How a $16 Folding Saw Saved Me a Call to the Tree Guy

The storm came through on a Thursday night in late June, the kind that knocks the power out for an hour and leaves the yard smelling like torn bark by morning. When I walked out with my coffee, a limb off our old red maple, easily as thick as my forearm, was down across the fence line, and a second one was hanging by a thread of bark right over the roof of my potting shed. I didn't know it yet, but the thing that would settle the whole mess was already sitting in my garden bucket, an eleven-inch REXBETI folding saw I'd bought on a whim back in the spring.

My husband Wendell took one look and said he'd call Grady's Tree Service Monday morning. Grady does good work, but he charges by the job, not the limb, and I knew from the last time he was out here that a same-day call for two branches would run us close to two hundred dollars, maybe more with the cleanup fee. My Saturdays are the only real daylight I get that isn't already spoken for, so I told Wendell to give me until Sunday evening before he dialed anyone.

I already owned a pair of bypass loppers and an old bow saw that had been hanging in the shed since before we moved in, but the loppers couldn't get through anything past about an inch and a half, and the bow saw's blade was so rusted it kept binding halfway through a cut. What I needed was something I could carry up a ladder in one hand, fold shut when I wasn't using it, and trust not to slip while I was six feet off the ground holding a branch with the other arm.

That's what sent my thoughts back to the REXBETI folding saw already waiting in my garden bucket. Eleven inches of blade, SK-5 steel, and a handle that locks open with enough of a click that I could feel it seat before I ever put weight on it. Its current price on Amazon is less than I'd spend on gas driving to a hardware store forty minutes away, so there wasn't much to lose by trusting it with something this size before Wendell made his call.

I wasn't trying to save the tree. I was trying to save my Sunday, and maybe two hundred dollars while I was at it.

Sunday morning I set the ladder against the shed, tucked the folded saw in my back pocket, and climbed up with the hanging limb close enough to touch. I opened the blade one-handed, which is not something I could do with the bow saw, and started the cut on the underside first the way my father taught me, so the branch wouldn't tear bark down the trunk when it finally let go.

The REXBETI's teeth bit in fast. I'm not a strong puller, my grip gives out on anything that takes more than a minute of steady sawing, and this took maybe ninety seconds through wood that was a good three inches across at the cut point. The limb dropped clean onto the tarp I'd laid out below, no tearing, no ladder wobble, nothing I had to explain to Wendell later.

The ground limb across the fence line took longer, mostly because I was cutting it into sections small enough to drag to the burn pile, but the saw never bound up the way the old bow saw used to, even when I hit a knot near the base. By the time Wendell came out with his own coffee, I was folding the blade shut and telling him he could cancel whatever he hadn't called yet.

It's been about eight months now, through a dry fall and a wet spring, and that same REXBETI has handled everything from suckers at the base of the maple to a dead limb on the crabapple that was too high to reach without the ladder trick again. The blade still cuts the way it did that first morning. I keep it in a bucket by the back door instead of the shed, because if I have to walk all the way out there for it, I'll talk myself out of the job.

What surprised me most wasn't the cutting, it was how little thinking it took. I didn't have to stop and file the blade, didn't have to oil a joint or worry about it rusting shut between uses the way the bow saw always did after a rainy week. I open it, I use it, I fold it, I set it down. For someone whose free time comes in short, unpredictable windows, that kind of tool earns its keep just by being ready when I am.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If we were sitting at my kitchen table and you asked me whether a folding saw is worth adding to what you already own, I'd tell you the honest answer. It depends on whether you're the kind of person who puts things off until they're an emergency, or the kind who'd rather spend twenty minutes on a Sunday morning and be done with it. I'm the second kind, most weeks anyway, and this saw fits that. It won't take down a real tree, and I still call Grady for anything over about four inches thick or anything near a power line. But for the branch that's hanging where it shouldn't, the one you keep meaning to get to, it's earned its spot in my bucket by the door. I'm not going to tell you it changed my life. It saved me a Monday phone call and a couple hundred dollars, and some mornings that's enough.