Burgon.Green&Co

Hello All,
Here's a saw I got at my local flea market recently, brought down by a dealer from Vermont. It's 18" long and canted, 3 1/8" at toe and 3 7/8" at heel, with three 7/16" split nuts, broad cheeks and a big top nib. The brass back is parallel. I'd say it's 9 ppi, except that it's been used so much without any sharpening that the points are actually rounds.

It was heavily rusted, so much that a crack had opened in the handle, visible to me in the handhole, opposite the slot sawn for the blade. I took off the handle to remove the rust underneath it before the handle exploded, and then realized that I should remove the brass back as well, to avoid scratching it while cleaning the plate. And that's when I found this beveled saw plate.

That discovery raised all sorts of questions about canted saws. It appears that shorter saws are often canted just by fitting the backs at an angle on the rectangular plate. But if that was done to this longer saw, the back would only grab the plate slightly at the heel, perhaps not securely enough to keep the plate rigid while sawing. By beveling the front end of the plate, the back is allowed a deeper grip at the other end of the plate. But if one is going to cut the plate, why just a short bevel rather than tapering the whole plate? Were the saw plates delivered to the maker already cut to size? Could the maker cut a long taper easily? Did they have a guillotine cutter then or just bench shears? Simon Barley has mentioned "paring" in discussing saw production. Does this have anything to do with shaping the blade?

This saw is canted 3/4" over 18" of length. The plate is beveled for 5" of its length, leaving 13" of straight saw. How does that dimension relate to the possible idea that for a 14" or shorter saw, a rectangular plate might be held securely enough to withstand the force of sawing simply by placing the back on at an angle? Was it at 16 inches that a saw plate began to require a front bevel to be held securely by the canted back? Has anyone disassembled a canted 16" saw, or even a 14" one, and seen a bevel like this?

All I've got here is this nice old saw and lots of questions.

 

This is a great saw! I just love the old English saws and this is a great example of a fairly early one.

In the Hand-saw makers of Britan, it lists:

Burgon, Green & Co Sheffiled 1817-1829
4 (24) Paradise Square

Everything about the saw makes sense, the shape of the cheeks were characteristic for the early part of the 1800s. The blade as well, as etching will start showing up around 1850.

It looks like the teeth have a LOT of rake to them, you should sharpen them up and use it. Beautiful handle also, nice lines to it.

 

David and all,

I hope that Pedder or Lui or one of the other makers will have a say on this, but I cannot really see why the back was fitted like that.

Being a self described bodge artist who can do nothing properly, I think that I know a bodge when I see it. If it is a bodge, however then it has been like it for a long time, possibly from manufacture. So why take an enormous chunk out of the top front of the plate? You can clearly see that contact over the width of the back has only been made in the middle with virtually none at the handle and little at the front.

Surely the easiest and most sensible thing to do is to fit the back on straight and then cut the plate on a cant etc.

"a rectangular plate might be held securely enough to withstand the force of sawing simply by placing the back on at an angle?"

I am sure that I will get corrected if I am wrong on this, but the handle holds the saw plate and transfers all the forces, unless there is a fixing through the back as there are on some of the fancier handled backsaws. The back merely provides stiffening and weight to a thinner saw plate than a handsaw.

So in principle the more back there is in contact with the plate, or the less plate that there is beneath the back, the more effective that the stiffening is for any given thickness of plate.

So why do it as it has been done? I still think that a bodge is the most realistic answer.

Happy to have this refuted

Fred

PS would you have 3 screws in a handle on a pre 1830's saw of that size? This may point to even more interesting possibilities.

 

Personally I don't think it was canted on purpose, and believe it was just how the plate was that they had which they used.

I really do not subscribe the the canted blades on saws theory either though.

I don't think it's unusual to have 3 nuts, not for such a large saw. Yes, it is more common to have 2 on the older ones, but there are not so many of the larger saws around. That is about as big as backsaws get (a miter is not a backsaw, IMO).

 

Thank you all for the info and comments on this curious saw.

Alan, yep, sharpening it is on my list. I doubt I'll use it very much but it'd be nice for it to have that possibility still. And I've got no opinion either way on the usefulness of canting a saw back, but it's clear that it was often done. My question is why'd they choose to do it this way or that way?

Ray and Fred, just like you, I always thought that it would be most logical, when canting a saw, to have a fully tapered plate, inserted evenly into the back. But that thought presupposes that the smaller shops got saw plate steel in large pieces and could do their own cutting to size and shape, just as we can now. But what if they received their plates already sized to width from the mill and did little cutting themselves? I think the early rolling mills produced fairly narrow sheets of steel, not like the big sheets we can get, so steel being delivered to Sheffield shops in saw plate widths might be a plausible supposition.

An important question to answer in sorting out this long taper idea, one Simon might help us with, is to know what tools were available in the 1st quarter of the 18th C that could make long cuts in saw plate? Dr. Guillotine's machine had only started cutting heads off 30 years or so before this saw was made. Had his device been adapted to shearing sheet metal by the time this saw was made, or had such a shear already been in long use? If such shears existed, could a small shop even afford one?

If they weren't using a guillotine to make long cuts, then how would they make them? With a hack saw? Chiseling? Grinding? Any of those methods probably take long enough that you'd want to make the cut as short as possible, to help keep your saw affordable.

Whatever the technique, if they just cut a 5" bevel on the front of the 18" plate they could insert it as deeply into the back as they could a 14" rectangular plate. And a 14" rectangular plate probably worked just fine with an angled back.

Ray shows a dovetail saw disassembled in his Canted Blade article on the homepage, which has the same minimal coverage of the heel end of the plate as this 18" saw exhibits. Makes me wonder that perhaps the full insertion of the plate into the back that we all think so logical isn't necessary at all?

My WAG machine is spinning at a furious rate here, fueled 100% by curiosity!
I remain confusedly yrs,
David

 

David,

I should have read Ray's article before I responded then I would not have made the elementary mistake about grip over the length of the back. Still, its a learning process and I don't mind being corrected.

I would surmise (WAG) that in the early 1800's, not only was it not easy to work steel when cold, (Would the plates have been cut hot?) but that the steel itself was a very expensive commodity. Canting would give a more usable depth of blade at the rear for the minimum amount of steel used.

But on looking at Ray's pics. the front of his saw does not have the chunk taken out of the front that yours does and it seems to "cant" quite well and about the same "grab" at the heel.

I suppose a question that I should have asked earlier is whether or not it is necessary to remove the piece at the front in order to get the back to fit along the line that it does. Taking some ad hoc measurements from the photo's using the little pointy hand icon as a measure, it is necessary - but it would be interesting to know what the real life situation was.

Which brings us back to your notion of the least work for the maximum effect when canting it. If they had to cut it in order to get the cant, then they would do the minimum necessary from the point of view of both effort and cost (time).

So I will retract the bodge assertion as it looks like there was method in their manufacturing. How they did it is another matter and whether they did it hot or cold. We need really, a dissertation on the method of manufacture and which, as you say Simon (anyone else??) can possibly provide.

Fred

I have tried working old saw blades cold and by hand and it cannot be done with any degree of effectiveness. I resorted to an angle grinder with a steel cutting blade in it. It worked but re-tempered the steel along the edge of the cut. It must have been a nightmare to do unless guillotined or ground using a wetstone.

Are there any signs on the edge of your blade (i.e. striations) to indicate the cutting method?

 

Hello Fred,

I'm off to leave town for a few days, and won't get to take the saw apart again until then to look for any marks to indicate how the bevel might have been cut. But I can say that the saw was ground or filed to some extent. The bevel doesn't make a sharp point where it intersects the top edge, but rather has been shaped to a gradual curve over about an inch or so. More later perhaps.

David

 

Burgon Green & Co

Saw making (old style) is a big subject, but one or two points may help:

A rectangle of saw plate was prepared by hot rolling from an ingot that was pre-sized to end up roughly to thickness, and (for hand saws) big enough to end up about right when sheared diagonally (in 1768 Joseph Wilson paid £4/4/0 for saw shears when he was setting up as a saw maker - at a time when his best hand saws cost 7/6). For back saws it was probably rolled out to twice the length and sheared in half. The degree of cant could be varied by the amount the plate was driven into the back (there is a good account of this in the book on the Seaton chest - about to be reissued in a greatly enlarged 2nd edition)- backs were prepared to look finished before the blade was fitted, and were closed up very tightly. The other thing that happened was that the blade could have moved within the back post-manufacture - see the S&J catalogue of 1915 for their reasons why they were inserting a screw through handle, back, and blade.
A question for David, please: was the back tapered across its width? I'm currently conducting an argument with another saw nerd, who says taper was unusual, but I think (on the basis of several measured backs) that it was. The amount of taper was small - maybe only 1/16inch in 12-16 inches. I think taper of the back disappeared before 1850, not sure when.

 

Simon,

(Sorry to hijack your topic David) If you click on the link below to this site, you will see a brief conversation that Kiwi and I had about (amongst other things) tapered backs.

It is not publication standard data, but it might help.

http://www.backsaw.net/index.php?option=com_jfusion&Itemid=58&jfile=showthread.php&t=203

Fred

 

Hello Fred and Simon,

In answer to your questions. Sorry Fred, I couldn't see any meaningful marks on the tapered front edge of the B&G saw, so no information for us there.

And, Simon, as to any taper in the back. I had said it was parallel in my first post, but went back and used a dial caliper on it to check again for you, with not very decisive results. It measures (on different sides) .807/.809 at the toe and tapers very slightly for 6 inches to .827/.825, then it stays more or less the same till the heel where it read .828/.830. Overall a tiny taper of .021, which is less than 3/128ths of an inch. I'll leave it to you as to whether this is meaningful.

I also have a Smith & Son 14" canted saw (2 screws, London pattern handle), that does have a more significantly tapered back. From .765 at the toe to .850 at the heel. By the way, your post isn't clear (a typo perhaps) as to whether you think the existence of taper to be usual or unusual.

I'm also curious if you can tell us any more about just what a "saw shear" was? Scissor action like a bench shear or was it like a guillotine? Any idea as to length of cut? Although I suppose a guillotine that could cut hand saw plate must have had a length of at least 30+ inches. I don't suppose there are many machine tool catalogs or smith's drawings from 1768 laying about to provide those details?

In any case, I hope this information is a help.
David

 

Burgon, Green

Thanks, Fred: I don't think my discussant, to give him a title more polite than he often deserves, will be convinced, but every little helps.

Simon