Handmade Turning Saw Pins
How to save $18 by working for three hours!
This is my third article about turning saws. You might be sick of it, but you didn’t live through it. When your hero last made a turning saw the pins were made out of hard maple. Since then, the maple pins failed not once, but three times. When a pin fails it’s sorta like the entire saw explodes. It’s scary! Anyway, you have heard it said, “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.” But I say, if you like it, put a brass pin on it.
No more. I got sick of this. I ordered brass pins from Gramercy Tools, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how I could make these myself. Wood had failed me time and time again, but I’ve done enough metalworking (my least favorite kind of woodworking) that I am confident I can make pins better1 than the Gramercy ones myself.
I cut threads2 in some 1/4” brass bar rod left over from the jewelry organizer.
threads cut I used that to put a nut in the middle to sit between the handle and the body of the saw.
I tapped a red oak handle I’d made, dabbed on some epoxy, and drove it into the handle with some vice grips.
I bored a 1/16” hole for metal dowels in the pin and used my hacksaw (from before!) to make a slot for the saw blade.
While I made this pin I went ahead and replaced the blade of the saw. When I last broke a pin I “upgraded” the blade to a 4TPI rip blade. Friends: a turning saw needs crosscut blades.
The brass pins work well. The prior version worked for quite a while, so it’s possible that the brass pins will fail, but my expectation is that something else (string?) will fail first.3
The main way that this is better, is that it’s very difficult to pound in the Gramercy tools pins without damaging the tips. My version, being threaded, can just be screwed in. Furthermore, because I get to decide exactly where to place the hole in the pin, I get to make the pins more appropriately sized for a large saw like mine. Admittedly, this is a lot of work, but I do think it was worth the effort.
Funny story: I was actually on the phone with someone while I was doing this and he asked me what that terrible sound was. “Are you sharpening something?” I stopped cutting the threads till the conversation was over.
The toggle failed shortly after replacing the pins. It wasn’t the long part, but the turnbuckle. I replaced the cherry turnbuckle with a slightly bulkier hard maple turnbuckle.