hand scraper

[hudson scheffer]

hi everyone being an older newbie i would first of all would like to thank everyone for their questions and answers,it is a wealth of information. this is the first for me to submit a question and hopefully it will be a success. my question is i don't fully understand what a hook or curl is on a woodscraper and how to achieve this. if any one has any help for me i would truely appreciate it,thanks

[Bill Houghton]

The hook is just what it sounds like: the scraper is first filed and (by most) honed so that the edge is at a right angle to the surface, and then a hook is formed with a burnishing tool that distorts the metal right at the corner. It's the corner on a scraper that does the cutting, and the hook makes for a "sharper" corner.

About my subject line: your friendly local library, inspired by Ben Franklin's lending library, will have oodles of books either on its shelves or available through interlibrary loan that will touch on this subject. Tage Frid's book is good on this subject.

[John Goodridge]

The following site has sharpening instructions with drawings on what the hook looks like:

http://www.stewmac.com/freeinfo/I-3416.html

[jonathan snyder]

Hudson,

Welcome to the Creek. Try a search here, for past posts on sharpening scrapers. You may also want to try a Goggle search, there are many sites with instructions. I am still trying to get the hang of sharpening scrapers, but I'm getting better. I just got the LN scrapers as the suggestion of folks here.

[hudson scheffer]

i have been away from the computer for a couple of days so please excuse the delay in the reply.i would like to thank each of you for the help in offering help and suggestions and again many thanks
hudson;)

[Eddie Darby]

Scrapers are used where the grain of the wood is difficult to work. There advantage is in that they have a steeper angle of attack. The harder a piece of wood gets for working it, the steeper you have to get with your tool. You can see that sometimes the scraper is used with quite a bit of forward lean to it!

You'll want to learn how to set-up a scraper with an aggressive cut and how to set-up one with a less aggressive cut for finishing. There are of course different thickness of scrapers for both these cuts. The demands for sharpening the edges of a scraper are just as demanding as any other tool you may sharpen, if you want good results.

Check the wood that you remove with the scraper, it should be very small fine shavings, and not dust. When you see these shavings, you will know that you are doing the job right. When you have a scraper set-up well and then it no longer is producing shavings, then burnishing it, without having to sharpen it with stones, should return the performance back to almost where it was when you first started out. After a while though, the edge of the tool sustains too much damage, and needs to be sharpened again.

One final note, scrapers leave a surface that some prefer for finishing over sandpaper, since the wood fibres are cut and not torn.