This Yorkshireman is the only person in the world making hand-crafted saws

Exquisite is probably not a word most of us would associate with that humble tool the handsaw. But then most of us don’t own a Skelton saw, craftsman-built by hand using only the very finest materials. It wouldn’t be stretching a point to say that you’d probably be happy to display a Skelton saw – functionally precise and designed to last through many generations – on your wall as a work of art.

Made in a tiny workshop on the outskirts of Scarborough at a rate of around ten a month, Skelton saws are coveted and bought by professional craftsmen, hobbyist woodworkers, guitar and violin-makers, and collectors around the world. On the day of our visit, saws were being sent to California and South Korea; and a craftsman in Kentucky insists on owning the seventh of each individually numbered range.

What makes the story truly remarkable is that Skelton Saws is just four years old – and before setting up the company with his wife Jacqueline, Shane Skelton had never actually made a saw, and is completely self-taught.

Listen to Shane talk about his past, though, and it feels as though every stage of it was carefully planned to lead him to the position of being, he believes, the only man in the world to be making completely hand-built saws, including a revolutionary new design, the Mallard. More of that later.

The couple, now in their early 40s, were both born in Scarborough – Jacqueline in the Old Town to a fishing family, while Shane grew up in Burniston, on the town’s outskirts. He came from a practical family: his early memories include helping his mechanic father to fix cars – “they were always old bangers”, he says – while Grandpa Skelton, a chicken farmer, drilled into him the ethos that if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing well, or, as he put it: “Buy cheap, buy twice.”

The teenage Shane landed a Saturday job at a blacksmith’s forge in nearby Cloughton, and by the time he was 18, he was working at the now long-gone gunsmith Gretton’s of Scarborough.

“John Gretton, who set up the business, was still pottering around, although his son was running it. So when I wanted to know how to do checkering, or make a spring, he’d show me what to do – and I’d do it! I ended up restocking, repairing, making shotguns, doing metalwork, woodwork, all kinds of things. At the time, handgun shooting was quite big, and I used to make really, really accurate competition pistols. I’d machine the whole thing, and people used to pay thousands of pounds for them. I was only 18 or 19 by then.”

Shane then worked for Europa Aircraft at Kirkbymoorside, including creating parts for and testing the prototype of the two-seater Europa XS, a small, low-cost personal-use aircraft later named as one of the Design Council’s Millennium Products, which were exhibited alongside the Millennium Dome in 2000.

As an adult, he moved between engineering and woodwork, at one point landing a job at one of Europe’s biggest furniture restorers, Tomlinsons of Tockwith, with no formal training, but simply by taking along his toolbag and showing them what he could do.

His final mainstream job saw him climb the ladder at an engineering firm to become a development manager.

“I had loads of people working under me, loads of paperwork, loads of meetings – it was just very stressful. In the end, it was making me ill.”

At this point, fate took a hand when Shane and Jacqueline were in a woodmerchants and picked up a piece of local wood. “Shane had been going on for years about wanting to make a saw, and I was thinking, well just get on with it, then!” she says. “So we bought this offcut of English walnut, which had been felled in Brompton, for £50 and he made a saw – and that’s how it started.”

The combination of Shane’s years of experience of working with metal and wood had laid the foundations of a passion which is now a family business – even their daughters, Sophie, 14, and eight-year-old Florence, are involved with the website.

“I like working in both metal and wood, and I can work both by hand,” Shane says. “I like turning raw materials into objects. And making saws is very similar to gunsmithing – wood and metal coming together, and it has to be very precise and accurate.

“I’m inspired by the 18th century craftsmen I discovered when I was working with furniture from that period. Everything 18th century is just about the best hand-made stuff there ever was: people could paint well, make furniture, the architecture was fantastic. All the Victorians wanted to do was copy what was being done a century earlier, but cheaper and faster. A lot of the skills were lost to mass production.”

Jacqueline says: “I was so confident in his abilities that I actually started the business before he’d even made a saw. We had a name, we’d started designing a website and I’d even created a bit of an alter ego for myself on Twitter: The Saw Maker’s Wife.

“We worked out who the best person in England was to send a saw to: a guy called David Charlesworth. He’s a woodworking guru. We decided that if it wasn’t good enough for him, it just wasn’t good enough at all. But he absolutely loved it, so we knew we were on the right track. There’s a massive resurgence in heritage crafts at the moment.”

Last year, Skelton Saws won the Heritage Craft Association’s Made in Britain Award, and Shane is named on the HCA’s Radcliffe Red List of Endangered Crafts as one of only two craftspeople in Britain making saws, although he is the only one making them completely by hand.

There’s currently a 10-month waiting list, and customers can choose from a range including the Sheffield (the “workhorses”, says Shane); the London (longer, lighter and influenced by cabinetmakers such as Chippendale and Sheraton) and the Damascus, which takes steel manufactured using a 2,000-year-old process to create a super-strong metal that is also highly decorative, resembling wood grain. Damascus steel is used by leading gunmakers and can cost Shane more than £2 per millimetre.

And then there’s the crème de la crème, the sleek and streamlined Mallard, a steel-and-bronze beauty of Shane’s own designing named after the steam locomotive at York’s National Railway Museum, which it resembles in profile.

“It’s revolutionary,” he says. “Handsaws have been put together the same way for thousands of years, with the wooden handle clamping the blade. What I’ve done is looked at it and engineered it to see how I could make it last longer, make it cut even faster than a normal saw. I’ve tensioned it to get rid of any vibration so it’s really smooth, as if it’s on tracks when it’s cutting.

“Without getting too technical, it’s a frame that’s never been made before for a saw: the woodwork doesn’t influence anything to do with the blade, everything is held rigid. The blade’s removable – it shouldn’t need replacing in this lifetime – but in the next generation, the blade could be replaced if necessary.

“It’s all made by hand – I cut and angle each tooth myself – but very engineered. It’s modern, but looks as if it could have come from the 18th century.”

Every Skelton saw is individually numbered and hand-stamped with the company’s logo – a peacock’s head from the Skelton family crest, also chosen as it’s a symbol of immortality – and has a made-to-measure handle of sustainable wood. And each one sold is entered in the Skelton Saw Register, a leather-bound, hand-written record which seems appropriate to the company’s ethos.

Skelton saws start at around £245; the Mallard will set you back upwards of £950, depending on your choice of wood for the handle, but when you factor in the premium-quality materials and the 50 hours of Shane’s time each one takes to make, that begins to sound like a real bargain.

You can meet Shane and Jacqueline Skelton at the North of England Woodworking and Power Tool Show at the Great Yorkshire Showground, Harrogate, which runs until tomorrow. For more information on their work, or on the occasional saw-sharpening workshops they run, visit skeltonsaws.co.uk