I'm Aaron Smith, and I run Bench & Chisel out of a small workshop in the basement of my home in upstate New York. By day I'm an Implementation Manager at a software company. By evenings and weekends, I restore antique hand saws.
Bench & Chisel started in 2022. As I got more serious about woodworking, I found myself gravitating toward old saws — drawn to the way tools made a century ago weren't just designed to work, but to be beautiful. I work with both hand and power tools in my own shop, but it's the older hand tools I keep coming back to. The more time I spent restoring saws, the more I realized restoration was its own craft — patient, technical, and quietly satisfying — and one I genuinely loved.
Every saw that goes on this site has been through my bench. I disassemble it, clean off the rust, hammer out any bends in the plate, sharpen the teeth by hand, and reassemble it carefully. Then I see out it cuts. If it doesn't cut cleanly, it doesn't get listed. The goal isn't a saw that looks good in a photograph — it's a saw you can take to your own bench and put to work the day it arrives.
To me, Bench & Chisel is more than a retail operation. It's a deeply personal project where I explore the concepts of craftsmanship, quality, and good work. Handcraft — the act of creating through mental and physical engagement — is one of the most effective practices we have for understanding ourselves and our world. It allows us to use our minds and bodies to make something concrete that expresses our perspective on the human condition. As we create, we gain clarity about our own thoughts and ideas. Handcraft is a sacred and valuable practice. It is, simply put, good work.
Bench & Chisel is for those of us engaged in the struggle to live and work in the best way we can — in the way that fulfills our sense of purpose, fits our values, and results in time well spent and life lived well. It provides the implements and inspiration for those who feel that doing good work is not optional, and that the best place to do good work is in the workshop.
If you have questions about a specific saw, or you'd like a saw of yours brought back to life, get in touch. I'd love to hear from you.
— Aaron