Building a Wooden-bodied Scraper by Dave Hahn

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I had some shop time, so I decided to build the scraper from Stephen Shepherd's FWW article "Make a Wooden Scraper" (in their Working with Handplanes compilation book, originally from FWW 167, not in their online archive unfortunately).
 

I followed the plans from the article pretty closely, but bumped a couple of the dimensions around a bit to fit the scraper and the stock available. I made the body from hard maple and the blade is half of a card scraper. My finished dimensions are 11 inches wide with the main body being 4 inches wide, 2 inches tall and 3 5/8 inches wide. The blade is roughly 3 by 2.5 inches and is .8 mm thick.

Here's a quick shot of some of the tools I used (not the lathe, it just currently lives at the back of the bench): saws (crosscut and coping), a small rasp, chisels, some scrapers. I did burn some electrons to do the hole drilling, however, I didn't use any sandpaper. Doing the curved cuts with a coping saw really made me wish I had a bow saw. The only rasp I had is a crappy chisel with about 4 inches of rasp (flat and half round) cut into the blade (now I need to get some rasps).

I started by transferring the sketch from the article freehand on to some graph paper to serve as templates. There is one for the top view and one for the front view.

I transferred the layout to my block which is glued up from some 4/4/ stock. The bottom laminate is smaller than the top two because it is going to be cut away entirely and because the board I started with wasn't long enough to make the glue up complete. SWMBO had the camera out while I started on the first arm, so that one's already cut and shaped in this shot.

Since I only had a coping saw and cutting through 3 inches of maple with a 6 inch blade is no fun, I made as many of the straight cuts as I could with hand saws.

The slow cut of the curved parts with the coping saw.

The cuts for the top view are done.

Since the arms curve in three dimensions you tape the off-cuts back onto the blank to cut the other view. Since I'm not using a bandsaw, I also clamped them to the blank for a couple of cuts to keep them from moving.

What the arms look like after all the rough cutting is done.

After quite a bit of shaping with the tiny rasp the arms are starting to look like they should. Having a longer rasp, and perhaps a couple of sizes will speed this up.

I didn't really want to use sandpaper at this point because I figured I might need to go through a couple rounds of using this thing and refining the shape with the rasp and didn't want to dull it with sandpaper grit.  So, I did some light scraping. I was actually surprised at how well this turned out.  I know how well they work on flat surfaces, but hadn't really done a lot with them on curved.  This is smooth enough that I don't think it will get any sanding.

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