Makes me appreciate the Stanley 80, and much use of the Stanley 80 beyond test shavings makes me appreciate the cap iron even more.
A self-important poster of all things but their own work brought up a video of someone who was perhaps in China or Malaysia peeling off a huge scraper shaving from a reddish rosewood. I’m assuming the wood was air dried and not dry to the same level as we’re used to, unless there’s something about the type of wood that was really amenable. The demonstration wasn’t particularly practical, either, but the shaving was impressive and sometimes figuring out how to do something better for the sake of doing it leads to something useful when you need it. I’ve already been down the road of really manipulating burrs, but I’ve never seen anything wood-wise that would allow a shaving to be peeled off like the one in the video.
The scraper in the video appeared to be thick, which gave me an excuse to do two things: 1) make one of the thick scrapers at a higher spring hardness than typical, to be used just bare handed, and 2) make a replacement blade for my #80, which came with a crappy butter soft blade that’s really more suitable for rolling a big soft burr to remove finishes. The higher hardness reason is simple – if you want a burr to be a little more tidy than it will be on a softer scraper, and easier to get a higher level of fineness, a little more hardness is nice. There’s a limit, though. The harder the burr, the harder it is to move the burr with a burnisher, and it still needs to be movable without breaking off. Courtesy of another discussion about an 80 scraper, I realized that an 80 that I japanned has no good blade, so I made one out of 80crv2, results are below
It works fine, but it could be a little harder and 80crv2 (think 1084 with some chromium and a trace of vanadium) is a tough steel. You’d think for spring steel, you’d want tough (hard to break), but my impression of 0.8% steel saw plates is the teeth don’t have the same strength and they also hold a honed or filed burr too much. Not a fan.
So, I made two more out of 1095 – which I unfortunately do not have in bar stock less thick than 0.1″. That’s a bit much, but this particular steel is the same that I wrote about several years ago – it’s defective. There is some lack of uniformity in it that’s no good for an acute edge, but for a scraper, it shouldn’t be a problem.
I cut two blanks in normal card scraper size and then one for the #80, and heated them in the induction forge and then brine quenched them, and tempered them in the toaster oven on broil. This is the first time I thought to use broil on the toaster oven – if it doesn’t work as desired, then not much is lost. It turns out that broil color temp checks to around 600F. This is a huge win – it means I can just make floats at will now vs. the pain in the ass setup that I had of using orange bars of steel to heat two aluminum quench plates and then getting those sitting level on a float and wrapped in kawool without burning myself somewhere along the way:
Cooked perfect – tasted a little salty from the brine. Of course, it’s 1095, brine quench, there was warping. I took this one out mid process, hammered it to get the little bit of warpage out of it and put it back in. The face cleaned up on it is just filed to make sure post hammering would yield something usable.
Attention deficit break here – the file I’ve been using is the best file I’ve ever seen. It’s a vintage atkins file that someone gave me, or actually I believe there are four. They are so good that I’ve put them aside waiting for a good reason to use them, but I’m just going to use them. I’ve got other atkins files, but something lined up galactically for these particular mill files. The teeth are sharp, superbly strong, fine and I’m guessing that probably around turn of the century before cost cuts, most of the top quality files were like this. The later american nicholsons are not the same. They are also flat enough that if you use them to work the face of a card like this one in the broiler, there won’t be much work on the stones. I’ve not mentioned them because I thought if I could find more on ebay at some point like them, I don’t want anyone else looking for them, but months and months of saved search have gone by and I’ve seen zero of them. I’ll post about them at some point. They are so good that when they dull, I’m going to have to salvage the steel for something else and see if it’s the steel itself, or what.
OK, back to the topic – what hardness did these come out to? 54. I couldn’t have picked a better number than that for this purpose. 
I left the scale on these, just waxed them and assume because there is a little salt, they will glaze with rust slowly even with wax on, and each time they do, I’ll oil and wax them until they don’t. Up close, the scale is very interesting, bordering on colorful:
Total hands on time involved to make each of these is about 20 minutes. And they are about as hard as you’d want them to be but still file hardness to maintain the bevel that goes on them. using them with a square bottom edge isn’t the best way – if you want to draw a burr a little longer than normal, especially on something hard, you want a bevel. These are filed to about 45 degrees, and then honed a little steeper and then the burr is drawn and rolled over.
One other comment here: if you’re looking to get a bright finish off of a scraper, you have to treat the edge before rolling the burr like you want it to do fine surface work. It needs to be clean without raggedness, and it needs to be drawn out cleanly without any dirt or grit or anything on the burnisher or scraper as anything like that at the edge will just deform the burr. So, you get to the point that the bevel is done quickly, but take 20 or 30 seconds to use something very fine (honing compound on wood, a very light buff, etc) to remove the honed burr before you draw and roll the polished burr.
My first attempt wood-wise was chakte viga. No go – it’s not compact enough pore wise and it’s resistant to a burr. It scraped fine – very bright surface.
What I need is some compact turning blanks that are a little green yet, and that’s something I don’t have.
The next thing to try is castelo box, which is compact, still fairly hard (like hickory hard), and I realized at that point, i just don’t have any wood that’s going to make a smooth poreless or nonstringy shaving that’s also going to allow me to take a shaving of a couple of thousandths without the shaving coming out of a shaving plane. But I was able to get these:
And lighter shavings left a plane like surface, so there may be a situation where I find something to do with the hand version here, and the #80 blade is now in the 80, though I did have to file the front end of the mouth leaning forward. The mouth on an 80 is large, but the shaving runs right up into the buckle or strap that holds the iron in place.
Surprisingly, the bed of this older #80 was really sloppy, all the way to having a dot of actual casting sticking up pround in a seemingly random place. If you tightened the front strap down, the blade would high center on the casting flaw and be bent. I have a feeling more of these were used to scrape paint and finish than anything else. Of course, I filed that off and spent about 20 minutes going over the whole tool, lapping the surprisingly bad sole and getting rid of stuff that just made it a pain to use. The sole was recessed toward the mouth, which made it kind of a pain to set to use and get it on and off of the stock here smoothly. 
This is the surface off of the scraper with a refined edge. It’s not a match for a double iron as you are refreshing it more often, but when the wood is hard and takes a good polish being scraped, the surface finish is similar. On beech or cherry, no dice – it’s a bit fuzzy and you have to follow it with a card scraper and something else. Why bother, you can just plane those.
One other side benefit came out of this – the thick scraper isn’t really that easy to use in a heavy cut freehand, but when it’s being used continuously, it doesn’t burn your fingers.
the widest shaving that I got off of this test scraper is this one from apple. Held down by the 80 both to give scale to it (way wider than an 80 could take) and also so that it would lay out flat. The shavings hidden under the hand scraper are from the #80 off of apple. If you have to take a bunch off, the 80 will definitely leave your thumbs and wrists in better shape. 
It’s easy to see why the double iron took over on flat surfaces, though. As fun as this was, it wouldn’t be very nice to try to replace fine planing where you can plane, and as you get to woods below maple in hardness, the surface left behind is a bit hairy if it has any thickness.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 