If you didn’t get a chance to purchase one of the Crucible curved card scrapers, you can make your own with a dry grinder and an existing card scraper. It takes about 30 minutes.
Download and print out the following template. It’s a hand-drawn version of Chris Williams’s scraper, which is where our design started.
Cut it out and affix it to your card scraper with the help of spray adhesive. Or make a cardboard template and trace its shape on your scraper with a permanent marker.
At your grinder, set the tool rest to 0° – parallel to the floor. Dress the wheel of your grinder (we use an #80-grit wheel, but a #60 or #100 will also do) so it has a slight convex shape. This convexity in the wheel makes the scraper easier to shape.
Get a bucket of water and put it by the grinder.
(Hey wait, where are the step photos? I’m in a hotel room that’s 400 miles from my shop. You are going to have to use your imagination.)
Place the scraper on the tool rest and start grinding the excess metal away. Don’t work on one part of the scraper for more than a few seconds. Keep moving around the perimeter. After 10 or 15 seconds, try to pinch the scraper with a finger and thumb. If….
… you can pinch the scraper with no pain, continue to grind.
… your fingers reflexively jump away, cool the scraper in your water bucket.
… you smell bacon, also cool the scraper in the water bucket.
Once you have ground down to your line, you will have become pretty good at grinding flat shapes – congrats. Now you need to remove the grinder marks from the edges.
Use a block of wood to hold the scraper at 90° on a coarse diamond stone and stone the edges. Remove all the scratches from the grinder. Then move up to a #1,000-grit waterstone (or soft Arkansas) and then up to a polishing stone. Then you can proceed with normal scraper-sharpening procedures.
This is exactly how I made all of our prototypes. I promise that you will become emotionally involved with your scraper after putting all the work into it, and you might not ever want to buy one of ours.
You can now purchase the Williams Welsh Card Scraper in the Crucible store. It is $20 plus shipping and is available for immediate shipment.
The scraper is named after Chris Williams, a Welsh chairmaker who first showed us this shape in 2018. While there are many custom scraper shapes out there for specialty work (especially scraping mouldings) Chris’s scraper was the first shape we’ve seen that is ideal for scraping both flat and curved surfaces.
We think it’s a huge improvement compared to the typical square-cornered rectangular scraper sold today. Here’s why:
The gentle curves of its cutting edges mean that you don’t have to bend the tool with your thumbs to scrape a flat surface – the curve is built-in. That makes our scraper much easier to use. (Side note: many woodworkers with arthritis who cannot use a rectangular scraper report that they can use our scraper.) Here are the tool’s other features.
It is made from 1095 spring steel that has been hardened and tempered to a Rockwell (C) hardness of 48 to 51. This hardness makes it easy to turn a hook with a standard burnisher (though carbide is always the superior choice for a burnisher) and the hook lasts plenty long.
The faces are polished and blued for rust-resistance.
The scraper is cut to shape using waterjet – both for precision and to preserve the hardness of the steel. Then the tool’s edges are hand ground and polished in Nicholasville, Ky., to make the tool easy to set up and maintain.
The scraper comes with a magnet, which acts as a heat sink while scraping, making the tool comfortable to use for long periods.
The tool is supplied with a heavy paper envelope that is perfect for storing the scraper, protecting its edges while it’s sitting in your tool chest or cabinet.
Sharpening the Williams Welsh Card Scraper is as simple as sharpening a rectangular tool. (We’ve prepared a tutorial here.) In fact, I think our tool is a bit easier to sharpen than a flat-edged scraper, especially when stoning the edges.
Like all Crucible tools, the Williams Welsh Card Scraper is made entirely in the United States with domestic materials. You can purchase one here.
This finished version of the braid can be further cleaned up with light cuts of the gouge, or left as-is. There’s a wide spectrum of what works with this carving.
This is an excerpt from “Joiner’s Work” by Peter Follansbee.
The bottom margin, the angled strike of the #7 gouge, the horizontal centerline and the punched mark just to the right of the gouge cut – the foundation for this pattern.
A braided pattern builds on the previous example (of the gouge cut). It’s cut with the same technique, but this time, for those who like measuring stuff, it is marked out in a measured spacing. For the braid, the layout is the key.
Start by striking the bottom margin with a marking gauge. Then use 3/4″ #7 gouge and strike it just as in the first exercise, only now the incised cut is not perpendicular to the margin, but tilts a little to the right. The top of this incised cut shows where to strike the horizontal centerline. Mark that line, then strike a round punch just to the right of the gouge cut. My round punch is an old 5/32″ nail set.
Now mark the height of the top margin, making it the same distance off the horizontal centerline as the bottom margin. It’s simple really. Strike the gouge from the other side of the punched dot, aiming in the other direction. Its tilt angle is fixed by the margin/centerline spacing.
Now it’s automatic pilot. Position the gouge between the punched mark and the margin and go.
With a compass, pace off the spacing of the punched marks on the centerline. These are either the width of the gouge or just a bit more.
Once they’re stepped off, strike each of these with the punch. Bang, bang, bang. Then, take the gouge and strike all the cuts that go down to the left of the punched marks, then those that go up to the right. It’s very orderly.
All struck, the design almost could stop right there and look just fine. But keep going.
Fiddle around with your spacing on some scrap. You can do it on paper, but you might as well just start working it on wood. It only takes a few minutes. The amount of tilt to the design is determined by the spacing between the centerline and margins, the size of the gouge(s) and the paced-off punch marks. Too steep looks dull; leaned over too far looks stretched out. You’ll know it when you see it.
Now it’s starting to look like something. Shadows start to make things look better.
Now go back and remove the chip. This chip is shorter in length than what you just did above. Think fingernail parings, crescent moons, that sort of stuff.
Using the same gouge, extend the arcs from the margin curving down into the neighboring cuts. Repeat this at the top and bottom margin.
This step begins connecting each element.
Now using the narrow #5 gouge, just take its corner and nick the small area from the margins to the curved cuts. You’re just taking a small chip out here; but it helps. The cut comes from the margin in toward the previous gouge cuts.
The beginning of hollowing. It’s quite a scoop, and a quick turn for the gouge.
You can enhance this carving by hollowing the braid with a more deeply curved gouge (mine’s an antique, similar to a #8 in the Swiss numbering system), modeling the overall pattern. To do this, you need to be aware of grain direction. Start at the centerline and cut down to the left, and repeat this all down the line. Then turn around and work up and to the right. The gouge takes quite a turn in each cut – essentially 90° in a very short space. Hollowing the braid really makes it come to life, creating more light and shadow interplay; that’s what all this carving is about.
Editor’s note: We’ve just sent Peter Follansbee’s book, “Joiner’s Work,” to the printer. It will be released in May. If you order a pre-publication copy from our store you will receive a free pdf of the book at checkout.
I’ve told most of my stories many times. When I first learned woodworking, it was from books. Books and one magazine. Ultimately that led me to taking a workshop/class with John (Jennie) Alexander and Drew Langsner. Some years later, Alexander and I started a correspondence in which we collaborated while 500 miles apart. This correspondence consisted of letters, 35mm slides, notes and photocopies of research/books/museum work. Back and forth these things sailed between Hingham, Mass., and Baltimore, Md. Maybe three or four times a year we’d physically work together. This went on for quite a while, until email came along and changed how we worked. (I lost all the email copies of our collaboration in a hard-drive crash. Let that be a lesson….)
What this means is I have been documenting my woodworking habits, ideas, foibles since about 1989, in words and pictures. I learned how to use a camera, tripod, cable release/self-timers etc. back in those days to shoot slides showing JA what I was doing – while s/he’d do the same down in Baltimore. We ate through a lot of Ektachrome. The good ones we kept, and used in slide lectures to woodworking groups, museum audiences and whoever would sit still for our dog and pony shows.
Interestingly, when I started museum work in 1994, that made my documentation more difficult. It was the audience – no one wanted to see all that gear set up in my shop, so I was limited in how often I could set up my camera stuff. Mostly, then, it was before or after hours during the season, but in the off-season/winter, I just left it in place.
Starting about 1992, JA and I would often talk about “the book,” as in, “we’ll have to put that in the book…” about joinery. That book percolated for 20 years until it became “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree.”
A couple years before that book was done, I had the idea for “my” book – much of the iconic joined and carved furniture of the 17th century: chests and boxes, cupboards, chairs, tables and more. And carving. And more carving. So I wrote and wrote, took pictures and filed things where, in theory, I could find them.
Like the joined stool book, this one got interrupted a few times, but I halved the time it took and then some. We ditched some of the repetition, but I think when you learn the mortise-and-tenon and frame-and-panel, then composing the piece of furniture is not all that complicated. A cupboard is not much different than a chest; the chair and table are like overgrown joint stools, Thus the focus of the new book is boxes and chests and carving. And more carving.
One standout visitor comment at my old job I remember clearly. One of the members of what I call my “craft genealogy,” Bill Coperthwaite, had just died. He was on my mind as I was working that busy November day. I forget what I was making, but it was oak for sure – and a woman watched me for quite a while, we chatted some, and in the end, she turned to her partner and said, “It makes me want to go home and make something!” I hope my new book, “Joiner’s Work,” gets the same reaction.
Note: In the next day or two, we will release our new card scraper over at Crucible Tool. In preparation for the release, I am preparing a lot of instructional material, including a video and a photo tutorial of how I sharpen a card scraper. You might find this helpful. You might not.
I’ve never met two people who sharpen their card scrapers using identical methods. As a result, there is more misinformation about sharpening card scrapers than sharpening any other woodworking tool. And that is saying a lot.
The following technique is based on 20 years of daily practice and a decade of research into historical methods. I won’t bore you with the spreadsheets and the bibliography. Instead, I’m going to explain the process using as few words as possible.
For those of you who learn using video information, I’ve also made a short film that will be released soon.
Step 1: Remove any Existing Burr or Hook The first step for me is always – always – to burnish the faces of the scraper to eliminate any existing burr or hook. The burr could be the result of manufacturing. Or it is the remnants of the hook on the tool you’ve been using.
Place the scraper down flat near the edge of the workbench. Press the burnisher dead flat on the scraper. Press down – hard! – and glide the burnisher across the face of the tool. Five or six good strokes will do. Repeat on the other three faces.
Step 2: Stone the Narrow Edges To get perfect 90° corners, use a block of wood as guide and stone the long edges of the tool. Shift the block of wood around so you don’t wear a groove in your stone. Use the sharpening stone that you use to begin your typical honing process (a #1,000-grit waterstone or a soft Arkansas oilstone, for example). Seven or 10 strokes should be enough to stone away any extra metal. (Note: There is no need to hone the short ends of the scraper as these don’t cut.)
If, however, this is a new scraper, you might need to stone the edges on a coarse stone for a few minutes to ensure the edges are dead 90° to the faces and consistent. Future stonings will go faster once the tool is set up.
Repeat this process with the block of wood on a polishing stone, such as a #5,000-grit waterstone or a hard Arkansas oilstone. Look closely and continue the work until the edge is consistently polished. The first time you do this on your tool it might take a few minutes. Subsequent sharpenings will require only 10 strokes or so.
Step 3: Burnish the Faces Wipe a little oil on the scraper and the burnisher. Place the scraper flat on the bench again and repeat the same burnishing process you used to remove the burr. Remember: Use hard downward pressure (yet the burnisher should still glide across the face of the tool).
This burnishing polishes the face of the scraper (much the way a hard bone will burnish soft wood) and push a little steel up on the tool’s edge. This step improves the durability of your hook and makes the hook easier to turn.
Step 4: Burnish the Edges Secure the scraper in a vise with one edge upright. Wipe a little oil on both the scraper and the burnisher to make your work easier. Hold the burnisher parallel to the floor and burnish the edge with moderate downward pressure (a bit less than you used on the faces). Five or six smooth strokes will do.
Tilt the burnisher about 5° to the right and burnish one corner of the scraper with five or six smooth strokes. Run your fingers up the scraper to feel if you have turned a hook. The hook is slight and subtle, much like the burr you turn on the backside of a chisel when sharpening it.
If the hook is not there, repeat with more strokes with the burnisher tilted at 5° to the right until a hook appears. Try adding more downward pressure to see if that helps.
When you have a hook, tilt the burnisher 5° to the left and repeat the burnishing process for the other corner. When you have two good hooks, flip the scraper over in the vise and repeat Step 4 for the second edge.
Clean the scraper with an oily rag and get to work. To improve the longevity of your burr, store the tool in a cardboard or paper envelope. The hook is as fragile as the edge on a paring chisel.
