Woodworking Saw: a Hand Saw Made the Disston Works Way (1922)

A hand saw for wood is a toothed steel blade with a wooden handle. Henry Disston & Sons of Philadelphia, who made most of the hand saws used in the United States, described their own sequence in a 1922 booklet: shear the plate, tooth it, harden and temper it, hammer it flat and true, grind it thinner toward the back and the point, tension it, polish it, set and file the teeth, and screw on a fitted handle. The booklet gives the order of the work and how the hand work is done, but keeps its numbers to itself: the steel, the hardening heat and bath, the tempering and the stiffening were Disston secrets. Those gaps are marked as unknown below. Source: How a Disston Hand Saw Is Made (Henry Disston & Sons, 1922), pp. 1-9. Picture: their p. 8, setting and filing.