Woodworker's Journal 1993-17-3, страница 17

Woodworking Basics

Trading sanding dust for shavings

by Roger Holmes

I hate lo sand wood. It's dusty, sweaty work, and my arms ache after a session harnessed to the sanding block. (I'm not as young as I used to be.) But discomfort and fatigue aren't the worst of it. It's the question of character—my character—that's the most troublesome. Would a real craftsman stoop to scouring wood with microscopic gravel? Surely, a real craftsman would glide across ihe surface with razor-sharp edge tools, brushing aside feathery shavings to reveal the wood's glowing, blemish-free beauty.

Over the years thoughts like these have come to mind each time 1 have struggled and failed with that simplest of woodworking tools, the hand scraper.

May/June 1993

Recommended by a pantheon of experts, ihe scraper has always seemed to me to be the true craftsman's answer to sanding. What could be more elegant than shearing off wispy shavings with just a thin piece of hardened steel no bigger than an index card?

The tool's reputed simplicity, however. made my failures with it all the more frustrating, i could work it well enough to clean up this or that spot of tearout. But I couldn't make it perform consistently. Rather than battle the recalcitrant piece of scrap metal across an entire tabletop. I turned again to my dusty but dependable pile of sandpaper.

A recent discussion with a fellow woodworker who sang the scraper's

praises sent me back for another try. Pulling an armful of reference books off the shelf. I descended to the shop, vow ing to figure out the tool once and for all. By the end of a long day. my fingers sliced with dozens of tiny cuts, I had succeeded. As you might expect, the solutions to my problems were simple—-it was all the dead ends that took the lime. I don't claim mastery of the scraper, or that the techniques I arrived at are the only ones that work. But I'm now confident 1 can make the thing work properly. If you've had similar scraper difficulties, I hope what follows will help you overcome them—there's something very satisfying about getting so much work out of so little tool.

17

A sharp scraper

slices shavings off this highly figured mahogany, producing a clean surface in less time, with less dust, than is possible with sandpaper.

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