I bought a spokeshave you can afford and one I haven’t tested out before either. I liked the look of it and Draper UK has been a long established distributor of all kinds of tools, machines and equipment here in the UK for decades and whereas their quality is generally accepted as reasonable to well made,…
We are often looking for an ideal fit with everything we work with, a one-size-fits-all solution and of course many will espouse this one or that one is the answer to life’s problems, but my stock answer always is this. Life is just like wood, it comes with knots in it. Controversy ebbs and flows around…
….continuing on from the last blog I wrote. These spokeshaves are not complicated or difficult to set provided everything is in fairly good shape. Complications come when the tangs are rusted into their sockets which is not at all unusual, or the forepart of the spokeshave is so worn away that there is massive gaping…
Question: How do I sharpen my wooden spokeshave, Paul? I have a wooden spokeshave and want to use it but with the two prongs sticking up I can’t really work out how to sharpen it. How do you sharpen yours? Answer: This question drops through my letterbox often enough to need an answer and the…
This question comes up fairly often and this is the how-to that works best. It works on the modern versions of blade-as-sole spokeshaves equally well. It’s not a difficult task but the tangs get in the way of conventional bevel-up sharpening, as you might with planes and chisels, so it’s is easiest to be done…
I wrote this blog on making and using a spokeshave blade holder/extender because it was something that enables you to use a honing guide if need be, but also gives the added leverage you really need for applying upper-body pressure as you do in normal sharpening of blades. Without the extender your fingers cannot take…
A few years ago, ten or more if I remember rightly, I ordered some spokeshave parts from Veritas in Canada. I think it was about 16 sets actually. The order was based on my previously ordering a kit of parts to make my own, to see how well it would work. I ended up ordering…
A difference between cast-metal spokeshaves and wooden spokeshaves is the dynamic of bevel-up and bevel-down cutting iron presentation to the wood I spoke of in an earlier post in this series and earlier blogs. The two differences may possibly appear to present the blade similarly by the overall appearance of the tool rather then the…
Wooden Spokeshaves Wooden spokeshaves predate the cast metal ones by centuries and more if you delve into the histories of ancient worlds. Spikes and spokes give some limited indication as to why these tools are called ‘spoke’ shaves, but so limited a definiendum only serves to undervalue the breadth and scope of a tool that…
Wood on wood is light, frictionless woodworking at its best and no metal-cast spokeshave offers anywhere near the senseasesiness to the hands of woodworkers than a wooden bodied spokeshave. There you go, it’s said and done. I was really raised on the Stanley and Record 150’s and 151’s and have used them all through my…