 Manual sawing is hard work. With modern tools, it's easy to take advantage of all the quick cutting tools from miter saws, to table saws, to band saws. But the mighty hand saws capable of doing the same job. It's just a pain to keep it perfectly straight and perpendicular, and until you've really mastered that skill, it's a lot of work. I'm on a quest to build myself up from the Stone Age to my own Industrial Revolution. So I'm all about building some tools that will make jobs easier. In this video, I'm exploring the historic invention, the pole spring saw, and how it helped make this job a lot easier. It will be a key stepping stone for my ongoing saw mill project. In one of my earlier builds, I made a pole lathe. Connected to an overhanging branch, it was powered by a foot pedal with the spring power of a bent branch to reset it. Historically, a very similar concept was applied to saws. Where the lathe spins back and forth, the same motion of the foot pedal in spring allow a saw to be brought up and down. Without this device, you'd have to do the back and forth motion yourself or with a partner on a pit saw setup. We did this previously to saw my own two by four from scratch and found out just how much work that is. Making those four cuts took 15 hours of exhausting labor and resulted in a very far from straight two by four. This device not only helps make it a one person job, but it holds the blade perfectly vertical with a perpendicular surface to guide the wood, allowing you to focus on cutting straight or to whatever shape you want. For the build of this tool, it's gonna be four main components. First up is the actual saw and its frame. And fortunately, we've already forged the saw previously in the initial video for the saw mill project. And then we built this frame when we used it in the pit saw. So this section is pretty much done and usable as it is. After that, the second part will be the body is basically the frame that will hold the saw and provide a track for it to go up and down. Then also importantly, it'll have basically a flat surface. It'll be perfectly perpendicular to the blade that you can rest whatever you're working on and that'll allow you to saw without having to worry about it being crooked. The third component will be the actual spring pole. And we could do this outside like we did the pole lathe then attach it to a tree branch. But another method that was often used was a bow at the top to offer the spring resistance. So I think we'll make a rudimentary bow for that purpose. So lastly is the foot shuttle which provides the power for the saw. So the first step of this is gonna be sawing a bunch of wood. And unfortunately, you're gonna have to do it by hand until we have this project finished. But first, thank you to today's sponsor. As a creator on YouTube, a fair amount of my personal life gets shared publicly. 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So if you wanna get your personal information removed from search results on the web, go to joindeleteme.com slash htme. DeleteMe is offering 20% off their privacy plan to all my viewers with my code htme. Again, that's joindeleteme.com slash htme promo code htme. All right, so I open the saw with a little bit bigger one that I used for cutting the two by four before by hand. And I got a scrap from the two by four. We have some of the old cuts, which we can tell are pretty crooked. So we can put this to the test and see how much improvement this will make. It's also gonna be useful for the eventual water powered one. I think already doing a few cuts, I can tell that the fact that it pushes the wood up as you're cutting, it's kind of an issue. So I'm gonna need to incorporate that into both this and an eventual saw mill just so that we hold it steady. So I got the straight line marked on here. A similar cut by hand by myself took about one hour with this exact same saw. So we can give this a shot and see how that does. All right, so that was definitely a workout. But that is my first long cut using this saw. And that took less than 30 minutes. So we're already seeing improvement in speed. I have at least double. And the cut actually looks pretty nice. I had a little bit of an issue keeping it straight, but in terms of square, it's a little off. And that's mostly because the reference to the bottom is also crooked. But that is, I would say considerably better than all the other cuts I've done. The biggest issue I think that slowed me down is when it would bind. Big challenge is just kind of getting a feel for it and like how fast you can go. It seemed the faster I ran it, the longer I kept it pretty slow, it wouldn't bind. It was very hard to gauge that because it would then bind pretty quickly. So I know a lot of water-empowered sawmills have their own kind of ratcheting feeding system. And I can see how that's important because you're able to adjust it to the correct speed of the saw itself. And then it just kind of, because this really do it and you never bind. Definitely something to keep in mind as I move forward with building an actual sawmill. And overall, I have to say I'm pretty impressed with just how straightforward this project was. The last few ones I've done, namely the lathe I made before was just a lot of little things that prevented it from working smoothly and correctly. Where this thing is actually, nice and straightforward and I was able to get it pretty much right away. It feels like it's almost unexpected where something actually works on the first try. It is a giant beast though. It's almost to the ceiling and makes it a little bit hard to move around. So I think this is both a useful tool and also gonna be a very important next step, which is saving myself the actual labor of doing it and finding a way to hook this up to a water wheel so we can actually have our sawmill and then fully automating things like the feeding of it into there. So we basically just set a log in there, let the water power it and we'll have a cut where we're not working up a sweat. So my first manually cutting of the two by four cost around $500. With this cost saving device, we could probably easily cut that in half, probably more. So I think with a little bit more practice on here, I could probably get this down to at least six hours and maybe a $200 two by four. It's getting closer. We aren't yet beating the Home Depot price. But the next step with the sawmill and the water wheel, we can actually get down to comparable price. Thank you again to all of our supporters on Patreon. Without you, this wouldn't be possible. Thanks for watching. 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