Wood – the safest and quietest practical lightweight electric saw to cut 2×4 to use inside an apartment

A reciprocating saw WILL do the job. If that is what you have and you do not wish to buy/borrow/rent a chainsaw, then you can use it. Get a long blade, designed for cutting wood. These blades have large, sharp teeth with wide gullets between them.

The reciprocating saw will take longer to do the job, and it does have some vibration issues, but I can assert that you can use it for hours at a time. A good saw is a beast, designed for heavy duty work. (I did so to cut up the wood after we had an ice storm once. It left piles of wood behind that can only be measured as many cubic yards. My chainsaw was dead, and was painfully unwilling to be revived. Amazingly, I used only 3 blades for the entire job. The final pile of wood and brush was roughly 10 feet wide, 6 feet high, and 60 feet long.)

If you do use a reciprocating saw for this purpose, you might buy some gloves with padding in the palms. Good gloves will be a necessity anyway, so use them. Ear protection is a good idea too.

If you already have a reciprocating saw and a circular saw, and want to just buy the right blades ... I'd consider a carbide blade in the circular saw, using it for wood that is up to 3 inches thick. Choose a blade with few teeth and large gullets. Then use the reciprocating saw with a wood blade only for those pieces that are too thick.

Having said all that, perhaps another solution if you do not wish to buy a gas powered chainsaw, is an electric chainsaw. These saws have no issues with gasoline, so are slightly simpler to deal with. It is still a chainsaw though. You will still need to use oil, and kickbacks are still a problem to watch out for, but a circular saw can also be dangerous if used unwisely.

Replace or sharpen dull blades as appropriate. A dull blade is a dangerous blade. It takes more effort to use, so you push harder. A good saw with a sharp blade should almost glide through the wood.

Finally, if you are cutting up a large amount of wood, then be careful. Do not work when you are tired. This is true using ANY saw. Stop and finish the job another day, a far better idea than spending time in the emergency room.

Try this little trick.

1. Cut two rectangles from your plywood an inch or two larger than what you want your finished pieces to be. Be sure one face of these rectangles are a straight factory edge.

2. Now stack the two pieces together and clamp them with the factory edges one on top of the other, nice and flush.

3. Scribe a perfectly square line using a builders square perpendicular to the factory edge on both sides separated by the dimension you want the piece to be.

4. Now take a perfectly straight piece of wood and clamp it onto the surface exactly at the dimension of the distance of the edge of your blade to the edge of the saw frame. You now have created a guide to run your saw against while making a cut through both pieces of plywood at the same time.

5. Repeat this procedure on the other side.

6. For the last cut parallel to the factory edge, measure precisely the distance and mark on either side, draw a line between the marks. This line should be square to the end cuts and parallel to the factory edge.

7. Now reattach the cutting guide at the blade to frame dimension as you did for the edges and cut both pieces at once again.

You have now made three cuts, two at a 90 degree to the factory edge and one parallel to the factory edge. Since both pieces were cut at the same time, they should be identical.