"jkn" wrote in message
...
Hi All
I am thinking of getting a circular saw (185mm) for a few jobs around
the
place. I am plenty 'handy' enough but for woodworking have tended to stick
to
hand tools for most of the things I need to do.

Apart from the fact that they are scary things, one other consideration
for me
is that I am left handed, and have a small and somewhat 'malformed' right
hand
(Poland's Syndrome, if anyone is interested).

Ah, like Jeremy Beadle had.

This normally causes me no problems, but I am aware that tools like this
are
increasingly ergonomically designed for the majority right-handed folk. My
right
hand has less strength than my left and sometimes it is awkward for me to
'hold a handle and press a button' with it at the same time - stuff like
that.

I'd not thought of a circular saw or other power tools as being "handed",
but I can see the problem. I wonder whether holding a circular saw and
guiding it along a marked line is something that *normally* can be done with
the "wrong" hand. The fact that your "wrong" hand is weakened tips the
balance even more strongly in favour of you having to use your left hand.

I wonder whethe Poland Syndrome and handedness go [sorry for this
unintentional pun] hand-in-hand: is the fact that your left side is your
dominant side a consequence of your right hand not developing?

It's a shame that the saw is isn't designed so the handle and guide can be
fitted on the opposite side. Given that left-handed people are a sizeable
minority, I wonder if any tool manufacturers sell replacement handles and
guides that are the opposite way round.


Handedness is an interesting thing. I had lunch with a woman who ate with
her fork in her right hand and her knife in the left. I was puzzled because
I'd earlier seen her writing with her right hand. I asked her and she looked
bewildered: she was evidently so used to eating with her fork in her right
hand for any food that didn't require a knife that she hadn't learned to eat
with fork in left and knife in right, and instinctively used her knife (on
the rarer occasions) in the opposite hand to the one she habitually used her
fork in.

My mum is left handed but was taught to use her fork in the left hand as a
right-hander would do because it would not stand out as much: at 82, she's
old enough to have had left-handedness stigmatised at school, though not to
the extent that she holds a pen in her left hand but still sloping to the
right as a right-hander would do; I've seen a lot of people contorting their
left hand so as to get the pen to slope to the right, usually involving
putting the hand *above* the line of writing rather than to the left of it.
Instead, Mum holds her pen in an exact mirror image of the way I would.