FWI: Snow Saws

Steve Romeo called it FWI - F@$%ing With It.  Taking something that works fine, and messing with it to make it work better.  I've been complaining about snow saws recently - they are either too long, too fancy, too thick, etcetera etcetera etcetera.  So last week I decided to cobble together my own.

This was what I had to work with:
The Life Link snow saw is 55cm long, making it too long to fit in a pack, and its big aggressive teeth make it great for snow but useless for anything else.  But it's just a flat piece of cut aluminum, making it the simplest and easiest for a FWI project.
The BCA Snow Saw is a little bit shorter, around 45cm overall and fits into some - but not all - packs.  The handle is beefy and thick, making it awkward to pack.  But it's blade has the lowest profile and teeth that cut snow, ice, and wood.
The Brooks Range Mountaineering Snow Saw folds in half making it the most packable, but I (just being me) somehow bent it right at the joint and now it won't lock open.  Nor is it straight.  So it's KIA.
I suspect what I actually want is a G3 Bone Saw, but at $40-60 retail they're twice to three times as much as any of the snow saws listed above.  Ouch.  I don't want one that much.

At first I was just going to cut down the LL saw to a shorter 45cm length.  But it still wouldn't cut through wood - so I decided that I would use the BCA saw blade, and it conveniently came off the handle with a couple of philips head screws.

Originally I was going to use the BRM handle, but the metal proved to be too tough for my flimsy plastic hacksaw.  I opted instead for the LL handle.  This turned out to be a blessing - the LL handle gave the saw a shorter overall length than the BRM handle would have.  So I lined up the BCA blade to determine where to cut, drilled two holes for the blade attachment, and filled down all the rough edges as well.  A quick trip to the hardware store for some nuts and bolts, a couple of squirts of lock-tight, and...

Finis!  The BCA saw blade guard refuses to stay on anyways, so I trimmed down the LL guard to the shorter BCA blade.  Now I have what I need - a wood/snow saw blade that is slim, lite-weight, and short enough to fit in my pack easily.  And it still has the BCA logo on it.  No reason not to carry it now.