A Rusticated Scraper Shave

I had a kind of 3D idea for the handle from combining different pictures of them in my head. After getting the basic shape, I grabbed the handles and started removing what felt wrong.

Here it is held, and the Cedar shavings below were indeed made by the tool:

Any uneven qualities are in my hands, because this was shaped to fit. Oddly the fit is good so the grip feels kind of soft. Even though I have secure grip and control.

Here are two more picture to get the feel of the rams horn kind of twist I made.

Here is a slightly fuzzy close up of the mouth.

The finish is the paraffin/safflower/turpentine mix I am fond of. The working areas are sanded to 400 grit, the handle is sanded to 220 to leave a touch more grip.

The plate is osage, the rest is brass and ash. This should hold up rattling around in the tool box, for a long time.

This one has worked out really well, Usually you use a chair devil or spokeshave type tool on narrow sections of wood. This means you don’t have to worry much about clearance. One of the advantages of the form is, once the knack for finding and holding the angle is learned, you can adjust angle on the fly. The rather large flat plane on the body helps me to find that angle initially, but then I can adjust it a bit as the wood grain shifts angle.

I wanted a tool that I could use as a spoke shave, but on a wide section of wood. I thought about it, and I decided that while I wanted the actual grip higher so it would be clear of the surface, I also thought it would be best if the handle was directly centered over the blade. Since the normal forces are indeed going to push backward and try to rotate the tool as you pull it towards you, I made sure that my thumbs would be right there to prevent the spin.

In practice, I can use this tool in one hand. It has great control. I am not taking a huge shaving with it, but it seems to work every bit as well as I envisioned it to.

I don’t have much call to use a tool of this form, in fact one of the projects I that I made it for has turned out to be a failure.

Such is life when you imagine things and try to build them. Even though I don’t use this sort of tool much, if I lost it, I would try to make another one just like it. I think it will be perfect for it’s intended purpose, to make a track for a marble to follow.

Bob

3 comments to A Rusticated Scraper Shave

  • Skip J.

    Excellent ergo there Bob! I have an old-time ram’s horn I bought from Lynn Dowd with classic handles in about that position. However, it uses just a regular plane blade size – I have a Ron Hock blade in it at the moment. Your small blade width suggests a whole ‘nother use for it. I don’t know about the marbles though. Question: the throat looks smaller than the blade width; how well do the litle shavings pass up it? Or do they at all????

  • There is a bit of a trick to the mouth. This is a scraper really, although it can be angled and used for a bit of a thicker shaving. When the blade is close in, since it is rounded, the shaving is shorter than the width of the mouth. When the blade is stuck out, then it clears the face and the shaving does not have to pass through the mouth. As a result, there never is a problem with the narrow width of the mouth. Sneaky eh?

  • Skip J.

    Hmmnnn… rounded blade huh? Well that explains the marble track… Maybe use it to cut down a knot a bit before using a full sized scraper???

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>