I keep a close eye on the Hand Tool Rescue channel because I love the work the guy does and he is always messing around with something really cool. In this case he is applying his talents to bring back a 1910-era mechanical saw blade filing machine. This is a really complex little piece of equipment that requires him to pour Babbitt bearings, machine new parts, fix some of the old parts, and get all the colors and stuff right.
Mr Rescue thinks that this machine was used in a factory or production environment just going on how much it was worn. It put in many years of dutiful service for someone and it likely sharpened thousands and thousands of blades along the way. Built by a company in Natick, Massachusetts sometime after 1911, it was likely one of the cutting edge piece of saw blade sharpening equipment on the market at that time.
What we really love about this stuff beyond seeing the guts of interesting machines and how they work is seeing how they were designed and assembled. Stuff from this era is just so robust, cool, and built to last that it makes out modern methods of manufacturing look shameful. There’s more actual metal in this thing than there is in a new Honda. Crazy.
Enjoy the video and the trip through mechanical time as the saw blade sharpening machine gets revived and refreshed.
