Reply To: File Sharpening Saws
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Any flat single cut file works for that but do it carefully or you’ll just make work for yourself. Your saws are new and you’ve just sharpened them so it may be hard to see what you’re doing. If you take a black permanent marker and color the teeth, it will help you see what’s going on. Make one pass (and one pass only!) with the flat file and look at the teeth. You’re looking for a very small flat shiny spot on the top of each tooth and if you’re seeing random hits and misses, make another pass, but stop after each one and have a look. It works best if you lay the file down on top of the teeth and run the file from rear to front with just a small amount of pressure on the file. Again, be careful – it doesn’t take very many passes to completely remove the teeth on a 14 tpi back saw.
The next part of that process is more delicate. If the teeth were at different heights and you did the jointing properly, you’re going to have some teeth with wide flat spots on top and some where the flat file barely touched them. At this point, you have to go tooth by tooth keeping in mind that you’re filing two different teeth each time you drop the saw file into a gullet and you have to file away only as much metal as it takes to make the flat spots go away and that can be tricky. It’s usually not uniform. For some of the teeth you’ll need to remove metal from the backside of the tooth only without altering the front of the adjacent tooth and in other cases it will be the opposite. Some can be filed as you normally would if the adjacent flats are equal so just take your time and evaluate each tooth as you go. It often takes a number of passes on really messed up teeth to get them straightened out.
As new as your saws are, I doubt you have a big problem with this unless you really went wild when you sharpened the saw. You’re not the first guy that made his saw dull by sharpening it either! That’s actually pretty easy to do. Watch all the video’s that Paul has done and copy his method as best you can keeping the file dead square and level with saw plate as you push the file through and maintaining consistent pressure on the file. It’s not a race either. I’ve heard Paul say that he can sharpen a panel saw in 4 minutes but he’s sharpened a lot of saws. I’m pretty sure when I started, the process of sharpening a panel saw was more like a 20 minute or more task for me so take your time.