Jump to content
I Forge Iron

Saw Doctors Hammers


basher

Recommended Posts

Here is my latest stash from ebay, collected from a modern saw doctor .

 lots of dogs head , double diagonal pein, straight /cross pein hammers range from 2.5lb and up.

 marked sheffield ,handforged from cast steel, 1911. and other marks quite a haul...

 I have given them a clean and will re handle most of them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Before I bought my first power hammer I used one of the diagonal pein saw setters' hammers as my main drawing down and spreading hammer. It could move metal much quicker than my foot hammer. It is one of the facetted ones like the one without a handle top centre in the photo. I have ruined mine for saw setting though and ground the pein into a fuller, it would bruise the saw now.

Good purchase. Were you able to actually meet and chat with the saw doctor? Any interesting insights to share?

I always wondered whether they set the big band mill blades in situ with a hammer and dolly/pair of hammers or off the wheels on a bench/anvil.

Alan

Edited by Alan Evans
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Alan,

I worked in a lumber mill during the late 1970's and they had a "saw doctor" in-house.  He would dismount the blade, put it on a balancer and check it, followed by laying it on a surface plate and hammering, then he'd repeat until satisfied.  These blades had carbide teeth that were riveted in place so he would replace those prior to balancing and setting the warp.  After it was remounted, he would sound an alarm so everyone could move out of the blade's path then he would turn on the saw and watch how it ran before releasing to the veneer cutters.  These saws would cut a 3 foot tall stack of veneer in one pass so the blades were quite large (and NO guards - just spun on the bearings over a conveyor that pushed the wood through the blade).  Not sure how fast they ran but the tip speed on a 6.5 foot diameter blade was howling.  Was a very noisy place to work - probably part of the reason I'm about deaf now.

I should have paid closer attention but I was still wet behind the ears and more interested in the machine shop at that time...LOL

Hollis

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank you for that description Hollis.

It was the handling of the big band saw blades I was thinking about rather than the circular ones, but the process you describe makes sense. Circular saws were going to be the follow up question. :)

Sounding an alarm to get out of line of the blade reminds me of a timber yard I used to go to with my father when I was a nipper. I remember being impressed by this big, cavernous, dark building which had a line of brilliant shafts of sunlight striking through the dusty air. When I asked what made the holes in the roof it was pointed out that they were all in line with the circular saw blade and were where the occasional blade tooth had come off!  Terrifying!

Alan

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Alan,

Yes, the circular saws would sometimes shed teeth and they'd go flying - exactly as you recall.  I worked in that mill for about a year and never saw it happen but apparently it was not an infrequent occurrence.

I never saw a band saw there but I only worked in the welding/machine shop and on the plywood line.  The place was old and huge so no telling what was in some of those buildings. It's an OT comment but they had an old Sherman tank chassis that had a cherry picker mounted on it in place of the turret.  That was fun to drive in the yard and pretend I was attacking a hedgerow in Normandy...<LOL>

Link to comment
Share on other sites

More than a decade ago I accompanied a knifemaker friend to purchase some segments of 8 inch wide bandsaw blade from a lumberyard/building supplies outfit that was getting out of milling their own lumber. Seems that RR spikes and other metal debris inside of logs caused catastrophic failure on a regular basis.

The roof of the building had been patched and repaired numerous times where the broken blades had shot thru the roof and fallen back down somewhere in the yard. The final straw was one coming back to earth in the center of the adjacent highway................right in front of the elementary school across the street!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

When I was in school during my apprenticeship, one of the other apprentices worked at a sawmill further up north. He said the hippies in the area had figured out "spiking" trees no longer worked due to the metal detectors in the mills, so instead they'd core a chunk out of a tree (effectively killing it anyways) and fill it with concrete. Quite the catastrophic results.

Luckily my father, who's a "Saw Doctor" (love that term, and I'll have to pass it on to him this evening :) ) hasn't encountered that in all his years at various mills!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just falling asleep last night having looked at this thread last thing. I then remembered that the reason the circular saw blades were able to shed their teeth were because it was an early system of modular tooth, developed amongst other things presumably to obviate the need for skilled Saw Doctors.

Any tool handy mechanic could renew all or some of the teeth as required. They were snail profile and rotated into "C" shaped notches around the blade perimeter. 

Presumably if a tooth hit a snag and maybe stalled the blade it was the other teeth that tried to carry on moving and if not fully tight un-rotated themselves and took off. Hence it was the ones that were on the up side of the bade not the down/cutting side which is why they went into orbit...

Saw Doctors' revenge maybe!

Alan

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...