Fellow BAG Michael Suwczinzky and I hit the local flea last Sunday morning,
and I grabbed a rather glitzy sawset. Fully nickel-plated, it says TAINTOR'S
POSITIVE No 7 in big fancy letters on the handle, and it has (count 'em)
five patent dates on it, ranging from 1891 to 1907. (Yes, I'll be spending
some time with the DATAMP.) A knurled setscrew locks a ten-sided anvil in
position for setting. I've never set a saw in my life, so I'm hoping I've
got a decent user here. Anyone?
 
Greg Isola
Alameda, CA
who was kicking himself for passing on that #5C (corrugated jack, Jeff), but
felt better when he got home, wiped off the nice (no handle) 1/8-inch sash
mortise chisel he got for a buck, and saw the TH WITHERBY stamp

On 10 Aug., Gregory Isola wrote:
> Fellow BAG Michael Suwczinzky and I hit the local flea last Sunday morning,
> and I grabbed a rather glitzy sawset. Fully nickel-plated, it says TAINTOR'S
> POSITIVE No 7 in big fancy letters on the handle, and it has (count 'em)
> five patent dates on it, ranging from 1891 to 1907. (Yes, I'll be spending
> some time with the DATAMP.) A knurled setscrew locks a ten-sided anvil in
> position for setting. I've never set a saw in my life, so I'm hoping I've
> got a decent user here. Anyone?

Greg,

I have a Taintor's Positive #7 that I've used for setting the teeth on a
couple of backsaws, and it's worked well.  The only problem I've had is that
the rivets on which the upper and lower handles pivot have worn and so there's
a bit of slop in the alignment of the hammer (?) as it comes down onto
the sawtooth.  I have to be a bit careful.  Plus the return spring is
missing.

I think I have (somewhere) a copy of instructions for use.  I'll see
if I can find it and send it along.  There's a washer that can be
placed under the anvil to fine-tune the amount of set.  On mine, I found it
under the knurled screw.

My missing spring leads to a Galoot-ish question.  Has anyone ever tried
fabricating simple wound wire springs? I'm guessing it would require some
process of anneal, shape, then heat treat.  But IIRC from machine design
(oh so long ago), ordinary steel wire isn't suitable.  As usual, it would
probably be simpler to just find another saw set, but...

Norm
in Fort Collins, Colorado

Galoots,

I guess it's typically bad form to reply to one's own posting,
but I wanted to give credit where credit is due, and part of this
might be of general interest.

On 10 August, Greg asked about a Taintor's Positive sawset, and I replied
> 
> Greg,
...
> I think I have (somewhere) a copy of instructions for use.  I'll see
> if I can find it and send it along.  There's a washer that can be

Actually, what I had weren't instructions, but copies of articles from
1892 and 1894 volumes of "The Manufacturer and Builder" describing the
Taintor's sawsets.  The articles are actually in Cornell's "Making of
America" (MOA) electronic library, and links were provided by Darrell LaRue
in an OldTools message (#91367) from 2001 which I'd found in the archive.
So thanks to Darrell and Chris (and of course the folks at Cornell).

Since I hadn't seen the MOA mentioned here since I started with OldTools,
I thought that I would.  It seems to be a unique resource, one of those
that could occupy hours of more or less productive reading :)  The library
includes scans of about 900,000 pages of journals and monographs from the
19th and early 20th centuries which have been text-indexed and are searchable.
The main webpage is at

http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/

If anyone chances to look at the second Taintor's reference (which is from
1894) in Darrell's message, there's an interesting story about the
discovery of an unknown trace gas (argon) in the atmosphere by Rayleigh
and Ramsey.

Norm
Fort Collins, Colorado