a well made 1953 black & white film in the public domain published by the United States Information Service. It's a story about a hard working family of pulpwood loggers who cut all their trees with hand tools. The family saved and purchased a power saw.
What kind of power saw? You'd expect it to be a chain saw, wouldn't you. Chainsaws were being mass produced by U.S. companies as early as the late 1940s. No, this saw had a circular blade. The video called it a "power saw." In one of the comments it was called a "mobile swing saw" sort of a portable version of a cut-off saw, the type used in old saw mills. The blade appears to be at least 2 feet across.
Here's a photo taken from the film showing the pulpwood logger cutting down a tree with this saw.
I did a net search and found a similar saw by another manufacturer. Here's a side-by-side comparison between the two.
Here's a larger photo of the red one.
The two above saws are both belt driven. Here's one in a smaller photo (below) with a driveshaft. The caption below it says it's made by a company named "Mobilco."
My father, Hap Vincent, and my uncle John Farris, rented a saw similar to the red one to cut all the big trees on our 2 acres of suburban property where he built the house I grew up in. I clearly remember the saw even though I couldn't have been more than 3 or 4 years old at the time.
Years later I asked dad if he had the trees cut into lumber to build the house. He said he traded the trees for seasoned lumber. I guess he must have rented a truck to haul them to the saw mill or they came and got the trees. I don't remember. I do remember the house quite well though. I lived there until I was 19 years old. Here's a photo of it taken about 1951.
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