Antone Martinho-Truswell – Covington & Sons Tools

by Antone Martinho-Truswell

[This article was written by the energetic Doctor Antone Martinho-Truswell, a Most Beloved Customer and Dean at St Paul’s College, University of Sydney. While not as scholarly as his fascinating and romantic earlier guest post titled Permanence, in this article Antone has graciously shared an aspect of his woodworking experience that will resonate with many Gentle Readers. Please enjoy.]

“Arise and be merry

And sing out while you can

The world will never see the likes

Of dear old Stan.”

From “Dear Old Stan”, by the Dreadnoughts, concerning a different Stan, equally worthy of your meticulous study.

A few weeks ago, I was putting the final touches on my most recently finished, and largest, woodworking project to date. Over the past 18 months, interspersed with dozens of smaller and more pressing projects, I’ve constructed this tea-house styled cubby house for my daughters, complete with engawa, shoji screens (already torn and patched), Aussie-style “tin roof”, and tiny roofed reading nook overlooking Australia’s Blue Mountains National Park. My daughters made the paper garland to celebrate the opening of their new palace.

With this project I set myself the challenge of making the entire structure using only handtools (save a cordless drill for the roofing screws), and to use primarily reclaimed timbers. The timber frame, floors, and inside surfaces of the wooden walls were all hand-planed with a kanna, and all of the joints hand-cut. This involved cutting some 300 joints, and an almighty amount of handplaning.

But it was the ripping that did me in. Or rather, did in my tools. Between the wall panels, floorboards, shoji frames, and the joints themselves, this involved a tremendous length of rip cuts in very hard Australian woods. As I celebrated the completion of the project with a glass of vintage Château Thames Embankment while gazing across the verdant valley, I considered the small collection of exhausted Japanese rip saws the project had left in its wake.

I had been using modern, disposable-blade, induction-hardened Japanese saws on this project, and two, in particular, gave the ultimate sacrifice in the process.

One saw was a rip single-edged kataba already fairly used up on other projects, the other a fresh but inexpensive ryouba that I dedicated to this project in particular. As Stan has noted before, these induction-hardened and mass-produced Japanese saws are excellent tools – sharp, effective, and long-lasting. Moreover, I had been putting them to more punishing work than usual – “in the field” rather than the workshop, cutting reclaimed timber replete with grit, dirt, and other dulling faeries that grinded away their cutting edges.

I am normally meticulous in following Stan’s advice to clean one’s timber and remove dirty, gritty surfaces with dedicated roughing tools before putting quality blades to work, but this project called for a different approach – there was too much timber to efficiently clean before working it, and the inexpensive saw was purchased and dedicated to the project in order to prevent needless back-and-forth while assembling the structure in the garden, so it served as both roughing and finishing tool.

Later, while enjoying a refreshing beaker of Château Fleet Street, I realized two things. First, that my much older furniture-making ryouba had also been dulled by local faeries; and second, that I needed to replace my other workhorse handsaws.

Naturally, this meant contacting Dear Old Stan, the only solution when tools that work are wanted. (Stan, I’m waiving my copywriting fees for that tagline.)

After some back-and-forth with our reliable proprietor, I settled on three saws to renew the capabilities of my saw-box. Our discussion covered a few considerations:

I have no shortage of fine-tooth saws like dozukis and hozohikis, all of which are working fine and providing good service.
I am up for the challenge of re-sharpening rip teeth, but am wary of the time investment versus benefit of trying to sharpen the complex shape of Japanese crosscut teeth.
These new saws would be used for sawing stock to rough dimensions. I frequently make furniture from locally-sawn slabs, and so need to make long rips and crosscuts to efficiently break these down into smaller components.
I wanted saws that are nicer, more real, and more meaningful than mass-produced tools, if possible.

Gentle Reader will not be surprised to learn that Stan delivered all I needed and then some.

The first cab off the rank was an antique 300mm ryouba labeled as being made of Tougou steel – a now rare tool steel produced by Andrews Steel of Britain. This is a stiff bladed, large ryouba, and a very handsome saw. Stan offered, and I enthusiastically agreed, to have this saw tuned, sharpened, and teeth re-profiled for hardwood by his saw-smith, Takijiro.

Takijiro trued and tensioned the blade, leaving behind the telltale henpecks seen on the sides of the blades.

This new saw’s first challenge was crosscutting a slab of camphor laurel planned for a coffee-table top, about 650mm wide and 40mm thick (after giving the slab a good scrub with a wire brush first). It took me about 2 minutes to complete this cut, and it was exceptionally easy to keep straight. I followed this with a 1200mm long rip cut through the same in about 4 minutes and equally satisfying. The cut surfaces were exceptional – very smooth and very straight, even with my paltry skills.

I could not have been happier with this saw, which came from Stan’s “miscellaneous ryouba” selection, and the decision to have the blade tuned and the original teeth replaced with dedicated hardwood teeth is something entirely to be recommended to all potential purchasers.

But one is never enough. And after years of reading Stan’s enthusiastic praise of them, I also wanted my own bukiri gagari, a much rarer and more specialized saw. Here, Stan was able to provide this beautiful 330mm blade made by Takijiro, again, sharpened, trued, tensioned, with hardwood teeth, and with a beautiful natural wooden handle to boot.

Nakaya Takijiro Masayuki, sawsmith extraordinaire

This saw is a joy to use. It’s much bigger than its 330mm size might suggest on first read. It feels like a much bigger, more substantial tool than the 300mm ryouba, despite the blades being notionally similar in size.

I soon became accustomed to using a pull saw with a “pistol grip” handle (aka “shumoku” handle), and sure enough it delivered a straight cut and quickly. I put this saw to the task of making the matching 1200mm rip cut on the other side of the slab, and the results were, as expected, fantastic.

I can’t overstate how much easier it was to make quality cuts with these quality tools. I’m not a professional carpenter, but neither am I a turnip, and can usually make a fist of accurate work even with subpar tools. And while I have some higher-end dozukis and other fine-toothed saws, I had kept my ryoubas and rough work kataba saws cheap and cheerful to this point. These saws were, if not quite like the light that shone round Saul on the road to Damascus, at least a bit like scales falling from my eyes.

The third saw I ordered from Stan was a mass-produced and induction-hardened crosscut ryouba, with an exchangeable 300mm blade – larger than is easily found here in Australia. The reason for this choice was explicitly related to one of my purchasing criteria above, namely that I suspect that I will not be attempting much crosscut saw sharpening any time soon.

The aforementioned ryouba and bukkiri gagari saws are both traditional, handmade saws with teeth that will require regular sharpening.

Stan kindly included in his package a tiny specialized saw file to accomplish this task. But I will be babying the crosscut teeth on the ryouba out of my own hesitancy to try to sharpen them. As such, I thought it wise to make use of the best of modern technology in this affordable, induction-hardened saw to be used whenever extensive rough cross-cutting, sometimes through less than immaculate timber, is required. It cuts very well indeed, and quickly, if without some of the romance and spirit of the handmade saws.

These saws are already the new front-benchers in my workshop, and doing excellent work. The only thing I recommend more strongly than Stan’s tools are his advice and counsel in selecting, using, and caring for them.

There are many people selling tools. But the world will never see the likes of dear old Stan.

As we say in Australia, here’s wishing you a Ripper Christmas! May the greatest of all carpenters be a light unto you and your loved ones.

Antone

*Christ in the House of His Parents*, oil on canvas by John Everett Millais (1849-1850), at the time a controversial painting much criticized by the likes of Charles Dickens because of its realistic depiction of a country carpentry workshop, especially the dirt, sawdust and shavings on the floor. But surely this is what a poor carpenter’s workshop in rural Nazareth would have looked like when Jesus was a small boy. Joseph is shown working on a simple battened door joined with nails, a standard carpenter’s job in all places at all times, but he’s stopped work to examine an injury on Jesus’s hand, perhaps caused by one of those nasty nails, foreshadowing future wounds, while Mary comforts her boy with a kiss. By no coincidence, a drop or two of blood has dripped onto the child’s foot further hinting of unpleasantness to come. In the background grandmother Anne takes over the job the injured child had been doing prior to the accident of clipping clinched nails, while young cousin John on the right (later known as John the Baptist) brings water to cleanse the wound, another ominous foreshadowing indeed. The apprentice shown on the left is said to represent Jesus’s future apostles while the sheep seen gawking through the open workshop door are said to represent the flock of Christianity. The ladder and the dove resting on it are also symbolic.

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