Hello all, This saw is singularly off topic and I will not be miffed at all if it is removed as being so, but apart from a silver cucumber saw that I have seen on Ebay recently (and which sold for well north of GBP 800 or possibly even 1000), it is the most curious yet. It is solid copper, and is, presumably by Joseph Tyzack or one of his successor companies. The nuts, I am sure are not right, as they are ill fitting steel on the front and equally ill fitting brass on the rear (domed). And as to age, I am completely at sea. I would hazard pre WW1 but how "pre" I do not know. Any ideas? The blade is 16 inches long. I do have another query as well. This saw has some "twang" -springiness- in its blade. It is nowhere near a D8 that I have that you can bend bouble and it returns to its shape, but it does return well to its original position from a blade divergence of abot 30 - 40 degrees. So, for those of you who know such things, can you "smith" or temper copper as you can steel in order to tension and firm up the blade? It seems unlikely to me but you never know. Happy New Year. Fred
Hi Fred, and happy new year!... I'd be thinking that might be a "Salt Saw" I'm sure I've seen catalogue entries for copper bladed salt saws. Never seen on in real life ( till now ). Regards Ray
I poked around a bit online ... no expert ... Cymbals are made from copper alloys - and are hammered and lathed into form. Cold-rolled sounds like a good candidate. but I don't know when the process dates to. I think sheets of 20thou plus can have a Rockwell (F scale) hardness up to 65 (but another page says 54). I gather - perhaps wrongly - that it would work-harden much easier than steel. Cheers, Paul http://203.158.253.140/media/e-Book/Engineer/Pressure Vessel/ASME Boiler code/sec2b/sec2bsb-152.pdf http://www.copper.org/applications/architecture/arch_dhb/fundamentals/intro.html
It's from the days when salt was sold in large blocks (yes, I'm old enough to remember my old Mum buying it for salting down the surplus runner bean crop - ah, those times were hard!!), and several Sheffield saw makers put them out in solid copper or solid zinc (examples of both are in the collections at Sheffield). I don't think the metal was smithed, and - in ignorance here - I doubt if it was capable of it. Fred has put his finger on the dating problem - there was no difference in design, as far as I can see from the catalogues and the extant examples, between the late 19th cent and mid 20th - so, take your pick and you probably won't be wrong.