The Lost Art of Saw Sharpening

By Doug Schnitzspahn

Photo courtesy of wilderness.net

When I worked clearing trails and fighting fires for the Forest Service in Montana, I had to go to chainsaw school. Laugh if you will, but our instructor, Al, the head of the fire crew in the district, and a Vietnam vet, made it damn clear that seasonal employees (ski bums, ex-cons, vets or kids just out of Ennis High School) were a crowd of morons who would, without proper instruction, cut off our legs as we felled Douglas firs on top of our crew-mates. In this logging-and-bucking boot camp, we learned to respect the gas-powered blade, to understand the lean of a tree and to think about every aspect around us before we put whirring saw to wood.

“But I’m not going to teach you how to sharpen the saw,” he told us, “because most of you don’t give a shit.”

I did, however, give a shit. And Al knew that. He ended up singling out a few of us to earn the coveted Class-B sawyer certification, meaning we could legally fell trees up to 24-inches in diameter and also saw on forest fires. Earning a “B” was no easy feat — I had to perfectly fell a tree against its natural lean, knocking down another tree that one of my co-workers, who failed the test, had left twisted off its stump and hanging precariously against the surrounding trees. Now, before you accuse me of being a redneck tree-killer, you should know that you have to be able to fell trees and clear blowdown to open trails and build bridges on public lands. And second, you could take the biggest tree-hugging hippie on the planet and put a chainsaw in his hands (his, because I believe this may be a weakness of the Y chromosome) and he will instinctively want to go cut through both deciduous and coniferous shit.

So I became a wildfire sawyer. First, I was a swamper, carrying a gas can around behind my mentor, a crusty, hard-boozing, porn-mag-reading part-time logger named Ted, and clearing what he cut. Ted was one efficient sawyer. Watching him work, I began to understand that the art of cutting shit down is a perfect symmetry of intelligence, fluid speed and efficiency, with a lot of prep time thrown in. As I watched him sharpen the teeth of his saw, he stressed the difference between a sluggish, dull blade and a well-maintained machine. Then I ran the saw. And since you need to move fast when you are cutting the front line on the flaming edge of a fire (and since a sharp saw runs faster), I learned how to make that saw sing.

“The difficulty of crosscut sharpening and the type of rare intensity it takes to actually do the job are just another argument used by those who want to be able to use chainsaws in wilderness areas.”

Late at night, you could find me pulling a round file along each tooth at the perfect angle, eyeballing it so I knew which teeth needed more attention by the shiny glint of metal the file left behind. Ah, the joy of that blade moving effortlessly through wood.

But most of the time, I did not fight fires. I cleared trail in the lonely, forgotten woods of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness, where chainsaws, with their buzz and gas and mechanized phallic power, were illegal. Here we were required to use the six-foot-long, two-person crosscut saw instead, a beautiful, quiet blade that can be just as effective as a chainsaw without all the fossil-fuel-burning noise. Archaic to some, the crosscut has a purity to it, a feel, understanding and thoughtfulness that you just don’t get with a chainsaw. Joined by the mechanism, by the very requirements of its use, my partner and I would tie the limber metal blade bowed across our backpacks and never worry about hiking into the woods with a gas can. The only problem? Sharpening a crosscut saw requires such knowledge, skill and patience, that only a handful of people in the whole country have mastered the art.

To sharpen a saw you need an acute understanding of how and why it works. A crosscut saw works by cutting at a right angle to the wood grain (as in cutting across a tree trunk), using angled teeth that slice away at the wood fibers like carving knives. The most important attribute of a crosscut saw is that these sharp cutting teeth actually flare out wider than the saw blade itself. These cutters, as they are called, generally come in sets of two, sticking out about 1/100 of an inch to either side. This flaring, which is called the set, has two purposes. First, it causes the saw to actually bite in against the grain of the wood to create the cut, which is called the kerf. And it ensures that the kerf is wider than the saw, which keeps it from binding, or getting stuck in the wood.

The cutting edge of most of the crosscuts used by the Forest Service consists of repeating patterns of two sets of cutters, followed by a deep gap, the gullet, a raker and another gullet. The teeth cut, the raker pushes the cutting debris — which tangentially I have to let you know are called schnitzspahn in German — into the gullet and it drops to the ground when the saw comes out of the log.

But those flared cutters are also precisely what make the thing so difficult to sharpen. There are three major steps to sharpening a crosscut. The first is called jointing the saw. Basically you use a special tool or, if you are good enough, eyeball the top of the saw and file down all the teeth so that they are the same height — but at the same time you have to make sure the rakers are slightly shorter than the cutters, measuring in infinitesimal thousands of an inch.

Next comes the true art. According to Warren Miller, who teaches classes in the process at the Forest Service’s Nine Mile Wilderness Training Center in Montana and is widely acknowledged as the North American guru of crosscut saws, the cutters and rakers must be shaped and then set, by the painstaking and risky process of hammering them to the correct flare. Only then can the actual sharpening of the cutter teeth take place.

Miller, who is a physicist by training as well as a long-time wilderness ranger at Idaho’s remote Moose Creek Ranger District, says it is in the final process where he sees the most mistakes. “Many people don’t pay attention and over-file the cutter teeth, which shortens the relationship between the teeth and rakers, making the saw run unevenly,” he says. “It is extremely difficult to teach how to see the place where the tooth comes to a point and you stop filing.”

The idea is to watch for the glint of the sharpened metal, but often a burr on the tooth can mimic that sharp metallic shine. “You have to find the small details,” says Miller. “Be patient. Know the limit.”

The difficulty of crosscut sharpening and the type of rare intensity it takes to actually do the job are just another argument used by those who want to be able to use chainsaws in wilderness areas. The Bush administration has cut off funding so badly for the Forest Service’s recreation departments that there are no longer people who do what I used to do and clear wilderness trails. Blowdown is accumulating. In places like the Glacier Peak Wilderness in Washington, miles of trails and important bridges have been obliterated by floods — and no one is going to open them up. The sad fact is that the vast majority of people who know how to use a crosscut saw these days don’t even work for the Forest Service any more. Chainsaw proponents say its best just to get in and open the trails as quickly as possible.

But doing that would compromise the whole concept of wilderness. A key tenet of the Wilderness Act of 1964 was to created these unique places where, In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition. Silence, freedom from gas-power and a celebration of the patience of people like Warren Miller are why wilderness was created. These places are not about Luddism, they are about that one chance at peace of mind, quiet, and a communion with the natural world that has been lost in every other aspect of our mechanized lives. Wilderness is a place where you can stop and think to solve problems without much technology. Wilderness is giving a shit.

The crosscut saw is a part of our ability to see wilderness as something within ourselves. If we give up on the difficult art of sharpening the saw, we give up on our own ability to understand the way things work around us, and give in to a world where every answer lies in Home Depot or Lowe’s instead of within ourselves. I only hope that some day I can find the patience to learn how to sharpen a crosscut saw by myself.

MG