Recycling old saws into scrapers.

Sometimes, an old saw is just not worth salvaging.
Sure, if good enough, the handle and bolts/nuts can be all be saved to use again when repairing or re-building another saw. There are times when it is the saw plate that will be utilized instead.

Amongst my huge pile of old saws awaiting rebirth, there was a very tired post WWII  Disston panel saw which had a ruined handle. The saw plate had a bit of surface rust, but nothing too drastic. I had a need to make some more curved scrapers for spoon carving, so set about cutting up the saw. This was initially done with a guillotine.

Saw meets guillotine ... 

Dividers were used to draw curves on the ends of the pieces of saw plate, and the guillotine and  heavy tin snips were used to remove much of the waste. The rest was done with a bench grinder, to create the final shapes of the scrapers.

The first few scrapers taking shape.

Once the required shapes are made good with a bench grinder, the scrapers's edges need to be prepared with a nice fine file. We are looking for a very clean edge , square to the faces. A burnisher is then used to create the burrs which make a cabinet scraper work like a fine plane - taking very thin shavings. Wonderful!

Custom shapes for scrapers.
While I had been making up a batch of convex curved scrapers for spoon making, another task came along yesterday. I am making handrails for a staircase at the moment, and I needed a concave scraper to help clean up the top curve of the handrails.

So I grabbed one of the incompleted spoon scrapers made from the saw above, and re-shaped one side with a concaved radius suitable for my requirements on this job.

The scraper will remove the lines left by the router cutters from the handrail top.

The concave side of the scraper and the type of shavings it created on the handrail. Nice. 

So simple and so effective. Scrapers are fantastic tools which are easily made my recycling old saw blades - so long as they are not too pitted from rust.

I usually make spoon scrapers with a different radius curve on each end. However with the one above, I chose to leave the saw teeth in place... as a reminder of where it had come from, it's former life.
It's a nod to that nice old Disston panel saw. It lives on!