It turns out that my wife could be interested in wood working if not for all the dust, noise, respirators, safety issues, etc that are associated with power tools. With this in mind we both registered for Roy's dovetail class in August to get us both some proper training on hand cut joinery but, at the time we didn't have the proper tools to bring our skills home with...so we started shopping for dovetail saws.
My hands are "normal" so several "normal" saws fit my hand but my wife's hand are small; too small for any standard western back-saw which ended up putting me in contact with Mike Wenzloff of Wenzloff and Sons. After a few calls Mike and I settled on the Early Kenyon style as an appropriate base to begin our custom saw dimensioning. We traced my wife's hand, made note of a few key measurements and sent this info to Mike for handle sizing.
Meanwhile I figured that since we are going custom we might as well do it all the way. I placed the order for my standard dimension Kenyon saw at the same time as my wife's custom one but with special instructions.
We changed the grips to figured walnut and had them cut from adjacent areas on the same blank so that we would have a truly matched set of "his and hers" dovetail saws. The result is pictured below and came with a nice surprise as well...the smaller handle version was not simply a small handle saw. Mike actually scaled the dimensions of the entire saw ever so slightly so that it would look and handle appropriately for someone with smaller hands and presumably lower muscle strength.
We couldn't be happier with the result and boy do they go through wood in a hurry (14TPI filed rip).
My hands are "normal" so several "normal" saws fit my hand but my wife's hand are small; too small for any standard western back-saw which ended up putting me in contact with Mike Wenzloff of Wenzloff and Sons. After a few calls Mike and I settled on the Early Kenyon style as an appropriate base to begin our custom saw dimensioning. We traced my wife's hand, made note of a few key measurements and sent this info to Mike for handle sizing.
Meanwhile I figured that since we are going custom we might as well do it all the way. I placed the order for my standard dimension Kenyon saw at the same time as my wife's custom one but with special instructions.
We changed the grips to figured walnut and had them cut from adjacent areas on the same blank so that we would have a truly matched set of "his and hers" dovetail saws. The result is pictured below and came with a nice surprise as well...the smaller handle version was not simply a small handle saw. Mike actually scaled the dimensions of the entire saw ever so slightly so that it would look and handle appropriately for someone with smaller hands and presumably lower muscle strength.
We couldn't be happier with the result and boy do they go through wood in a hurry (14TPI filed rip).
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Nice score! :tool:
