Good ergonomics improve your mood. In a better mood, you do better work.

This sawbuck is used primarily for holding medium sized wood rounds and crotches while they are sectioned into bowl-turning stock using a chainsaw. It works particularly well for the first three ripping cuts: the piece is sectioned in half down the pith, with parallel flats trimmed off either side to regularize the piece. If it’s thin enough, it can be band-sawn in a circle, otherwise it is octagonalized and then hexadecagonalized with the chainsaw. During this process, the pieces get smaller and lighter as more and more wood is taken away, and they get harder to manage and more likely to fly around. Likely there is a better sawbuck design out there for those later stages of the process: going from square to octagon, and then cutting those corners off again. But for ripping this is great. It also serves as a general storage and display table for chunks as we’re first deciding how to go about cutting them.

General Notes:

-low enough to be stable, high enough to cut comfortably

-the thinking was that there should be a low end and a high end, but the next version could stand to be four to six inches higher

-V angle is probably 115° or so

-need a fairly large diameter log

-softwood is soft on the chain when you overstrike

-the base stumps rot away before the "top" does, over six to ten years or so