On the latest project in the 'shop, which is nearing completion, the last remaining thing(s) I have to make is a set of identical (hopefully ) pulls for a small door and a couple of drawers. The design I had in mind needed to have a small 10mm dia 'collar' at the bottom to cover over a goof in drilling the hole in the door (filled with a bit of 6mm dowel then and re-drilled correctly)
I was chundering to myself last night and scratching my head about how to make a 'cove' shaped finger pull in the handles which would be identical on all three pulls. A bespoke scraper would be the ideal way but what to use? High speed or tool steel would be just the jobbie so I fruitlessly hunted high and low last night trying find anything suitable, until this morning I opened a drawer in the 'shop and came across a few of these:
These flat bits are as cheap as the proverbial chips and made from tool steel. Perfick!
I used the disc sander to grind one to the necessary profile, making sure that the dx system was 'off' and I was wearing the required PPE. After about ten minutes, I ended up with this:
I had a spare ash handle made some time ago, so it was easy to just tap in the scraper thus:
Also shown is one of the lumps of English Boxwood I bought from WH last week, from which the pulls will be turned. I already had a small offcut of London Plane in the lathe between centres which I turned to to 12mm dia last night, so this morning I very gingerly marked out the first prototype handle and used the new scraper; I even used it to scrape a shallow concave depression in the face:
This is the first prototype without sanding inserted into the small door:
I have in the past made a scraper from a HSS drill but it wasn't particularly good, but using gash flat bits seems to me to be ideal, provided what's being scraped is fairly 'small scale' - Rob