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I'm here to share the enjoyment I get from the lowly card scraper. I'm in the middle of a project - a small (12"D X 17"W X 12"H) chest & stand. I'm making it from some air dried (for ~10 years) black walnut. Before I started, I pulled out a few plane irons to sharpen and, as an afterthought, I figured I should touch up my scrapers. I have a set of four from Lee Valley, two are thick and quite stiff, two are somewhat more flexible. I also have one that Pete Taran gave me a few years back, when he was still Mr. Independence Tool. He said it was a piece of the steel he used for the saw blades. It's thin and very flexible. I also have the LV file holder-scraper sharpener jig. It makes it easy for even me to get a good edge and hook. I knock the old hook off with a file, joint the edge in the jig, stone the edge to remove the file marks and stone the arises to get them smooth then turn a new hook. It takes maybe 5 minutes to turn all 8 new hooks on a scraper. In use, the thick cards are so stiff I can hardly put a bend in them but they really remove material...they're like the scrub plane of scrapers. The thinner LV cards are pretty easy to put a bend in and they are somewhat less aggressive. The IT scraper is my scraper equivalent of a finely tuned smoothing plane (like my C&W coffin smoother). They all produce fluffy shavings (scrapings?) and can be used pushing or pulling. I cut saw kerfs in a scrap of wood to hold the cards and keep it handy on the bench. When I get going, I have to change every little bit to keep from burning my thumbs... they really heat up - I figure it's a good gauge of how well they're working.
If you've not tried them, you should. If you have and don't like
'em, that's okay because I like 'em enough for both of us.
Charlie Rodgers, resting his thumbs in Summer, 2006
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