Curly Maple Tear Out with Scraper

[Jon Agnew]

Hey, Fellas.

Working on a small box for my mom for mothers day. I've got some nice curly maple for the lid that I'm trying to smooth. Even with a freshly sharpened card scraper, I'm getting small bits of tear out....not really visible to the eye, but certainly to the touch. It's kind of fuzzy feeling. Could this be a problem with my scraper sharpening? Or is it just plain bad luck and I'm going to have to deal with --*vomits in mouth*-- sandpaper?

[lowell holmes]

When planing with a lunch box planer, you can control tear out by misting the board with water before planing it.

I don't know if that would work when using a hand plane or scraper. You might try it.

I have a bevel up jack that I use with the 50 degree iron when working figured maple. It does a pretty good job controlling chip out. I use the same iron in my bevel up smoother as well.

[Mike Henderson]

Sandpaper is just a tool, same as a plane or a scraper. Just like you select other tools, sometime you select sandpaper.

I'm not saying you should use sandpaper, but don't reject it just because of prejudice.

Mike

[Jeff Bartley]

Jon, Like Lowell I use a plane with a steep bevel. The one I use is a stanley #65 with a LV iron sharpened to 40 degrees giving the plane a 52 degree effective angle....it works great! But I wouldn't be ashamed to use sandpaper too, Mike's right, it's just a tool too.

[David Weaver]

I would use a standard bench plane and set the chipbreaker really tight. If the grains aren't sheared off cleanly by a 45 degree iron, then it's probably the case that the fuzziness or roughness will happen with anything (certainly a card scraper won't likely change that because it leaves a tearout free surface, but not necessarily a shiny smooth one).

I don't like to use sandpaper, either, every once in a great while I might (I don't remember the last time I did, a couple of years ago maybe), but roughness like that is something you can deal with in the finishing stage, too, if you have a finish that will need to be abraded.

If you're putting straight wax on it, those grains are going to stand up later, anyway, as the piece gradually absorbs moisture over time.

[Charlie Stanford]

Hey, Fellas.

Working on a small box for my mom for mothers day. I've got some nice curly maple for the lid that I'm trying to smooth. Even with a freshly sharpened card scraper, I'm getting small bits of tear out....not really visible to the eye, but certainly to the touch. It's kind of fuzzy feeling. Could this be a problem with my scraper sharpening? Or is it just plain bad luck and I'm going to have to deal with --*vomits in mouth*-- sandpaper?

Rework the scraper. Turn a smaller hook. Use very light burnishing pressure so that the scraper will cut while being held at no less an angle than 70* or so. You could just try preparing a straight edge with no hook and scrape it at 90* or just slightly less - basically just scraping with the arris and not an actual hook.

If this doesn't work sand it with garnet sandpaper on a block.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

Charlie's got a good point there - a smaller hook can work better. You may need to skew across the grain or work in different directions in some spots too.

I've worked some unruly curly maple that gave me that same sort of "fuzzy" feeling with the scraper - it wasn't really so much "tearout" as in pieces missing, but more like the fibers of the wood sort of being roughly cut and standing up a bit - the feeling was also kind of akin to what you get when you work end grain with a scraper, or with a plane sometimes and the blades gone a little dull or you didn't wet the grain before the cut. Being lazy, rather than dig out the paper, or reshapen something, I did the same thing I do often with end grain - grab a handful of course shavings and burnished it. At that point, it felt smooth, and looked good under finish, which was good enough for me.

[Terry Beadle]

When sharpening to the smaller hook edge, use your finest grit. I have a 10,000 grit water stone and it will put a super fine edge on a card scraper.

Another thing to consider is that the finish will fill minute scratches. Use a hand buffer with some chrome polish and the finish will be finished nicely.

[Prashun Patel]

I am not sure why this works, but if you are not planning to color the piece, you can also try wiping the surface with BLO (lightly) or shellac, and then scraping. If you are coloring, you can try water or DNA.

[John Coloccia]

Sandpaper is just a tool, same as a plane or a scraper. Just like you select other tools, sometime you select sandpaper.

I'm not saying you should use sandpaper, but don't reject it just because of prejudice.

Mike

Very true, Mike, but a real man would use a plane. A real busy man, like me, uses an ROS followed up with a Porter Cable SpeedBloc. :)

[Jon Agnew]

Thanks for the input. I'll try making the smaller hook on the scraper like Charlie suggests and go from there. I'm not opposed to sandpaper out of principle or anything. But I try to avoid it if I can because I work in a very small space in my basement. Even without a power sander (which I don't even own), it gets pretty dusty pretty quickly. Mike is absolutely right, it's a tool that I turn to if the situation calls for it. That said, it's most often a tool of last resort for me.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

If you're just trying to avoid dust, eventually you get to a point where there's not too much of a difference between the shavings from a card scraper and dust from sanding - even when I have nice tight curls from a fine scraper, they still blow around and turn into dust if I'm not keeping things clean. If you end up scraping with just a 90 degree edge (and not a hook) it's basically dust anyway . . .

The big that cuts down on dust for me when hand sanding is judicious use of the shop vac, and using the vac with a brush attachment to clean the sandpaper.

[John Coloccia]

You might also want to try scraping at an angle. It's easy to get a catch and leave a large gouge like this, but if you can get the hang of it you get a shearing cut that works better. I put my palms down on the piece for support, and then I move the scraper in an arc. If I angle the scraper with my right hand further forward, I arc from left to right, as an example. The arc is relatively small. Try it on some scrap to get the hang of it.

[Chris Griggs]

I don't like to do a lot of heavy sanding but I don't mind some light sanding.

That choice to sand or not, for me, has more to do with how I want the finish to respond to the wood. If I want to mute the figure, mainly to reduce blotch I'll sand at 220 or above. For example last time I made something out of cherry I sanded up to 600, because it seemed blotch prone and I was finishing it with oil.

If I want the wood to absorb as much finish as possible and display as much of the grain I will plane the surface and leave it at that.

Like Dave I rarely have issues with tearout when using a standard angle blade, with a freshly honed edge, a light cut, and either very tight mouth or a very closely set chipbreaker. As always YMMV...

[Tony Shea]

If im working something that needs to be scraped then I will typically have to sand the whole piece lightly in 320 grit. Im not a big fan of sanding but it certainly works well. I rarely have to scrape an entire surface with the arsenal of planes I have available but there are times where there is a spot of tearout. So then I scrape the tearout area and and a bit outside this area as not to dig a hole. But this always puts a different, more fuzzy sheen on the wood. Therefore I go through and sand the whole surface after. I have no other way to get around this.