THE ZEN WOODCUTTER.

I need a gentleman's saw. It's not that I'm a gentleman,  I guess that the name refers to someone who might make small, neat repairs to his backgammon board or Meerschaum pipe, and not a ruffian joiner, hacking at floorboards or door frames for a living. 

In any event, it is  a small backsaw,  having a brass support along its top edge and with very fine teeth,

 it is a lovely, delightful tool, just the job for neat cuts on small stock - dowels and mouldings. I have a couple but they need sharpening and I can't do that, sharpening planes, saws and chisels, may as well be quantum physics. I can sharpen knives better than  anyone who ever lived but I can't do tools. I have a wheeled and angled clamp for running blades over an oilstone, but more often than not I just buy a throwaway chisel from the UKIP shop -  pay a pound, use it for one job and then consign it to  the eventual task of all screwdrivers and chisels, opening paint tins. I have a couple of small block planes which I manage to sharpen, about once a year and an arsenal of electric planers. I really do want, crave, one of those old, really long planes, 

the deadweight and length of which just square boards by magic but I can never afford one and even  the modern equivalents

 
 cost over a hundred pounds;  I have saws, anyway,  that'll square boards and I'll get a planer-thicknesser one of these days so, other than for the aesthetic there's no need for a big hand plane.

I do, though, buy some decent hand tools  and I wanted a nice gentleman's saw.  Google took me to Workshop Heaven and  for a moment turned my life upside-down. Japanese saws and planes and chisels, I never knew they existed, well, I suppose I must have done, but just never thought about it, yet Workshop Heaven was littered with them, glittering, thin  and deadly, as you would expect from SamuraiSword blokes. These were Zen tools, inscrutable,  tools you had to think yourself into, you couldn't just pick 'em up and start sawing stuff.  Not for the first time, I wished I was thirty years younger, that I might have time to learn all this hand-crafting stuff, acquire these tools and live long enough for them to become my friends. Like my New Pincers.

 I have a pair of pincers which I bought when I first became interested in old furniture, over twenty-five years ago and although I have since acquired more pairs, these remain my New Pincers; pass me my New Pincers, dear. You mean these old, grey ones? Yeah, my New Pincers. They were my first considered tool purchase and I still love them. It came late in life, my reverence for tools and what they represent; doesn't matter if it's a spoke shave or a JCB, it is all clever monkey stuff, started with a rock for hammering and then a jawbone with some remaining teeth, for sawing, this pair,  found in a builders' pit, in the garden,

were used in the construction of my house, the stone with a
depression worn into it, from striking the iron, imagine the damage done to joints and cartilege; the technology is the religion, the spirituality of the opposable thumb, and any man says different, I'll hit him with a mallet.

I don't, though,  have enough life left now; not enough time to fill a workshop with Jap blades and ebony smoothing planes. 
C'est la vie, goes to show you never can tell.

But the projects are always with me.  I need to build a shed to replace the one blown-down in January and I will make it from stout wooden boards, nailed and screwed,  pegged and bracketed, tight enough to withstand Armageddon.  I can't do one of those barn-raising projects, like the Amish people do in the Hollywood movies, where all the neighbours congregate, singing and hammering and drinking lemonade, before dozens of them push a huge wall up, at ninety degrees from the ground and then cheerfully clad it with boards sawn from trees felled in the local forest. I will just have to sink some posts in concrete and clad them and figure out how to make a roof, doors and windows; 
the youtube is my shepherd, 
I shall not want. 

With this project in mind, even though I have, in the byre,  a big, de Walt radial arm saw which would, as well as sawing and moulding wood, whip you up an omelette and iron your trousers, I bought a smaller, more portable site saw, a Makita sliding, compound-mitre saw.  I'm not rich or anything but I don't do foreign holidays or football matches or the 'pub or any of the things which lots of men do; mrs ishmael has a sewing-room filled with crazy machines and forests of fabric and I have tools and machines.  She has machines, too, robots which vacuum and wash the floors, beep-beeping their fatigue or irritation.  I barely do clothes, I have a hairtcut once every sixteen years and I can always, anyway,  justify the tools;  my table saw and my radial arm saw work perfectly, after more than  twenty years' service and have saved us a fortune, the price of machined timber is terrifying, so we bought this one,with one of those big, long tables to fix it to, for when we work outside.

 And then, fuck me, on  my birthday, the other day, there came these,

 a selection of Nip saws, with a how-to book

 They are made, people say, of the best steel in the world, wafer thin, terrifyingly sharp and you only have to look at them the wrong way and they shatter.  Unlike Western saws, they cut on the pull stroke, not the push and this one, above, has a cross-cutting edge on one side and a ripping edge on the other.

I have a couple of boards, so big, so nice that I will probably never use them, some stupid bastard'll come along and burn them, when I'm dead,  and I have a sneaking suspicion that these saws will find their way, not into the workshop but onto the wall, as a piece of art, too nice, too perfect to use.

The Samurai sword, for all the ritualised perfection  of its construction and use was no match for the Thompson .45 calibre sub-machine gun.

Similarly, the Makita saw, another Japanese product,  will do, in a split second, what would take the traditional Japanese saw minutes and it will also cut at angles and to depths which are impossible to achieve, for me, at any rate, by hand. It really would be a long, long labour of love, becoming adept in Nip joinery.

Before sandpaper became available in the West, in the  1830s, woodworkers,  as well as using metal scrapers, rubbed at wood, using their bare hands, with sand and grit and coral and pumice  and if you look at early furniture this obviously worked very well but I wouldn't exchange my Makita orbital sander for  a handful of powdered rock, no more than I'd ride a horse to town.

Such, though, is the devil, Pragmatism, talking,  and deep-down, I do wish I could hone blades, wield handtools like a master and even ride a horse to town. Once, many had these and other skills, many knew the names of birds and flowers, could read the weather, knock-up a box or a gate, lay a wall, catch a fish, tend an animal, tie a knot, brew a beer, bake a loaf; now we are utterly alienated from the means of survival and most of us are good for fuck all, save taking pictures of ourselves and gibbering in cyberspace, like fucking monkeys.

Week after next I will be in the hyperbaric chamber, nine-to-twelve, for a month or two, my six weeks' worth of mornings; maybe, as well as improving my healing process, the ten atmospheres will revive my energy and my autodidactism, maybe I will wrestle, after all,  with my inner Samurai. The saws, after use, can still go back on the wall, to be talked about, handled, proof that we are all the same, even though some of  us pull where others push and some have more teeth to the inch.