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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> > Crosscut saws have long been made in both one-man and two-man
> > versions. I learned as a teen to make firewood with a crosscut saw
> > before we got a chainsaw.

All our firewood is cut with hand tools.  Sometimes I collect the debris in 
the wake of a tree service and those have been bucked up with a chainsaw, but 
theirs, not mine.

The use of any type of manual saw depends on it being sharpened, set, and 
cleaned to make it cut the easiest.  You let the sharpness do the work and 
not 
your back.

Any one person in reasonable shape can use a two man crosscut saw.  The 
reason for the two man arrangement is that all such saws are more efficient 
on the 
pull stroke than the push stroke.  With two sawyers it's all pull strokes.

Like so many modern things that have replaced our skill and strenght (and 
more's the pity), the notion that a chainsaw is many times far and a way 
quicker 
and easier than manual saws is a myth.  The smaller the diameter of the wood, 
the more mythological it becomes.   Most of the firewood we use is stove 
wood, 
wood for the kitchen cook stove.  Pieces more than 4" across are too big and 
must be split, so we seek out copice, dead saplings, and limbwood,   With a 
magnificiently sharpened 36" or 42" buck saw, I can cut such wood faster than 
someone with a chainsaw.  This is due in part to the fact that I can operate 
the 
saw with one hand while hoisting and feeding the wood with the other.  A 
chainsaw is going to cut through a 10" log faster than I can with a crosscut 
saw, 
but not that much faster.  On a green log one stroke will take out 1/2" of 
wood, perhaps half that on a dried log.     </HTML>