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Many of us are familiar with the technique of using a razor blade to scrape away drips from varnish and other film finishes. It’s a great way to level defects, especially if you use a brand-new razor. To keep the corners from digging in, you can bow a thin single-edge razor just as you would a card-type cabinet scraper. If using a stiffer razor, such as a utility-knife blade, I wrap a short strip of masking tape around each end to keep it from digging in. This also levels a drip perfectly to the adjacent surface, leaving only a slight plateau to remove with very fine sandpaper wrapped around a hard sanding block.
I find that utility-knife blades are also useful scrapers for smoothing small wood parts such as box pulls or decorative filigree. They work pretty well right out of the package, but there are times that I prefer more aggressive scraping. In those cases, I burnish a hook, or burr, onto the blade, just as I do with my card scrapers. (Unlike with a card scraper, you can only create a hook toward one face of a razor blade.) I burnish the burr at about a 30° angle off horizontal, taking a few light-pressure passes along the length of the blade with a scraper burnisher. Alternatively, you could use the rounded section of a chisel shank. A burr sure makes scraping go faster, and finishing up with an unburnished razor makes short work of the final-pass smoothing. — William Murrey
Here are some supplies and tools we find essential in our everyday work around the shop. We may receive a commission from sales referred by our links; however, we have carefully selected these products for their usefulness and quality.
