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Did You Say Dragsaw?

Anyone who ever used a manual crosscut saw to cut off a large log--a brutal exercise involving hours of exhausting work, especially if firewood was the objective, requiring a cut every sixteen inches along the length of the log--dreamed of having a one-cylinder, crude and finicky dragsaw.  The blades were much heavier than human-powered crosscut saws, and when the greasy and contrary engine ran right, cut through a log much faster than any mere mortal could.  

 When the engine finally started, it spun a wheel, geared down as a motorcycle engine still often is, by a chain connected to another wheel, to which a very stout saw blade was connected, causing the saw blade to be pushed forward and pulled back; imitating what happens manually when a person cuts across the log.  Sickle bars for cutting grass, and pistons in a motor, work in a similar way.  

 Dragsaws were portable in the same way that a rock is portable.  They weighed about 300 pounds, so a man without sons needed a horse and a sled to move the beast.  Early models were steam powered, but all the dragsaws I recall had one-cylinder gasoline engines.  

 My mother's father--our Grandfather--was not only a farmer, but a blacksmith, a harness maker, and a shoemaker (or at least a shoe repairer).  His small blacksmith shop was one of the almost secret and sacred places in the childhood of all his grandchildren.  It was there that he, or his brother--also an immigrant from Norway--took a piece of dragsaw blade and made a meat cleaver.  

 Truth be told, it wasn't a very good cleaver.  The steel was good, but the design was bad.
It might have worked better had the butcher been seven or eight feet tall, but the cutting edge was straight, front to back, and the heel of the blade almost necessarily hit first, requiring a shoulder motion that was almost as tiring as moving a dragsaw.  Grandpa's cleaver has hammer marks on the top edge of the blade, probably to help finish the cut rather than trying to hit the same mark a second time.  

 The cleaver, as it is today, is better than it was because I took it to a machine shop and ground away as much as I had courage to remove without ruining its authenticity.  Even so, it is more a treasure than a useful tool.  Whenever I can, I make an excuse to use it, but when I do, I fear more for the cutting board than the meat bone.  It would have made a fine weapon for a Viking on a raiding party to the British Isles in search of free beef.  

 Until now.  

 Michael is laying sod in his back yard.  "I have", I said, "a perfect tool to cut off a strip of sod.  Uncle Hans gave it to me years ago, before it occurred to him that anybody else might lust for it."  (About the same time, he gave me a little hand plane that also belonged to Big Grandpa, that I had somehow managed to break when I was a boy.  It was crudely welded back together in that same little blacksmith shop.  Nobody is going to break the cleaver!)

 "Don't worry about dulling the blade!", I told Michael.  "It isn't going to happen!  No stray pebble will have a chance!"

 In fact, it will be a great pleasure to touch up the edge, again, and to discourage whatever desires rust might have for the heavy old carbon steel blade.  It isn't an ideal cleaver, but it is a fine bridge across generations.  It is not easy to find a way to work a dragsaw into a conversation, otherwise.  

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