Bush Saw
Over the Easter weekend I was doing some gardening, i.e. chopping things up. I realised that the bush I was cutting up would make a good handle for the saw I was using.
The saw blade was from some telescopic loppers but it was a bit hard to manipulate a saw on the end of a 2m pole so I’d just been using it with some thick gloves which was far from ideal.
A 14in by 1.5in section was cut from the bush and a slot was cut in the end using the saw blade. Any rough bits were removed with a surform. A couple of holes were drilled and the blade was bolted in place with some M5 bolts. I added a bit of packing so that the blade did not move. It’s likely that as the branch dries out I’ll need to tighten up those bolts. It’s also possible that had I made the slot a little longer then I would not have needed the packing. A final touch was to add a screw eye to the end so that I could hang it up in the gardening cupboard in the workshopshed.
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
looks great – we’ve got some tree branches cut down out front and this gives me some new ideas.
As suspected, I needed to increase the slot longer, approx 2 times the width of the blade. This gives enough spring so that the wood can be tightened on the blade.
Looks good! I have a collection of cut up sections of teak window frames. When sliced up and routered, the wood comes in handy for making long lasting replacement handles for tools, garden seats etc.
teak handled tools, that sounds good.