The current forum post on Scraping/Sanding Regimen reminded me of a question I’ve had for some time. The card scraper is near the top of my list of favorite tools. In addition to its Zen-like simplicity, one of its merits is its utility in smoothing challenging grain that is prone to tearout with the handplane.
For years I’ve heard that another great characteristic of the card scraper is that it works as well regardless of grain direction. Though that is most often the case, my experience is that the card scraper often does have a favored direction, and going against it creates more resistance and a less smooth surface than by scraping in the other direction. Interestingly, the favored direction is not always that which I would predict by “reading the grain.”
Since I’ve never seen this mentioned, I wonder if others have had similar experience.
Replies
Yes, same here. The scraper won't tear out against the grain like a handplane but does seem to work better going with the grain.
With maple in particular, the visual "grain" apparently has little relationship to the actual grain of the wood, so that trying to read it to determine the direction to plane/scrape can produce an error. I've seen maple split in a totally different direction from the "grain" pattern seen.
The card scraper will leave a roughness going against the grain, but it is easily sanded smooth, unlike the tear-out from a plane. I also can scrape very small patches to work with the grain almost always and reduce the roughness in small spots.
Agree with the OP and the other comments. Scraping diagonally often works better than straight. Curved scrapers are best for spot corrects, cabinet scrapers and straight scrapers are best for evening out uneven areas. Smaller shop made scrapers work great for glue clean-up or scraping small pieces and edges.
Different timbers do seem to react in a variety of ways to scraping. I find the most difficult to be those such as sapele that contains a lot of roiling, spiralling grain but is also of the less dense kind.
A fully-sharp scraper on difficult but denser timbers does seem to cut in any direction without any issue. But with the less dense stuff, the fibres cut against the grain with a scraper seem able to bend or otherwise avoid a perfectly clean cut, so can end up being slightly "fluffy", but in a much-reduced fashion than if they'd been cut with a plane (or a getting-blunt scraper). The "fluffy" patches can be seen and also feel slightly rougher than the other areas to the finger tip.
Such stuff generally needs a fine grit sanding to make the fluffy areas less fluffy. But this can also make the very cleanly-scraped areas a tad more "fluffy" too!
With some timbers, you can't reach perfection (whatever that is). :-)
Lataxe
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