Sharpening a Card Scraper

[Music] hey guys my name is Frank Strazza thanks for watching my youtube channel in today's series I want to go over how to sharpen a card and scraper that's this tool right here this is probably one of the most useful woodworking tools when it's sharp when it's dull it's probably one of the most useless tools it's a very simple tool but sharp is the key you can use this a card scraper for scraping hardwoods you can use it for scraping veneers curly grains it's a wonderful tool in future videos I want to go over how to sharpen the cabinet scraper in this that's this tool and we'll go over other tools as well including chisels and things of that nature sharpening card scraper is done in two phases the first phase is what I would refer to as honing the edge okay so that's gonna be starting with a file going through a series of grits on a sharpening stone the second phase is gonna be done with the burnisher and that's gonna where we we actually burnish the edge with this tool so let's get started here's a sampling of some of my scrapers as you can tell they come in different thicknesses I like to use the thicker ones the thinner ones are nice for doing finer cuts and a great place to get them is from Lee Nielsen Tool Works but of course you've got a sharpen they won't come sharp and ready to go the first thing here we're going to do is I'm going to show you my stones that I use and you'll need a good file this is just a nice fine mill file and one of the things that's important here is to use a diamond stone I found that for sharpening a scraper you really need a good hard diamond stone and the reason why it's because a water stone is soft and when you're sharpening the scraper on a water stone you can dig into the stone so I've got here just three Diamond stones I've got a coarse medium and fine these are nice good flat stones and then I've got an oil stone which is also hard and that kind of goes to the next level so let's define sharp in this case the way I like to define sharp is having two highly polished surfaces coming to infinity I'm not talking about angles right now we're just talking about those two highly polished surfaces and they have to join in this case in a scrapers case we have the face and we have the edge so the face in this case has to meet 90 degrees with the edge so face edge 90 degrees in the case of say like a chisel you've got two angles in this case but again two highly polished surfaces so this this polished surfaces is meeting this highly polished surface here and it's creating an angle in a chisel of course the you've got to have an angle because if this was 90 degrees it wouldn't cut effectively so you lower the angle and you have an effective cutting tool so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to apply a little bit of water this is water with a little bit of soap and that just put that right on the diamond stone it just helps float the particles away I'm gonna start with the fine stone and I'm gonna work the face okay and what I'm doing in this case is I'm removing any subtle burr that may be left there and again just polishing the face what I'd like to do and I sharpen the scrapers I like to do this face this face this face this face and when we put a burr on this we're gonna curve it around like this so essentially we're gonna have four cutting surfaces a burr on this space bar on this face of our on this face and on this face so you can see here I've got this edge polished this edge polished and this edge in this edge the goal here of course is again we want a highly polished surface to meet another highly polished surface so you can see if you zoom in here you can see the polish right there meets all the way to the edge so the next step here is I've got this scraper position in the vise upright and we're going to work the edge with the file and I'm holding the file like this pinching it between my fingers and I'm holding it as close to I as to 90 degrees as I can of course the file only cuts on the push stroke so I'm working it and the goal here is to create a perfectly flat edge on the top of the scraper you can even hold it like this using again my fingers to brace against the edge of the face of the scraper and then hold the file so how do I know that I've gone enough with the file well what will happen is you will feel a burr on either edge and this is super important I think this is probably one of the mistakes that a lot of people make is that they don't go enough with the file initially so I'm gonna work this again 90 degrees here all the way across and then feeling for a burner what's happening is when we're filing this down we're removing metal down like this but the metal is going to be pushing over and it's gonna create a little burr on the side and that's an indicator that we have gone enough with the file super super important I want you guys to see the top of this and another indicator is if you see an even scratch pattern all the way across that's also something that's good so the first thing that I'm going to do here is I'm going to remove the bird that we created with the file again just on the stone like this doing all four phases in this case we're now going to start on the coarse stone and where the goal is is to remove the file marks but we want to keep this 90 degrees I like to hold this at an angle so I'm not working it directly like this by holding it at an angle like this it creates more stability so how do we know that we've gone enough on this coarse stone well there's a couple things we can look at the scratch pattern and the scratch pattern obviously is going to be different from the file to the coarse stone so if you can look at it in just the right light you can see sometimes if there's a variation of the scratch pattern I can see a little little change right there a little change right there you can kind of change in the light and you can see that but really the biggest thing is going to be feeling that burr and when you feel a burr again from the the coarse stone here then we know that we're ready to move on now that I've removed the burr from the coarse stone on the face now we're gonna go to the medium stone again same thing how do we know that we've gone enough on the medium stone again looking at the edge watching the scratch pattern and most importantly feeling the bird again removing the burr from the medium stone and we'll go to the fine stone holding it 90 degrees feeling the burr removing the burr you don't have to do this step but I like to go ahead and just put it on the fine oil stone this is a hard translucent oil stone working it again 90 degrees I'll feel the burr will become finer as we work through the crits again we're just going to polish off that burr on the face and now we have a perfectly sharp edge and the best way to test this if you'll sue Minter you can see here what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hold this flat and see if it grabs my thumbnail see how it grabs my thumbnail we know that we have gone enough if it grabs if it just literally skates across let's take a dull one this one just kind of skates across the thumbnail so we know that that's not sharp but this should actually stop we're not carving away the thumbnail just testing it like this okay so the first step to the burnishing aspect of this is to work the burnisher on the face okay and the burnisher needs to be round it needs to be harder than the actual scraper material don't use the back of a screwdriver or the back of a gouge or anything like that get specified burnisher it needs to be polished very important and round okay so the first step is to work the face and what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this furniture on this face and the goal here is to burnish the edge and what that's going to be doing is gonna be drawing the steel up like this if you can look at it's kind of creating this it's coming up like this and then the next step is we're gonna go here on the top and we're going to press that part and it's gonna curl out like this and over and push it out and create a burr so what I'm going to do is put a fair amount of pressure on the burnish or down like this and flattening this edge this is also called ticking the edge so I'm going to go about 20 times or so 30 times depends again I'm trying to draw this steel out I'll flip it over and do the same thing on this space I'm putting a fair amount of pressure and again over here so the next step is to work the edge like this now we could put this in the vise and and work it like this but I prefer to stick the corner in the end of the bench and if you flex it just a little bit lower it down to where the burnisher isn't gonna go underneath it but lower it like this keeping the burnisher at 90 degrees super important okay now I'm gonna curl the burr over to about three degrees maybe just slightly if you go too far it's going to make a weak Birds not gonna it's not gonna work effectively so barely so watch this okay again I'm looking here 90 degrees I'm still at 90 I'm still at 90 I'm still at 90 now I'm going to slowly raise this furniture up to about two degrees in in this direction and then I'm gonna go down then I'm gonna roll it back here three degrees like this I'm gonna tell you what I'm doing here so again I've raised it the three degrees now I'm gonna come back this way now I'm at 90 I'm slowly rolling it back to three degrees in the other direction now that putteth puts a subtle burr it's actually taking the the steel and pushing it over like this it's a different bird than what we got when we've created the burr on the stone the burr on the stone was created by actually the meeting of the face and the edge with the stone this burr is actually pushing the steel over and creating a micro hook that's actually going to do the cutting now I'm going to show you how I do it by clamping in the vise now I prefer to do it the the previous method but this is another method we're starting here at 90 degrees like this now I'm gonna slowly roll it down about two degrees in this direction then about two degrees in this direction here again you could feel that burn after we burnished the edge the scraper is now ready to use however once it gets dull you don't have to go back to the stones in fact you can go back to the initial flattening of this edge and then reborn' --is-- it about three times before you then have to go back to the file and go through all of the steps let's see how the scraper works I found that the harder the wood the better the scraper works doesn't work as well on soft wood although it will but hard wood karlie maple evany let's try it let's let's see how it works the best way to use this is to put your thumbs directly behind the surface you'll feel the angle okay this is about about this angle right here thumbs behind and we push it like this flip it over again those are the those that's what we want right there those beautiful shades you can skew it you can work across the grain yes it will heat up but that's the advantage of doing all four edges you simply just rotate the scraper you can flip it over like this [Music] let's try it a piece of ebony here no tear out a perfectly smooth surface folks this is just a simple card scraper and this is what you can do you can work veneers you can work exotic woods this is what you can what you can do with a just a basic simple card scraper if it's sharpened correctly thank you guys for watching and please feel free leave a comment ask any questions you'd like and certainly subscribe to my channel and like this video thanks thank you guys for watching

Channel: Frank Strazza

Views: 47,158

Keywords: cardscraper, woodworking, scraper, sharpening, howtosharpen

Id: u8wrqiHJz00

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020