Thread: Scrapers

That's a great result MA. There was a thread here a while ago where some who owned the Veritas triangle burnisher were commenting on how when using the narrow edge, far less pressure is required.

I guess that's pretty much what you have. A narrow edge burnisher.

Having scrapers as part of your arsenal really is a benefit, and you'll find yourself using them far more often than you would have expected, and for so many varied tasks.

MA,

Like Lance said what a fantastic result, you have made another tool(saved$$).
An they look good, from my understanding of setting the edge on a scraper, you are just bending the edge using pressure,so I can’t see an advantage from using an oval,a rectangle or a round bar, we are only using a single point contact anyway.

Cheers Matt.

Thanks Lance and Matt. I bought a Veritas burnisher jig a while ago (the type you can set the angle of the hook on and slide along the edge) which was okay but not consistent. I could see the merits of scrapers, just couldn't get results like others. Until now

MA, I always say that discovering the scraper was the single biggest revelation I've had in woodworking. For some reason, our school woodwork teacher, who was a cabinetmaker trained in the 'old school' never mentioned them so it wasn't 'til the late 70s when I became an avid reader of FWW that I first encountered the things. I suspect our teacher had never had need of them himself, living in North Qld where no cabinetmaker of the day would have bothered with 'difficult' woods - why would you when there was still a seemingly-endless supply of woods like red cedar, satin sycamore & maple etc etc that planed & worked so easily?

I did know about 'scraping' to some extent, because my father & uncle would use bits of broken bottles to smooth axe & hoe-handles & the like, but nobody I knew used a bit of old saw plate or similar, which would've done at least as good a job & more safely! So what you can do with a piece of tempered steel was a revelation to me. I can still remember the feeling of satisfaction & joy the first time I produced rolls of full-width, fluffy shavings after what seemed like hours of making nothing more than dust. But it's not just taming cranky grain on flat surfaces they excel at - with a small selection of files and a few shaped stones you can have the most versatile shapers that might cause a shallow nick or two, but won't remove fingers in the blink of an eye!

As you progress with scrapers & use them in more situations (they are the bees' knees when you are faced with making very short runs of complex mouldings), you'll find treating the edges is an art in itself which becomes intuitive with practice. The amount of 'hook' that works best depends on the wood and the angles at which you can get at the surfaces being scraped so I much prefer a freehand method of burnishing because it's so much easier to vary angles according to need. When scraping mouldings you often don't need a hook at all; it's pretty difficult to make a hook on something to clean out or make a narrow quirk for example, but they seem to work just as effectively with a clean, square edge in that context. And you've probably discovered already that you can remove/reduce a hook several times without any problems, in fact working the edge a few times work-hardens it & gives you a more durable edge, so it's very easy to experiment as you go along to get them working at their best for you.

I hope you can get back into full harness soon & put all these extra little skills you've acquired to good use in your regular work!

Ian

Thanks Ian. Work has been quite of late . But a few outdoor landscaping jobs have come my way and that will keep me busy until things improve lockdown wise.

How much do you know about Red Cedar? I was told that the reason we don't see much of it now is that it proved too hard to grow in plantations, apparently it only thrived in a mixed species, forest type environment, with significant distance between trees. Is this true?

On a side note, an heirloom seed/plant mob (Diggers Club) have red cedars for sale. I would be keen to plant one but finding space on our block for more trees could be hard (my moniker is Mountain Ash for a reason).

Originally Posted by IanW

MA, I always say that discovering the scraper was the single biggest revelation I've had in woodworking....

Me, too, but my revelation was linked to discovery of Japanese sashmono joinery.

I saw a demonstration of scraping at a woodwork fair about 40 years ago and was immediately blown away by the vibrancy of the surface appearance.

Then I was in Japan and introduced to sashimono furniture - extremely simple and subtle design and vibrant natural wood surfaces - AND

• the best surface preparation was hand planing, only,
• scraping was acceptable and gave a good finish, but,
• "why would a craftsman use sandpaper?"

Subsequently, I had many discussions on this issue, largely based around why westerners (including me) could not see that sandpaper killed the soul of the timber.
George Nakashima wote a book on this theme.

Anyone using a buffer for theirs?, if I needed a scraper much I'd be considering one.
I'm just getting by with the block and hone for now, and have no need to do much curved work, so haven't sprung for a
used grinder yet.

I was taken back at how effective it works for scrapers, compared to anything else I've seen through the years.
Filthy Dirty Easy Way to Sharpen and Maintain Scrapers - YouTube

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

.......How much do you know about Red Cedar? I was told that the reason we don't see much of it now is that it proved too hard to grow in plantations, apparently it only thrived in a mixed species, forest type environment, with significant distance between trees. Is this true?....

Yes, MA, quite true. The problem is predation by the cedar tip moth. The caterpillar of this pest feeds on the fresh new shoots & heavy infestations on young trees causes erratic, crooked growth, leading to trees with poor form. If you put a few thousand cedar seedlings all in the one patch, the moths think it's Christmas & quickly breed up to plague levels, so you end up with a lot of stunted, crooked saplings that are never going to make decent trees.

There are a lot of tree species that don't do well in plantations; Qld Maple is another one - I'm not sure what the specific problem was, but in general, putting squillions of any plant together as we do with our food crops leads to escalation of pests & diseases. It gives plant breeders & researchers something to do...

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

......

• the best surface preparation was hand planing, only,
• scraping was acceptable and gave a good finish, but,
• "why would a craftsman use sandpaper?"

.....

Horses for courses, Graeme. Some woods, & particularly softwoods (which the Japanese use a lot of) finish very well off-plane, but it takes most of us a very long time to learn to sharpen & set planes to the level we could prepare a surface for french polishing with nothing but a plane!

Scraping on some woods leaves a 'cloudy' finish due mainly to slight tearing of the superficial fibres instead of the very clean cut of a plane blade. On the 'right' woods, the surface left by a scraper can be every bit as good as that left by a plane, on some woods (mostly very hard ones) the scraper can leave a much better surface, while on very soft woods, it's more likely to leave a mess. Don't bother trying to scrape red cedar, for e.g., a plane will give you a far better surface.

I guess a "craftsman" in the Japanese sense would have little need of sandpaper, but your average weekend warrior doesn't have the time to spend mastering planing the way they do. So if you need to use paper to get where you want to be, there's no shame in that at all, I say. You can get a very good surface with paper that will polish up very nicely. It's the only economical (of time) way I can get red cedar ready to french-polish!

Tom, that video you linked to is one of the more irritating videos I've watched - correction, part-watched in this case, I started skipping after about a minute of it. Why oh why do people think we are going to be riveted by interminable prattle & mumbling? If you're going to make a video, write yourself a script, & better still, edit the darned thing (heavily). He seemed to me to be making his scraper preparation more work, not less. It's really not rocket science to prepare a scraper edge. It takes less than a minute with a fine file & a hard stone (a fine diamond is best, 'cos you won't make tracks in it if you are moderately careful). The hard part is mastering the burnishing, but once you get that, it's easier than falling off a log - three or four light passes per corner & the job's done & you're back to work. You can usually re-form the burr with the burnisher when it dulls 3 or 4 times at least, sometimes several more times before you have to re-define the edge. It can't get much easier, imo....

Cheers,

... I guess a "craftsman" in the Japanese sense would have little need of sandpaper, but your average weekend warrior doesn't have the time to spend mastering planing the way they do. So if you need to use paper to get where you want to be, there's no shame in that at all, I say. You can get a very good surface with paper that will polish up very nicely. It's the only economical (of time) way I can get red cedar ready to french-polish! ...

Really important to raise that skill base, which in the case of the Japanese craftsman was extremely high. Rigorous selection process, then an eight year (minimum) apprenticeship .... And only producing for the top one or two percent of the market.

I was involved in the timber industry at that stage and we were selling timber to Japan out of PNG and species intended for high end furniture included:

• Red cedar - Toona Australis,
• Pencil cedar - Palaquium amboinense and others,
• Erima - Octomeles sumatrama,
• Rosewood - Pterocarpus indicus,
• Cheesewood - Alstonia scholaris.
• There were others, but ones memory fades.

A small percentage of the finished furniture that I saw had that extremely glossy traditional Japanese lacquer finish, sometimes in black or red, but usually leaving the grain visible. Much seemingly had no finish applied, just raw timber, but at the time I never questioned it. Perhaps there was a subsurface oil finish? Or something else? I should have asked more questions.

And remember we are talking about the extreme high end of the market. I well remember one small low table about a metre long (like a coffee table) with a retail price around $5,000 in 1980. The top was pinkish stained and clear lacquer marketed as "kwinceri"; the legs raw; the timber was pencil cedar.

I've never encountered "Erima", Graeme, but have at least some experience with the others & they are all on the soft side for hardwoods and not very amenable to scraping. But the Japanese do use some "hard" hardwoods like Dalbergias. Some of these may be the woods your contacts were alluding to when they mentioned scrapers?

Yeah, I've read a few times that they use no finishes on some of their timbers like the stuff they use to make temples. Softwood & no "protection" sounds counter-intuitive to us, but the Hinoki (Cypress) they favour is naturally durable like cedar, and the wooden plane 'polish' apparently adds to the durability - they last for centuries! Don't think I'd try improving the durability of my Ironbark fenceposts by hand-planing them to a polish tough.....

Cheers,

... I've never encountered "Erima", Graeme, but have at least some experience with the others & they are all on the soft side for hardwoods ...

To my eye, erima is a rather stout but ugly tree, something like teak up to 30m tall and with a very regular round truck up to 1.2 or 1.5m diameter. In PNG it was the perferred timber for dug out canoes. Could be relatively easily carved with sone adzes and axes.

Its timber is very pale creamy and rather bland with minimal visible grain; possibly even softer than the other hardwoods I mentioned. One of its uses was as a cheaper alternative to paulownia, and in larger dimensions.

The limitted visits that I made to workshops in Japan, mainly around Tokushima in eastern Shikoku, those very soft hardwoods were being mainly hand planed; scraping seemed to be reserved for those jobs where planing was not possible. Wish I had paid more attention, or had a better memory!

At the time I certainly did not appreciate the skill base that I was watching.

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

..... At the time I certainly did not appreciate the skill base that I was watching.

No doubt they made it look easy. But when we try to copy a master, we soon realise the amount of skill involved (& how much we lack!).

Wish I'd paid more attention to many things in my life

Cheers