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- Newsgroups: rec.woodworking
- Path: sparky!uunet!indetech!cirrus!john
- From: john@cirrus.com (John Wishneusky)
- Subject: Re: Scraping versus Sanding
- Message-ID: <1992Nov17.020603.2783@cirrus.com>
- Sender: John Wishneusky
- Organization: Cirrus Logic Inc. Fremont, California
- References: <5330101@hpindda.cup.hp.com> <1992Nov5.102424@wsl.dec.com> <3989@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca>
- Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 02:06:03 GMT
- Lines: 37
-
- In article <3989@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca> clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) writes:
- >In article <1992Nov5.102424@wsl.dec.com> gringort@wsl.dec.com (Joel Gringorten) writes:
- >>In article <5330101@hpindda.cup.hp.com>, gph@hpindda.cup.hp.com (Paul Houtz) writes:
- >
- >>|> I would scrape rather than sand.
- >
- >>|> A good quality steel scraper, properly edged and burnished, will give you a
- >>|> much better surface than sanding.
- >
- >>The context to which Paul wrote the above statement applied to oak, and I
- >>think I agree. However, I wish to raise the question whether scraping is
- >>*always* preferable to sanding, particularly in "problem" woods.
- >
- >Many people get religious and say that scrapers *ALWAYS* do a better job.
- >That's simply not true. Scrapers don't work that well on softwoods,
- >and behave miserably on things like birdseye maple, crotch grain etc.
- >
- >I had some fairly wild grain birch, and the scrapers (my first attempt)
- >didn't do *that* great a job. (I believe I had the scrapers sharpened
- >correctly, I was impressed with the shavings I was able to produce.)
- >
- I watched a Fine Woodworking video, I think it was on wood finishing,
- where the craftsman demonstrated planing and scraping prior to
- applying a finish to new wood. The piece he domonstrated on had an
- area of "wild grain". He had to approach little bits of the area from
- different directions to get the best result, reading shifts in the
- grain, but he did all the final surface preparation with a cabinet
- scraper. I've used scrapers for final finishing in lieu of large
- amounts of sanding for years now (ever since my orbital sander died :-)
- and find I have improved gradually with each project. I'm not as
- consistent yet in sharpening the scraper as I'd like, but find I get
- the best edge when I don't try to cheat the process:
-
- Draw file the edge, stone the edge, burnish from 2 directions to
- produce a good hook.
-
- John
-