I recently purchased a scraper plane with instructions that call for sharpening the blade with the burnisher held 15° from horizontal. I quickly discovered this is easier to write than to do. So I came up with a jig that allows me to burnish the blade accurately and quickly. The jig consists of two blocks of wood glued to a base with a slot between them to house the scraper blade. When resting on the registration block and the blade, the burnisher is automatically tilted to the correct angle—in this case 15°.
The width of the registration block depends on how much the blade projects above the blocks. My blade projects 5/8 in., so the width of the registration block is about 21/4 in. Use a protractor and a full-size drawing to determine your jig’s length. If your blade gets shorter over time through repeated sharpenings, you can trim the width of the block a bit to maintain the correct angle. In use, I either clamp the jig to my benchtop or in my vise.
As to variations on this theme, you can size one side of the jig for burnishing a hand scraper at 5° and the other side for the scraper plane at 15°. Or you can make two slots in one jig to give you four different burnishing angles.

Drawings: Jim Richey

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