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It’s funny what you can accomplish when you’re ignorant. No one told me I couldn’t cut joinery with a hacksaw, which has fine teeth and little set. But that’s exactly what I used to do — until I took a class in hand joinery and learned all about backsaws.
Same thing goes for scraping. For years I used a card scraper on pine until I read somewhere that you can’t scrape softwoods.
You can scrape softwoods, such as pine, with a sharp scraper, a light touch and a slightly different angle of attack. When I scrape hardwoods, my card scraper is usually about 65�° from the surface of the wood. When I scrape softwoods, I increase that angle slightly until two things happen: I get curls instead of dust and the grain stops looking fuzzy.
Other lies:
– Always work “with the grain.”
– Curved edges cannot make flat surfaces.
– Grits have no flavor.
– Christopher Schwarz
