This was enormously satisfying. Only saved about $8-9 and a trip to the hardware store (it was raining), but it was worth it. I was just sitting around stewing over my little projects and realized I had everything I needed to make a new metal tool in my apartment.
What's neat about this is that you're not actually sharpening an edge in the normal sense; You're very methodically creating an edge that is so blunted it becomes sharp... backwards.
Read on for the full experience of goblining out with makeshift tools on the kitchen floor
Equipment used:
- a suitable piece of metal (old spackle spreader thing)
- nasty shears I found in the road to liberate piece of metal from handle
- bastard file (yes it is called that)
- clamps
- lots of squared hardwood scraps to pick from
- junk store saw to cut the wood
- bamboo skewers
- whetsone
- water
- any hardened steel tool handle or shaft
Here are a bunch of crappy photos and gifs of my process. I did this without much finesse, and it still worked great:
First thing's first, we gotta get a piece of metal. This is more or less the right size and thickness. What kind of steel is it? I don't know. Maybe spring steel, I guess. You need that so that the card scraper can flex and return to straight. This putty tool does that, so I sacrificed it. I don't like doing that job anyway.
I actually ended up cutting it again after taking this picture to straighten up the edge.
Next, we make this doohickey. This is almost the best part. I used a couple of flat bamboo grilling skewers that happened to be the exact thickness of the file to fill some space inside the doohickey and act as spacers to expose more file outside the wooden blocks.
Now begins the actual process of sharpening a card scraper a.ka. cabinet scraper. First, "jointing" the edge. This is a very weird term that I won't get into which just means squaring up the edge. So, the point of the doohickey, as you can see, was to provide a 90-degree guide fixed onto the file. If I had a real work table and vice, this would look much cooler, but we're doing it on the floor, on a big piece of paper to collect the filings, because I am a floor creature.
...and then you have to file the sides. This does some of the work of removing the burr that was created by filing the edge. I think that's what we're doing here. I don't remember exactly.
At this point, you can also use the file to take off a bit of the corners of the metal card. This helps to avoid the corners scratching your work, but it isn't necessary, because the way you use the thing is by bending it between two hands to lift the corners up off the wood surface. Anyway who cares
Now we use the whetstone to grind off the rest of the burr, gently. Doing this on both faces gives us, at last, a jointed edge (square edge. It's just a square edge).
Now that we have a fresh edge to work with, we can make the burr/s that actually makes a card scraper what it is. We do this by sort of smooshing and dragging a piece of harder metal across the edge that we just created. This seems insane. What I'm doing here is hard to describe without drawing diagrams that other people have already drawn a thousand times, so if this is interesting to you, honestly you should just look up better video guides of how to sharpen a card scraper.
...I ended up having to try again and press way harder than what I'm showing here, putting as much weight on it as I could. One video guide I watched said "don't use much pressure, go lightly," and another was way less detailed and the guy was like "You gotta press really goddamn hard." So, I think this basically depends on what kind of metal the card is, its thickness/gauge, and the relationship between the two metals. I don't know what I've got here. I pressed really hard.
⚠️The last step I forgot to record. It's the most important part of this whole traditional sharpening process. You take your burnisher (metal stick) and press it along the edge at a slight angle to fold down the burr you created on both edges of the edge. This gives you two hooked burrs curling backward off the edge of the card. You can feel it snag with your fingernail. Very exciting when you get it right!
Then you just freaking scrape away. I really gave myself a mess to work with here, since the carved grid on this board catches the scraper when I move it wrong and makes it really difficult to hold it at the correct angle. Also the acrylic paint in the grid was somehow smearing out into the grain a bit, so I had to touch up a few times. But that was part of the point of scraping the surface anyway, to remove the paint that went outside of the carved lines, and it worked really well for that.
I'm not sure about how this thing looks. It's a work in progress still. But this was fun. The video below was taken before I got a better edge; the second time around I was getting much better shavings and less dust.
You can make a thing too 👍👍👍👍👍👍