In woodworking and carpentry, hand saws, also known as "panel saws", "fish saws", are used to cut pieces of wood into different shapes. This is usually done in order to join the pieces together and create a wooden object. They usually operate by having a series of sharp points of some substance that is harder than the wood being cut. The hand saw is a bit like a tenon saw, but with one flat, sharp edge

Handsaws have been around for thousands of years. Egyptian hieroglyphics exist depicting ancient woodworkers sawing boards into pieces. Ancient bow saws have been found in Japan. The cut patterns on ancient boards may be observed sometimes to bear the unique cutting marks left by saw blades, particularly if the wood was not 'smoothed up' by some method. As for preservation of handsaws, twenty-four saws from eighteenth-century England are known to survive.

Materials for saw blades have varied over the ages. There were probably bronze saws in the time before steel making technology became extensively known and industrialized within the past thousand years or so.

A hand (med./lat.: manus, pl. manūs) is a prehensile, multi-fingered extremity located at the end of an arm or forelimb of primates such as humans, chimpanzees, monkeys, and lemurs. A few other vertebrates such as the koala (which has two opposable thumbs on each "hand" and fingerprints remarkably similar to human fingerprints) are often described as having either "hands" or "paws" on their front limbs.

Hands are the main structures for physically manipulating the environment, used for both gross motor skills (such as grasping a large object) and fine motor skills (such as picking up a small pebble). The fingertips contain some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body, are the richest source of tactile feedback, and have the greatest positioning capability of the body; thus the sense of touch is intimately associated with hands. Like other paired organs (eyes, feet, legs), each hand is dominantly controlled by the opposing brain hemisphere, so that handedness, or the preferred hand choice for single-handed activities such as writing with a pen, reflects individual brain functioning.

A saw is a tool that uses a hard blade, wire, or chain with a toothed edge to cut through softer materials. A saw may be worked by hand, or powered by steam, water, electricity or other power. An abrasive saw uses a powered circular blade for cutting metal.

In a modern serrated saw, each tooth is bent to a precise angle called its set. The set of the teeth is determined by the kind of cut the saw is intended to make. For example, a rip saw has a tooth set that is similar to the angle used on a chisel. The idea is to have the teeth rip or tear the material apart. Some teeth are usually splayed slightly to each side of the blade so that the cut width (kerf) is wider than the blade itself and the blade does not bind in the cut. The kerf of the blade is adjusted with a tool called a saw tooth setter.

An abrasive saw uses an abrasive disc or band for cutting, rather than a serrated blade.

In ancient Egypt, saws made of copper are documented as early as the Early Dynastic Period, circa 3,000–2,800.^{[page needed]} Examples of saws and models of saws have been found in many contexts throughout Egyptian history. Particularly useful are tomb wall illustrations of carpenters at work that show sizes and the use of different types. Egyptian saws were set with the teeth projecting only on one side, rather than in the modern fashion with the more advantageous alternating set.

Paul Sellers was born in 1950 and apprenticed in the UK in 1965 . He moved to the US in 1984 and quickly became noted for his ability in traditional woodworking. He has taught thousands of people in the craft of woodworking. He teaches in the USA and the UK for the New Legacy School of Woodworking . Sellers is author to Working Wood which was published in 2011.

Mag Ruffman (February 28, 1957) is a Canadian comedian, actress and television host.

She has played roles in films such as Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea and TV series Road to Avonlea.

In addition to her acting, Ruffman works on home improvement, hosting shows for W Network, Canada's women's network. She hosted A Repair to Remember in 1999 and 2000. In 2000, she launched a second series, Anything I Can Do, a workshop show. Ruffman writes a weekly home improvement column, ToolGirl, for the Toronto Star. She published a collection of her ToolGirl columns as a book, How Hard Can It Be?, in 2003.