Sawdust on the Floor

This past summer my family and I had an opportunity to visit Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.  While the restored historic homes and building were vastly fascinating, the one place that really captured my attention was the Colonial Williamsburg woodworking shop.  Here, skilled artisans hand crafted period pieces of furniture using the same techniques and tools the original settlers of Williamsburg would have used.  Now I love my power tools and I am not suggesting that we return to the only hand tools era, but some of those tools really merit consideration by today’s woodworker. 

All of the magnificent pieces crafted at the Williamsburg shops were all hand finished.  Yet the surfaces were as sanded a smooth as glass, not a ripple, divot, rough spot or seam could be felt.  The secret to this finish was quite simple, the cabinet scraper. 

Scrapers are simply small flat pieces of high grade tool steel.  The typical scraper is about 6” long, by 2 ½” high.  The top edge of the scraper is tooled so that a very small burr occurs on its edge.  To use the scraper, you would either push or pull the scraper along the surface of the wood, in the direction of the grain.  The results are very thin slivers of wood, much like when you use a hand plane.  As you repeat this over and over again, the surface becomes extremely flat and smooth. 

Unlike the original craftsman, today’s woodworkers normally will not find full width boards for tabletops, or dressers. So we often will glue up several narrower boards to make up the width desired.  No matter how carefully you are in preparation or clamping, the joints of the surface always seem to need a little attention.  Or maybe that’s just in my shop. While I often turn to a random orbital sander to clean up the surface, a much better tool would be the scraper. The sander will always leave sander marks, and if your not careful ridges and valleys.  This will not happen if you use a scraper.  Instead you get a nice smooth surface that any woodworker would be proud of. 

So maybe power tools are nice, but sometimes we need to go back to the traditional ways of woodworking, because sometimes the old way is really better.