Restoring an old wooden spokeshave
I'm hoping to build a chair this year, and so I picked up this wooden spokeshave (my first) off eBay for less than $15 including shipping from England. The patina is great to the touch, but it needed some tune up work.
The blade was by far the most work, and again I tended to wonder if saving the money on eBay is worth the hours of of hand grinding and the wear and tear on my stones. Regardless, the purchase had been made. The biggest concern I now have with this spokeshave is how much of the blade is really left, but hopefully enough for my use. After the blade was sharpened, I replaced the worn front of the wooden body with a strip of white oak.
After a fair bit of additional tweaking (gluing some shaving strips into the tang holes to increase grip) it worked pretty nice. I'm not sure if it's capable yet of taking consistently thin shaving, but if not I'm ok with a rougher use of the tool, although the worn thinness of the blade remains a concern in terms of potential chipping (I increased the bevel angle to 25+ degrees, should I make it higher?).
Definitely one of the most fun tools out there.
I'm hoping to build a chair this year, and so I picked up this wooden spokeshave (my first) off eBay for less than $15 including shipping from England. The patina is great to the touch, but it needed some tune up work.
The blade was by far the most work, and again I tended to wonder if saving the money on eBay is worth the hours of of hand grinding and the wear and tear on my stones. Regardless, the purchase had been made. The biggest concern I now have with this spokeshave is how much of the blade is really left, but hopefully enough for my use. After the blade was sharpened, I replaced the worn front of the wooden body with a strip of white oak.
After a fair bit of additional tweaking (gluing some shaving strips into the tang holes to increase grip) it worked pretty nice. I'm not sure if it's capable yet of taking consistently thin shaving, but if not I'm ok with a rougher use of the tool, although the worn thinness of the blade remains a concern in terms of potential chipping (I increased the bevel angle to 25+ degrees, should I make it higher?).
Definitely one of the most fun tools out there.