Sam Yerardi
01-28-2008, 11:56 AM
This weekend I was working on my daughter's hope chest and I needed to scrape down the raised panels. The problem was they were already installed. I tried using a 1" wide chisel as a scraper and that worked fine for a while. Since the edges have a slight scallop to them I needed a shaped scraper. I was trying to think what I could use and I looked over to my bench and there was a set of old kitchen carving knives in a wooden holder. My wife wanted to throw them away years ago but something told me to hang onto to them. I picked one that was close to the width of the edges of the raised panel. I put the knife in my vise so that about an inch of blade was exposed between the vise and the handle. I used a cold chisel to break the blade off where it entered the vise. Since the metal is so hard it is very brittle and I got a clean straight break. I then grinded the edge to match the profile. Voila - a scraper with a nice rosewood built-in handle. Granted it's only good for that one purpose (unless I re-grind) but it worked beautifully!