Building a Wooden-bodied Scraper by Dave Hahn

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This thing is starting to come together.  Now I need to make the blade holder.  The article showed cutting the holder off the shaped blank.  I had enough stock to do that, but I was concerned about the glue joint being in the middle of it (in retrospect I doubt it would matter), so I made it from a separate piece.  The chunk of maple next to the scraper body is from a 150 old hard maple tree from my parents front yard that had some storm damage.  This is especially cool since they live right next to where my dad grew up, so he's been around those trees for a while.  I had some other stock I could have made the holder out of, but I'll cut and plane this down to size.  I don't know that any shots show this, but the blade sits about 5 degrees forward of vertical, some handplane work made that happen.

I really didn't want to cope the cuts for the throat, so I made some cuts and roughed it out with a chisel.  I was kinda in a hurry to get this thing up and running, so I got some tear out in a couple of spots.  This part isn't visible on the outside and hopefully won't hurt shaving egress.

After some scraping and rasping the throat is cleaned up and I've chiseled the shallow rebate for the blade to sit in, its supposed to be just shy of the thickness of the blade.

This design has a thumbscrew to bow the blade to adjust the depth of cut.  I drilled the hole for the thumbscrew through the body (referenced from the front face, not the sole or back), and then drilled a larger hole for the push block and then cleaned the corners square with a chisel.  I think the total depth of the recess is 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch. This is a 1/4 inch bolt, so the square nut is 7/16.

I cut some more of that 150 year old maple into a square block that fits into the recess and is pushed into the scraper by the bolt.  I have it pushed way out here for illustrative purposes only.  I started with a really thin piece, but found that it fell out when I removed the blade.  So, I cut the recess deeper and made it a block so it would stay put.

I've got the holes drilled for the screws to attach the blade holder and have the scraper cut to size and beveled at 45 deg and burnished.  I decided to clean up the transition from the body to the blade holder a bit for looks and comfort from what is pictured here.  You can see that in the title shot.

Making some shavings.  I'm holding it one handed so I can take the shot, but you can see the shavings and the general hand position.  It can be pushed or pulled and works best when skewed to the direction of cut.

I still need to do a little more scraping on the arms to smooth them out and will probably use some BLO and wax for a finish.  I also don't like the screws I used to put the blade holder on the body.  I think I'm going to epoxy some all thread into the body as studs and get some brass thumbscrews.  The adjuster for the blade bow is just the carriage bolt head.  I think I'm going to fashion some sort of knob for looks and to give a little extra torque since the alignment of the bolt and nut is a little tight (my recess chiseling is far from perfect).