Our goal is to make a scraper do this,

make nice long fluffy shavings.  Nice fluffy shavings means a well polished wood surface.

There are a lot of ways to tune a scraper.   The following is my preferred method,  and it works quite well.

The goal is to shape a hook edge on the end of the scraper.

You take a much harder surface, and deform the scraper with pressure.  This draws out the edge, which is then angled to be able to cut a shaving.   The following picture shows the concept, and shows my understanding and experience.  I  must warn you that there are a lot of quite smart, researched and experienced folk out there that don’t entirely agree with  my perception of this.  I like to push the end first, not the side of the scraper.  Then I ‘bend’ the bur over to make the hook.

The  neat thing about the hook or bur that you make on the edge, is that it is ‘work hardened’ and very tough.  You can, I have, make a bur with a less hard burnisher,  but it will not usually be as good a bur and will take more work to do.

Here are a few scrapers with a hand held burnisher,

First thing you do is clean up the scraper.  This is 400 grit Norton 3x sandpaper, good stuff for cleaning up a burnisher.

Still cleaning up.

Then I clean  up the ends.  You can put a block on  the sandpaper and  slide the scraper along it, if you want  an exactly square end.   A lot  of folk do.

Now that we have removed any previous burs, we start to make one.

First I make a few even passes on a really hard polished rod, at the normal or 90 degree angle.  I put about as much force on it as it takes  to pick up a gallon of milk.

Then I lower the angle a little bit, maybe 3 degrees from  the normal.  At this angle I make another smooth pass.

Then I go ahead and burnish at the 7 degree from normal, angle that my burnisher is set to, by putting the scraper in a slot and having that guide the scraper against the burnisher for one more pass.  If it doesn’t make a good scrape I may make another pass or two until I like the edge.

A burnishing tool can be made with a small carbide rod, an old tap, or a really hard punch.  As long as the rod does not show damage from the scraper, it is probably hard enough.

A slit and a drill hole in a stick are all you really need for a handle, or you can always buy one made for the task.

Bob