Several weeks ago, a member of another forum mentioned that he scans saw handles on a flatbed scanner. I thought this was absolutely brilliant and an excellent way to document the exact proportions of a handle. Whether it is a budding handle-maker looking for ideas, a historian attempting to document style changes or simply someone curious about handle design, scans are a faithful copy of an object that is easily mangled, destroyed or otherwise lost to time. In this thread, I will post scans of handles of saws that I have; I encourage others to do the same. The images are currently hosted on Flickr, which downsizes the picture, but I will attempt to find a good filehost for the full-size image so that people can download them. In the meantime, if anyone wishes to obtain a copy of the original image, just ask me and I'll happily oblige.
Wow, all 4 of them are nice handles. Love that ray fleck on the Groves. The Rutter is also wonderful and one of my favorite styles (London Pattern). The Marsh has great lines to it, as does the Biggins. Great set of handles!
Thanks for the compliments. The Groves is just stunning. Of course, there are a lot of things that look nice but are lacking in comfort during use. Lamborghinis, supermodels, etc. The Groves handle, on the other hand, is so smooth and well shaped that it makes other handles feel like plain blocks of wood.
I've actually done this before. It seems to work but it doesn't solve smaller or larger hand, at least that was one issue I had when trying this. In seems having a set of templates for each style handle is what I was trying to achieve, so that you could have different sizes for large, medium, small, etc...I haven't looked too closely, but Issac Blackburn's templates are done well. I don't know how he does them, but the fact that multiple sizes are available is valuable. Would be nice to have a sketchup file or other that could be obtained in open source which would allow the user to print out from the actual file and/or resize it differently at their discretion. Short of that, having multiple sizes is also good. My question has always been how to easily get from the scan into some type of CAD/similar that could resize? Steve Jobs was always a fanatic about displays, aspect ratio, print and even basic exchange of a display so that it prints correctly. Calligraphy was a big part of his obsession. Getting analog into a digital media is sometimes not so easy, but I think it's safe to say that it would so cool to say, "self, that handle was cool which so-and-so sawmaker did" and be able to go to a collection and get a file that you could resize for the hand the saw was being made for. There must be some magic pixie dust that could be used with 3D printer technology that could do this automatically...*sigh* Alan