Soon my WW pupil will be making a wooden spokeshave using the Veritas kit. But what would be the best wood to employ for the body? I assume softwoods won’t do. The hardwoods I have in the timber store include:
English ash, beech & oak
American cherry, black walnut, hard maple & butternut.
Old growth burmese teak
Sapele
Iroko
Old growth pitch pine
Afromosia
There are some others but they’re too narrow in section being mostly planks less than 3/4 thick. (The spokeshave body of the Veritas plan needs a minimum 7/8 thick piece of wood).
The teak, cherry and afromosia have rather swirly grain. The sapele has roey grain. The others are generally more straight grained with only smaller sections of swirl. I’m presuming the straighter and smaller-grained stuff is best functionally-speaking for a spokeshave …. but that teak looks stunning when polished up – partly because of the grain swirl.
What would you use?
Lataxe
Replies
This kit requires tapping threaded Holes in the wood, a brass plate seems to be handling wear of the sole. So I would go with a tight, dense wood. Afromosia would be my first choice, followed by maple, beech or cherry.
Beech is, of course, traditional. Hard maple makes a nice shave. I'd likely go with the Afromosia too.
The afromosia will be the first choice then.
My pupil came for a session yesterday (doing the legs and rails for her small table) so we discussed the approach to her making the spokeshave body for the Veritas kit o' bit to fit into. As she's a novice and struggles a little because of arthritic joints in her hands, we decided to have three wood blanks on the go at once......
The first will be a piece of butternut - forgiving and fine grained for easy drilling, sawing, chiselling and so forth. The second will be either beech or maple - also fairly forgiving but a bit harder agin' the tool edges. The third will be the afromosia, which should get perfectly tooled by the time she's practiced the various tool operations on the other two blanks. That'll be her spokeshave.
I'm hoping that at least one of the two practice blanks will end up as a usable spokeshave body, since I could buy another Veritas kit o' bit and have a wooden spokeshave of my own, using one of those practice attempt bodies. I don't really need another spokeshave but it'll be interesting to have one with different characteristics from the metal ones I usually employ. I'll try to put a rounded nose on it, as mentioned in another thread.
Lataxe
Butternut is really really soft. I can't imagine one lasting more than a few swipes before it has serious damage.
The butternut is likely to be the sacrificial practice piece. It's easy to cut with edge tools so seems to be a good wood to learn the techniques required by the spokeshave kit. If it gets bodged as my pupil does a bit of "learning via mistakes" that's OK as the beech or maple and afromosia final pieces will be waiting to be tooled correctly.
Lataxe
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