Help with cross-cutting technique/tools

Practice practice practice!

I don’t think the cuts don’t look that bad, they just need to be cleaned up. You should look into building a shooting board to help square up the ends. I believe Paul has a video on shooting boards here.

Btw, you have come to the right place to learn how to work wood! I wish I would’ve found this site when I started out in this hobby.

As far as tools go, I would search Paul Srllars blog on his recommendations. If I knew about his blog I would’ve saved a ton of money.

Other than that, keep at it!

Hi Gonz
Welcome to the site, I find as long as I produce a knife wall on all 4 sides and then saw to length leaving a witness of the knife cut I can plane down to the line usually using a shooting board

Hi Gonz
One thing that helped me was to watch the reflection of the wood in the saw. When it runs continues through the saw plate you are square in all planes.

Dont hold the saw to tight, the tighter you hold it the more it will go of line.

Sounds like a good idea @robinhc, I will see what Paul thinks.

A couple of pieces of advice re sawing:
Double check you are dropping your hand as you are crosscutting like Paul does, it should help you keep in line with your knifewall. If you start to go out of square on any cut, try stopping and going back up the cut to where you where square and saw lightly to get it back on track. Once you have done a certain amount you will find yourself getting more an more accurate, don’t worry.
Hope that helps.

All too often, Gonz, I find that there are issues surrounding the saws and especially lower end intro saws. It’s a strange thing that some less expensive and even disposable saws, panel saws for instance, can knock the socks of expensive handsaws. For instance I used a panel saw made by a well known but relatively new to saw making maker and was extremely disappointed because I expected more from a $150 panel saw. I then went to a Bahco panel saw that cost £9 and it cut like a dream. What was the difference. Well, the plate of the US saw was too thin and buckled with each forward thrust and and wobbled with each pull. The Bahco saw cut a pristine cut. On another occasion I bought a Two Cherries saw made in Germany for the US company Robert Larsen supplier that turned out to be over set with the worst punched-out teeth I ever encountered. It produced terrible work no matter how I used the saw and anyone using it would or could think it was them not the saw. The difference between Bahco and the US maker was that Bahco saws are throwaway saws, which are fine if you use them on laminates and kitchen tops made from pressed fibre board or other manmade boards. I like saws for life, not disposables.
It’s highly likely that what you are encountering is overset teeth, a lightweight saw and a little over self expectation. Relax (psychologically and physiologically), press a little harder to compensate for the thin steel back and if necessary remove some of the set by tapping the teeth between two hammers doing both sides. This will leave exactly the right amount of set if you don’t hit too hard.

Thanks Gonz. I’ve suddenly started having trouble sawing even CLOSE to square vertically (I’m okay horizontally thanks to the knife wall) and while I think I found one of my problems (the boards weren’t horizontal because my bench was on a slope. My cut was “vertical” but the board wasn’t horizontal so the result was out of square) the answers you received here tell me there’s more to sawing square than I appreciated yet.

One thing I have done is follow this advice, works really well to reduce the set evenly as I don’t have a very fine saw set. I just use a small bench vise with two plates of smooth steel I had left over from another project.

http://www.popularwoodworking.com/article/get-a-consistent-set-on-your-saw-with-paper

After trying out a Lie-Nielsen thin plate tenon saw a couple of weeks ago, which I liked very much, I took a pair of calipers to the plates of a couple of home store miter saws I had hanging up. Finding one that was about 0.023″, slightly over the LN’s 0.020″, I filed the stock teeth off as they were poorly stamped and ridiculously over set. I then refiled the teeth in at 11 points per inch, sharpened per Paul’s progressive rake method, and set the saw. After using the vise trick above, I couldn’t be happier with the way this saw cuts. Of course the handle is much too large, and I think the steel is a bit soft, but it will work for now with frequent re-sharpening.