Popular Woodworking 2004-06 № 141, страница 34

From the Bench

Simple, Useful Cabinet Scrapers

In trained hands, a cabinet scraper can prepare a surface for final finishing and remove localized areas of tear-out left behind by a hand plane or machinery.

The cabinet scraper is an effective weapon in the war against tear-out.

The cabinet scraper (also known as a card scraper) holds a remarkable place among the traditional woodworking tools that are used to deal with especially dense timbers and difficult grain.

When woodworkers discuss hand planes that are able to deal with such woods, the talk invariably turns to earnest consideration of tiny mouth apertures, secure iron bedding, carefully considered angles, flat soles and a fine depth of cut.

The cabinet scraper gets included in such discussions, even though the tool - essentially a piece of thin steel usually cut into a rectangular shape - doesn't exhibit any of these traits. Its inclusion is based on the fact that it's capable of taking fine shavings while hardly ever tearing out the wood fibers. Further, the denser and harder the timber, the better the tool seems to perform.

The cabinet scraper is capable of this performance because, despite the fact that it's called a scraper, it actually is a self-limiting cutting tool when it's properly prepared, sharpened and manipulated.

Scraper Actually Slices

Without getting into a tedious analysis, this self-limiting cutting action is determined by the geometry and scale of the tool's burr, or wire edge, which enables it to perform as if it was a very finely set, high-angle smoothing plane with an extremely short sole. This has consequences that place some limits on its usefulness, however, which we'll touch on in a moment. But first, a little about its traditional role in furniture making.

I was introduced to the cabinet scraper during my apprenticeship in traditional cab-inetmaking, as part of a general approach to preparing surfaces for finishing. This ap

proach consisted of truing up a surface with a try plane, addressing any localized areas of tear-out and tool marks with a smooth (or smoothing) plane, then following that up with the cabinet scraper only if there were areas of tear-out that the smooth plane could not address. The idea was to eliminate any surface defects with cutting tools because they remove material efficiently.

by Don McConnell

Don McConnell builds furniture and does ornamental

carving in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Formerly at the cabinetmaker's shop at The Ohio Village, he remains an avid student of the history of the trade, tools and shop practices.

Any noticeable differences in surface texture or minor marks left from the cutting tools were removed (some might say obscured) by subsequent hand sanding. The argument was that sanding was less tedious (more efficient) for removing the very small amounts of material necessary to produce a uniform surface texture for finishing.

Many hand-tool woodworkers today are drawn to finishing right after cutting - avoiding sanding altogether. But for them, the cabinet scraper may actually complicate things.

For one thing, if the surface texture from the scraper is different than from their smooth plane, they may not be able to use it on a small area of tear-out without having to scrape the

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Popular Woodworking June 2004