Saw-19
Price: SOLD.

Condition: Straight and sharp, with no pitting and a mirror-like blue-black patina of magnetite remaining after I scraped off the extremely tenacious red rust with a frequently sharpened (!) chisel.

The securely attached rosewood handle has lost its upper horn, but otherwise only shows the normal dings of storage in a toolbox.

The Henry Disston & Sons etch is as sharp and clear as the day the saw was made, but it's difficult to photograph. Note that the etch carries the June 23, 1874 date for Henry Disston's patent of the skew-back handsaw.

The first image of the etch was photographed by bending the saw into a concave shape and reflecting the sky; the second image was made by bending the saw the same way, but is shown here after unsharp masking before & after inverting the contrast.

The medallion design dates from 1917 to 1940 according to Erik von Sniderns's Disstonian Institute webpage, but the June 23, 1874 patent date disappeared from the etch soon after the start of the First World War.

The faint wavy horizontal marks in the etch images are the residual soft rust that the sharpened chisel could not remove, and the black dots are microscopic pits scattered uniformly over both sides of the plate.