Frank Pellow

Hi Joe. The stained glass items that you depict are excellent! You appar to be every bit as good with stained glass art as you are with scrollsaw art. I'm better wit scroll sawing. Cheers, Frank

Ingenious. I love both the design and the implementation of the design.

I utilized a set of patterns created by Charles Dearing to create the three framed panels shown in this photo: They were cut from cut it in 6mm thick Baltic Birch plywood using #1 Flying Dutchman Ultra-Reverse blades and backed with 3mm thick plywood panels painted with acrylic paint. The Rosseter-Pellow frames are made from very old and straight Pine and stained to match the colours in the panels. I've recorded this project in another Scrollsaw Village thread. Here is a link: Three Charles Dearing 'Illusion' patterns - COMPLETED - Works In Progress & Tutorials - Scroll Saw Village

Thanks for the tip. I do plan to do things manually.

Frank, I thank you for a detailed explanation of the steps that you went through to create this piece. I like the heron a lot. The fact that you used a stained-glass pattern as a starting point has given me an idea. Stained-glass work is also one of my hobbies and what I am now going to do is to look through stained-patterns and attempt to find one that would also look good as intarsia - or perhaps as segmentation. Then I will create both. I'm not sure why this never occurred to me before.

Steve, in observing how you secured the glass, I notice that you managed to cut the glass in a perfect circle. I'm OK at glass cutting, but not nearly as good as you. Because of this, your method would not work well for me. I'm attaching a photo of how I secured the glass with a back view of the 'sort of oval' glass that I cut for Fiona's 'Blue Tits on Hawthorn".

'don in brooklin' was referring to me. I've backed many of my scroll-sawn pieces with appropriate glass. I'm attaching photos of three of those pieces.

There is a poem entitled 'I Long for the Northland 'that expresses the poet's love of the Boreal Forrest that stretches all the way across Canada. I've designed a plaque to hang in a new building on Pellow's Island and that plaque features the poem. Corporal J. Romanson of the Canadian Army wrote the poem during the second-world-war. My Father, Christopher Pellow, also in the Canadian army in Europe, clipped the poem from an army publication and sent it home from France to my mother and me, having first underlined the parts that meant the most to him. I changed a few of the words in order to better describe the part of the Boreal Forrest around Hearst Ontario. Here Is a photo of the clipped poem: It’s tacked to a wall in our cabin. Here is a photo of the plaque: I cut it in 3mm thick Baltic Birch plywood using 2/0 Pegas spiral blades. It’s backed with another 3mm thick plywood panel. The frame is rough-cut Pine. I've recorded this project in another Scrollsaw Village thread. Here is a link: I'm cutting a plaque that has a lot of small letters using a spiral blade - Works In Progress & Tutorials - Scroll Saw Village My dad purchased Pellow’s Island in 1925, thus in 2025, our family will have been guardians of the island for a century. I’m partway through composing a poem that I’m entitling ‘Returning to the Northland’ that celebrates that guardianship. My intention is to record that poem in a companion plaque (this time using 6mm thick plywood —which will make the cutting easier).

I understand that a small amount of Baltic Birch comes from Finland. There are, of course, many countries other that Russia and Finland on the Baltic, but I have not heard that any of the others manufacture this type of plywood. Canada certainly has vast regions of same type of Boreal Forrest where the Birch is obtained, but I have not found (and I have looked) any Canadian manufacturer of Birch Plywood. It's not just the lack of voids that appeals to me, the characteristics and quality of the Birch wood make it good for scrolling.

That looks great Don! I will have get myself some of that Decoart Snow Writer

I really like this and, in particular, I like the painting that you did.

Well, I have now done some top feeding (about a dozen holes on different regions of the panel). What do I think about it? My short answer is: "It's a lot like snowboarding -I have learned how to snowboard and taken a few runs down steep hills -but it's strange to go down a hill standing sideways. I will, most often, choose to ski down the hill facing forward." So, I consider top feeding to be something in my bag of tricks, and will use it for holes located in the middle of large panels.

Thanks, I don't have a hex socket but I managed to jerry-rig one and it worked! The table came off, the guard came off, the table went back on and I am ready to attempt top feeding (after a break for dinner).

Well, I ran into a problem when attempting to top feed. It seems that the Pegas comes with an unexpected safety "feature": Un addition to the "regular" above the table hold-down and blade guard, the Pegas saw came with a below-the-table blade guard: This is a bit of an annoyance when attaching the bottom of a blade when that is the first end to be clamped. Until now, that is the way that I always secured a blade. But, for me, it is show stopper when top feeding and securing the blade in the bottom clamp second. In this case the guard really gets in the way. Therefore, I decided to remove the guard. But, in order to loosen the screw that holds the guard in place, one has to remove the table. Metric tools are needed for this and I have them: But, even with ratchet wrench secured on the nut below the table and hex wrench with e decent amount of leverage in the indent on top of the table, I could not loosen the bolt. I'm not quite sure what to do about this. For now, I will give up on attempting to Top Feed.

I've never tried top feeding because it was very difficult to do on my original generation Excalibur. Since it is supposed to be easier on my Pegas, I will give it a try.

That explains it.

You are sawing outside in Ottawa in early March??????? WOW! Where did you hide the snow?

Yes, there is button that you push as you tilt. I think it could be designed better. I'm certain that I could design it better. The upper arm is parallel.

I did mention that the saw has adjustable bolts at the bottom of the legs. But, they did not adjust enough to give me the slant that I like.

IMPRESSIONS & COMMENTS AFTER 8 HOURS SAWING: I now have the saw fully set up with dust collect and rear slightly elevated. Here is a photo: I do need to do something about all the wires but, other than that, this is where the saw and it's paraphernalia will be. The points below are in no particular order, they will be just as I think of them. 1) I've spent 6 hours working on a real project (the one that you see on the table) and another 2 hours testing out things such as really thick wood and sawing with the arm tilted. 2) I like the dust collection. I thought that the noise of the Festool vacuum would bother me but, at least so far, it doesn't. 3) Notice that the two rear legs of the stand are sitting on a 2x6. Like many others I know, I like to saw with the saw's table slanted slightly towards the front. I had thought that the adjustable bolts at the bottom of the legs would provide enough slant for me, but they do not. 4) I really really like the arm that stays up when one pushes it up. It was very tedious to have to jam something (usually a paint can) under the arm of my EX-30 in order to keep it up. 5) I mentioned in my first report that I find the hard stops at certain angles to be cumbersome. I found another manufacture's saw that has the same tilting mechanism at a nearby store and that one is just bad. Oh well, not everything about the Pegas can be perfect. 6) The blower is excellent! I did install a similar blower on my EX-30, but this one is better. 7) The clamps, of course, are excellent. One of the reasons that I purchased a Pegas was the quality of the after-market Pegas clamps that I installed on my EX-30 some time ago. 8 ) What did surprise me was that the clamps are much further apart than they are on my (about 20 years old) EX-30. I measure the separation as about 89 millimetres on the Excalibur and about 114 millimetres on the Pegas. That's a difference of 25 millimetres (or about an inch). All of that and a little more is above the table and that allows me to work with thicker wood. 9) I find that since I can clamp the blades much closer to the end, blade installation is much easier and more reliable. This also means that I am much let likely to break delicate blades. So far, on my real project, I am breaking the, very delicate, 2/0 spiral blades at about half the rate that I have come to expect on my EX-30. If this continues to be the case, the saving in the cost of blades alone will pay for my new saw. 10) I can saw at a slower speed on the Pegas. I have already found this to be advantage when doing some very tricky sawing. 11) The table on my Pegas is slightly bigger and I like that.

It's great that you are doing this Don! Some of that cutting looks quite difficult for beginners and I would save those for a second lesson. I would have them practicing on more lines. For a project, I suggest a simple puzzle.

Thankyou for that Information Melanie. I have glanced at the magazine at a store a handful of times but have never purchased one. I guess that I should do so and attempt to determine how much it might be worth to me.

I thank everyone for who liked my post and those who posted their congratulations and good wishes. I now have the foot-pedal and the lighted magnifying lens. I am still trying to find a reducing connector between my Festool vacuum and the dust port. With most of my set-up complete, it was time to start sawing. Here is a photo of the very first cut on this machine: The project that I am sawing is appropriate because the two people in that photo (myself and my grandson Ethan) are the only two people that ever used my old EX-30 scroll-saw. My preliminary report based on only one short cut is that the saw is quiet, solid, steady, and accurate. I realized too late that the blade I used was not a Pegas. It was a Flying Dutchman #1 Spiral with Flat Ends. Oh well, I do plan to be using Pegas #0 and #2/0 blades for the majority of the sawing on this piece.

Don, what I found at that link was 6 different CDs each costing $35 (US). That means I would need to spend $210 (US) in order to get all 72 issues. That's away more than I want to spend. Is there one CD somewhere with all he issues? I would pay a reasonable amount for that.

My new scroll saw arrived on Friday. Only the saw and the stand arrived, not the footswitch or the lighted magnifying glass or the blades that I ordered. Part of my order comes from Bear Woods USA warehouse and part from their Canadian warehouse. It’s curious that the part coming from he USA arrived first. I’m going to set up the new saw close to the old one located in the basement. The Pegas saw is quite heavy and my Festool dolly came in very handy for taking the box down the basement stairs: The dolly is especially designed for moving loads up and down stairways and it did its job very well. Getting the saw out of the box proved to be a challenge. The saw is heavy but not too heavy for me to lift. Sitting right on top of the saw in the box is a warning not to lift it by the arm. I very much appreciated this warning, because I would have attempted to lift it by the arm. However, when I did grab the saw as instructed, it did not want to budge. The problem was not the weight; the problem was that, somehow, the saw was wedged into the box. I ended up cutting one side off the box using a keyhole saw. (The black and yellow handle of the saw can be seen in the above photo). Once the box side was removed, the problem became obvious: The saw was bolted to a plywood panel. That’s a good thing but, maybe, the warning about lifting the saw should also explain about the plywood. The stand came in many parts with no instructions. But, it did have a parts diagram and an experienced person can assemble the stand by close examination of that diagram. I do think that it is a good stand. Here is a photo of the saw on the stand: The saw itself did come with a manual. Very few tools come with good manuals; the best that one can usually hope for is an adequate manual. The manual with this saw is just, barely, adequate. The biggest problem I had with the manual, is that there is no description of how to either assemble or to use the tilting mechanism. Most of the machine came assembled but the parts, including a gear, that comprised the tilting knob and locking components did not. I figured out what and how to assemble the parts from a parts diagram and it seems to work OK but I am not certain. In particular, there is a way to utilize hard stops at certain angles, including 90o of course, and that seems cumbersome the way I have it set up. I need to find a machine that is set up properly and compare what I have done to that machine. But, I don’t know where to find such a machine. Maybe a made-in-Taiwan Excalibur or Excelsior has the same mechanism and I should be able to find one of those at a nearby dealer. I’ve only used the saw for about 10 minutes, but my initial impression is that this is a very good saw. It certainly is quiet. When I first turned it on, I thought that there was something wrong because I did not hear anything. Then I looked and saw that the blade was moving up and down. This photo gives a better idea of how my overall scroll saw area will be set up. I will take another photo once the remaining parts for the Pegas have arrived and been installed and once I acquire a part to connect the small hose on my Festool vacuum to the larger dust port on the Pegas.