Mastering the Jeweler's Saw: Techniques for Precision Cutting

so my goal of this video is to help people become more comfortable with using a jeweler saw and break less

blades and by the end of this you should be able to cut detailed pieces

much better than you were before it so let's get started so the most asked question i get is

regarding sawing and how do i cut out super small pieces

or the detailed things that i cut out well i'm gonna go over all that and show you what i do and how i don't

break as many blades as i once did when i began doing this when it comes to the saw frames

themselves i'm sure you've seen all these on the market the new concepts the haymaker green lion

and then the german style ones so for the most part the frame is there to hold your

saw blade tight and that's pretty much it so when it comes to the more expensive

ones they have little features that make it more comfortable

or easier to switch things or just different things like that that basically add to the value of them

and make your life a bit easier with that said i'm not going to be showing any of the higher end saw frames

in this video and just stick with the traditional german style

just to show you what you can do with a cheaper saw frame i do have review videos on all of the

higher end saw frames that i'll have links to in the description but for now let's just focus on the

german style when it comes to the german style frames you'll notice that there is a couple different sizes

so you have an eight inch five inch and three inch option and for the most part i suggest getting

a five inch reason for this is it can cut through most metals if you have large pieces of sheet metal

you can most likely get through it all and it just overall is the middle ground of everything using a

three inch there's a lot of times where you're going to run into your

work when you're working with bigger pieces of metal or even medium sized pieces of metal

and you'll have to recut or cut from a different side and it just becomes very annoying so i

don't even use the three inch one anymore and the eight inch one can cut through

just about any piece of metal because of how much room it has to cut the problem with

this is it's very hard to control so making very precise cuts is a lot more difficult on this

the smaller the throat which is this area the easier it is to handle because you

don't have all this weight back here trying to pull you around so technically the three inch one would be

the easiest one to saw with but it runs into your metal so much that it is

more of a nuisance than just learning how to use a five inch one better and there's not

much difference to it so when it comes to saw blades there is an absolute ton of them on the market

but there is a big difference in quality from the lowest end ones to the higher end ones

these are on the higher end these are the nano line of blades from pepe tools i'll let

you know right now that i'm pretty much sponsored by pepe tools but i still would suggest these if i was not

because they are the cheapest and they probably are one of the best blades on the market

so just keep that in mind when i say the cheapest i don't mean the cheapest on the market i mean

the cheapest for this quality of blade if you look at some of the stuff on amazon that has no listing or ebay or

any of those other places you can find blades for very cheap for packs that have an

entire set of them but they are very brittle and they're not the best blades you're going to end up

breaking them a lot more and they also dole out really quick these particular blades come

in these little canisters and it's very easy to store them and seal them up they also have info

on them so you know what gauge they're supposed to be used with which i didn't really see this on any other

blade containers and usually they're just bags anyways and it's nice to actually have a hard

case to hold them in also you don't need this many saw blades and what i mean is you don't need this

variation of saw blades if you're only really working on thinner sheet metals you're only going

to need like one or two sizes max so yeah you don't need this full range i have it because

of the whole sponsorship thing and i deal with a ton of different sizes of metals

so all of them come in handy for me so if you want to cut off like casting sprues and stuff

like that you're going to need a bigger saw blade than if you're going to be cutting through

some thin sheet metal so we're going to be using this one which is not for the size metal we're going to be using

but i'll talk about that more in a second so for this video i'm going to be using

some copper sheet metal you can use brass you can use silver it doesn't really matter

you can even use aluminum if you really wanted to but i don't suggest really cutting aluminum it likes to gum up your

blades i have no idea what size this is in gauges but

this comes in really handy this is a tool that i use more than i would like to admit because

i forget what size metals i have so all you need to do is basically put this into whatever one it fits

and if it's nice and snug like that that's what gauge it is so it's 20. if you go to 19 it'll be a

little wiggly and you can find pieces that are a little between sizes

but at least you can get a feel for what you need and what you have so according to the packaging this is

for a 22 gauge and this is a 20 so this is thicker than this is meant to be used on

you should technically be using either a one ought or a two ott according to the diagrams on these but

there's a reason why we're not so i've found if you are cutting sharp edges straight lines

or tiny areas you want to use a smaller blade than you're supposed to or something that's meant for cutting

smaller material you don't want to go too small because it's just going to take forever but i've

found that a couple sizes down usually works so i'm going to be going through a lot of this and showing you

the different techniques i use to get really nice cuts and this template will actually be in the

description below so go down there and download it it's free of charge all i ask is for a like

on this video when it comes to stuff like this you can really find anything online and cut it

out to your heart's content or you can design your own stuff like i did

you will have to learn a program like illustrator or inkscape but once you do that you can

pretty much design whatever you want so speaking of those two programs it's a perfect time to talk about the sponsor

of this video which is skillshare so i thought skillshare would be a perfect sponsor for my channel seeing

that you come here to learn stuff and skillshare is a community for learning and just like my videos you can learn at

your own pace and one thing i like about it is every class is project oriented so you're

working towards a goal and not just random skills so you'll actually have something by the end of it

so if you're looking to learn adobe illustrator i suggest taking the essentials training from

daniel scott and if you want to learn inkscape which is a free program i suggest checking out gaiamarvert so

for the first 1000 people to click on the link in my description you will get a free trial of

skillshare premium this gives you full access to the entire catalog that skillshare has offered

and after your trial skillshare is as low as 10 a month with an annual subscription so thank you

skillshare for sponsoring this video and supporting my channel so how do i get this onto my metal well

this is actually printed on label paper so it's basically sticky paper and i just cut it out and stick it on if

you don't have a label maker you can use super glue and i actually suggest using super glue for this

if you're not using label paper just because it keeps everything bonded to your metal

and when you want to get it off you can just heat it up with a torch and burn it off

you can use a glue stick as well but i have had problems with it releasing and then it ruins your entire cut

because you it's really hard to line it back up again so one of the first practice pieces is the straight line

piece i'm going to go through and show you how to do straight lines then do a sharp

turn and go through the whole thing and with the label paper

you just literally cut it out but you want to leave somewhat of a gap or extra on there

on all these i've made it so you can see where you need to cut but on the practice pieces i didn't

really do it that much another thing with the label paper is you need to be able to get it off

i take it off first and then cut off any excess it makes it just easier to peel and try

not to touch the back of it too much so there we go so when it comes to the bench pin

i'm using the one that is a quick release from grs and you have a bunch of options in these

if you don't have this little setup if you have a workbench that has a overhang to it you can clamp on a bunch of

different styles of bench pins and if you don't have an overhang what i used for

many years was a piece of wood this is about 11 millimeters thick and i just kind of bolted it down

hanging off the edge so i had an edge to clamp things to so when it comes to the bench pens themselves there's a ton of

options just like pretty much everything else and you have to pick and choose what you want

a lot of them will come like this where just a wedge of wood basically that you cut to however you like it

there's also the option of working on this surface or working on the flat surface

so i personally like working on it on the flat surface but it's going to be up to you what you

prefer once you do get yours you're going to be able to design

however you want your cutout area to be so this is basically a traditional setup

it's just a hole with a triangle going into it setting them up is going to be solely up

to how you want to be sawing so i used to have a large slot in mine and then

i added holes later on that basically how i saw everything now there's also some that already come with

everything cut out and it's just good to go out of the box so a lot of these bench pins come

with a anvil set up that you can basically put this in this mounts to everything and

you're good to go problem with a lot of them is the work area it's very limited on the

one set basically run into this so if you're working with a bigger piece of metal you

really can't because you'll just hit on that there are a lot of on the market that it's just a piece of wood

i don't happen to have any but it's basically a little clamp that clamps onto your desk and it's flat

all the way across or you can find some that have an anvil that is flush with your block

and for those of you wondering why is there black on the top of this one and none of the others have it this is

just glue to fill in all the holes because i've used this bench pin so much that it was

falling apart and i just filled it in with glue so as you've seen with my other bench

pins i had a lot of different configurations of how i had them but this is it now this is

how mine is i have one six millimeter hole with a cutout so my blade can fit

through there and that's it also i work with it upside down like this instead of having the slanted side

up so for loading your saw frame there's probably a bunch of different ways of doing this for the most part with the

german ones i find out the length that i need to actually hold

the blade in it and then i lock this in place and never move it so you just want to take your saw blade

which is almost unseeable on the camera and you want to make sure the teeth are

all facing down i'll have a zoomed in picture here showing that

so just to show that these blades are not super brittle like the other ones that i've

was talking about you can pretty much do that with it and it's good and kind of just goes back to normal so

i like to open up the bottom one first and seat my blade in there and with that in there i can

lock it up against my bench pin or just push up against the bench and press on it

and then lock this in place and there you go it's set and it should be

nice and tight where you can take your nail on it and strum it one super important thing

when cutting though with these blades or any blade is you need some sort of cut lube

to put on your blade to make sure that it's going to not overheat itself and break and then

get snagged or any of that other stuff and it just makes it so so much easier to go through all of your

cutting and everything like that all right so here's our first practice piece i'm going to take my saw and get it into

my bench pin like this and i need to start my cut to do this instead of pulling down on it

i'm going to push up and just that little bit of pushing up will make a

small divot that you can see right there and from that you can actually start sawing

[Music] and when sawing you don't need to put much pressure you don't need to be

pushing forwards or anything too hard it will just kind of work its way

so as you can see i've already cut a decent weight into the metal so when holding your saw frame and sawing you

actually need to make sure that it's going up and down as much as you possibly can

if any turns or anything that will risk you breaking the blade and you'll leave weird angles in your cut

alright so i'm at the start of my line and i want to

just go along it without moving the soft frame whatsoever to make a straight line

and right when i get to the end of the line i can stop you'll also notice that it makes sawdust

everywhere you can blow on this every so often and it will go away so you can see your lines better so once i

get to an end like this and i need a turn the best way to do this is to move your

blade up and down and turn your metal and there you go then you can go

straight again and then continue this process so if you're having trouble with this

where you can't really move this and keep the blade straight you can go up and down and move

your saw and then realign everything so you might notice that i keep moving this back to

reposition the piece it's because i only have that small six millimeter hole that i can work in

as soon as i hit the edge of it i'll start cutting the wood so that's why i have to keep moving it reason why

i like that little hole only is the piece is supported almost all way around

so there's almost no chance of it bending or getting snagged and from the sawing

so there we go we have our little practice part cut out it's basically a straight line and

curves so i'm going to cut the rest of this out just so we have this piece out of the

metal and it uses the same process on the outside

so here's our piece completely cut out and you'll see that there's a little gap that i could

move this around and that's just because our saw blade actually has a thickness to it

so it's removing that material so you're going to have that no matter what you do so you're going to have to keep that in

mind but you can get things really close together and you can

basically fill these with solder a lot of the time if you're trying to join two pieces

together say if there are two different metals you might also notice that these are a

little curvy you can clean that up using a file so basically with a tiny bit of cleanup

you can square off all your corners and make them as sharp as you'd like so now

i'm just going to show you some basic pierce cutting basically you just drill a hole in this and then

you thread your blade through set your blade and you're good to go and you can cut all the inside out

of something so you might notice some dots here these are for your center punch

so you can make it easier for you to drill a hole through you don't have to use any of these you can

drill wherever you'd like but these are just the points where i would start it at

so i'm just going to be doing one of them and i'm going to be using a 0.8 millimeter drill bit when drilling

stuff out make sure you use some cut lube as well so to start the piercing cut all you

need to do is release the top part of your frame feed this through the little hole that we just put into it

and then i feed it all the way down to the bottom so it's not dragging on this piece

and then push this back in place and tighten it up there we go so for this piece i'm going

to go out to an edge and then turn in from the edge

and then stop at the point and come back to where we started and go to the other side and do the same

and when you're just about to the end of it slow down and there we go so let me show you

what i just did so this will give you sharp corners this works on anything that has a sharp edge that you need to

come to as long as you basically trace one side and then the other to it

you'll end up with a sharp corner one other super important thing for cutting out pieces like this is to cut

out all of your piercing cuts first and then cut out the outside of your piece

it just makes it easier for you to handle and it basically makes it so it's harder to

bend as you're working so if you want to move backwards through a cut you can basically just pull back

but if it gets stuck you can just use the sawing motion and move it backwards

so there's our triangle cut out you can see right here where i had to cut into everything it's

not perfectly straight which we can easily fix that with a file so there we go much better just using a

little bit of filing so now we can cut out the outside of it so i'm going to show you something

and mess up on purpose to show you how to fix your line if it's not going straight

so say you're going and you start to wander off to one side

so as you can see it's kind of going off outside of your piece which this is totally fine if you cut

outside this is the way to make a mistake and be able to fix it if you cut into

your piece that's where it's a problem so if anything try to pull away more and then you can fix this later

so we're going to get real zoomed in here so you can see what's going on so see how i'm out that far i'm going to

come back to wherever it started and just kind of start again

kind of pushing on the saw towards the pattern until it catches and then i can just keep going

[Laughter] and that's how you can fix if you start wandering like that

and like i said make sure you wander outside of your piece if you can help it

so here's our very sharp triangle with all of the piercing cut done and looks pretty good the outside still need

to be cleaned up with a file to make everything as flat as possible but that can be done

later so straight lines are cool and all but let's do something

more curvy so just like before we need to get into this piece and i'll just start a divot and start

going in so this is where i kind of do things wrong

you're supposed to only move your metal piece that you're working on and not your saw blade works all frame

i do a little bit of bowl all right so there we go this is a really good way to practice keeping in

line along with moving everything around in circles

and dealing with multiple pieces trying to bend on you all at once

because the more you're cutting this the more it's turning into this floppy thing here and you can feel

it as you're working you might have noticed i had my fingers on it on both sides

of wherever i sawing and continuously moved it like so so just keep that in mind

and you should be able to do this with no problems so to mix things up a little bit we're going to get a little bit

smaller and have multiple piercing cuts and have curves so just like before we

just need to feed our blade into our piece and reset it be sure to lubricate your

blade and here we go so with this particular one i'm going to

start in an arc to line up with one of the edges to make sure that there's no real

transition there we go that's one little paw part done you can't really see it but if i

flip it over you can see that it's a pretty good transition there

maybe a little sanding and it would be perfect so we just need to do that to all the

rest of them just cut in try to go along the lines as you're cutting in

so the transition is far enough away that when you come back around it just reconnects to itself and you

really can't see where the saw started so there's all of our piercing cuts and all of them look almost perfect

just very little cleanup you're always going to have clean up when sawing but it's minimizing that is the key

so let's cut it completely out and this is a much thinner piece so we're going to cut

in one go all the way around and at the same time try to support this so if there's any catches or anything it

doesn't bend the entire piece so there we go and with that one single cut

it should just come out and we have our little paw print and you can see very

delicate but it is all done and it came out pretty much perfect still needs that

little bit of cleanup but yeah this is a very good way of practicing

your piercing cuts moving and working with smaller pieces like this so with all of those basic skills that i

just showed you should be able to cut out just about anything so i'm going to show doing that with

this so if you do want to try cutting this piece out just keep in mind that it will

take you quite a bit of time it took me about an hour to get this completely cut out so just be patient

and take your time with this rushing will just make things worse and you should be able to use all the skills

i've taught in this video to successfully do this [Music]

do [Music] so

[Music] so [Music]

so [Music] so there we go you should be able to use

all the things i showed you to cut this piece out you might not be able to do it without

breaking a blade or anything like that but you should be able to at least

do better than when you started out so that's pretty much all the test pieces that i wanted to cut out and show on

this there are some extras included but for the most part they pretty much cover the same things

so i know people don't just have copper laying around that they can use to practice

cutting stuff out and it can get kind of expensive for people just starting out so you can

literally cut out coins and it's not illegal to cut them out so don't worry about that

so just pick a design that's on there and cut it out and that is a good way to practice your

pierce cutting or you can cut directly into it and cut the pieces out of it and you're

literally spending pennies to get practice in so that's pretty much it for this if you

want to see some other sawing videos i've made in the past i'll make sure to have links in the

description or on the side over here and leave a like on this video if it was helpful leave a comment if you have any

questions and subscribe i try to make new videos every week well that's about it so i'll see you

guys next time bye [Music]