draw up some ideas. I also need to learn a different filing technique, because the usual triangular tapered files are probably not going to be ideal for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time right now to do anything, so I’ll have to revisit it in a couple of weeks.

Resawing is tough enough work, and these frame saws turn out to be kind of tricky, so I can see why people generally wouldn’t care to go to so much trouble to perfect one when you could just get a silly bandsaw. However, this is not really an option for me at the moment, and I don’t like giving up anyway, so I’ll keep fooling around with this thing.

I think you hit the nail on the head regarding the performance of these saws when you mentioned the giant teeth in the Japanese saw you linked to. The saw in that sequence has a couple of features that make it more suited to resawing than the blades commonly commercially available to us for making these saws today.

First, as you noticed, the teeth are huge. The Putsch blade is about 5 TPI. This is fine for ripping 1″ or 2″ thick stock, but when you resaw, the thickness suddenly jumps to 6, 8, 10 even 12″ or more. For sawing something this thick, the teeth on a typical rip saw are way too small, even at 4 or 5 TPI. This causes the gullets to clog up with swarf long before they can clear the kerf and leads to slow cutting and a saw that tends to drift in the cut. The only solution to this is fewer, larger teeth per inch, as seen in the Japanese saw. There are no saw webs commercially available that I’m aware of that come with teeth that big so we are basically left to make our own.

I retired (and repurposed) my frame saw several years ago because I just couldn’t get it to perform well, push or pull. I’m convinced it was the blade, not the design (I used a 1-1/2″ wide bandsaw resaw blade; another huge mistake). I could never tune that saw just right but I can resaw just fine with my 5 point hand saw, though it is slow going for the reasons I mentioned above. The benefit of the hand saw is the wide saw plate, which helps to minimize drifting induced by clogged gullets. I think this is the problem with most saw webs on the market when we try to use them to resaw with. Too many TPI and too narrow of a web to stabilize the saw. They just weren’t designed for resawing. I think the web in the frame saw in Roubo was like 3 or 4″ wide. I would suggest making a web of 2-3 TPI tops, maybe even more like 1-2 TPI. I think this would be much more appropriate for resawing than the 5 point webs we typically see used. The Japanese saw you linked to seems to agree with that.

The other unique thing about the Japanese saw is that they file those teeth with positive rake (tooth leans into the cut). This makes them very aggressive but also fragile. I don’t think you could file a push saw with positive rake like that. The saw would likely just buckle in the cut or the teeth would break. The pull stroke is what makes a saw with such an aggressive rake possible to use.

If you do decide to make your own web, please let us know how it turns out and compares to your current setup. I would be very interested in the results.