New (to me) Spokeshave

I recently bought a couple spokeshaves from a tool dealer.  I really only wanted the metal one in the picture below, but they came as a pair.  I'll write soon about that shave, but today's post is about the wooden spokeshave.

A couple of spokeshaves

The aft end

The front end, showing the "Clark Tool Co." mark

This spokeshave has the mark "Clark Tool Co." on the front (stamped upside down, oddly).  I was unable to find any information about this company.  They could be an original manufacturer or possibly a hardware store that put their own name on somebody else's tools.  If anybody knows, please leave a comment.

The spokeshave body looks to me like maple, though the seller says beech.  It is 11 1/8" total length, about 7/8" thick top to bottom and 1 3/8" front to back.  The iron's cutting edge is 3 1/16" long.  The body's shape is typical of wooden spokeshaves that I have seen, with the exception of the thumbscrews - probably not a new feature to many of you, but new to me.

Bottom

Top

The ends of the iron are mortised into the body and the tangs are threaded so that the iron can be raised or lowered using the twin thumbscrews on the top side.  As is often the case with old tools, the threads did not match one of today's standards, so I couldn't chase them to clean them up.

The iron and brass

Here are some details about the thumb screws.  They are attached to the football-shaped brass plates by curling up the bottom cylindrical part of the screw.  The brass plates are tightly mortised and screwed into the body.

Details of the thumb screws

The iron and body are curved in two directions.  Two pics above, you can see different facets on the brass wear plate as it had been filed to create a curve front-to-back.  The brass was also clearly filed side-to-side to match the lateral curvature of the iron.  As found, the wear plate had more curvature than the iron and didn't match it very well.  I filed it a bit to even them up.

A straightedge resting on the iron shows the slight lateral curvature

The right side of the wear plate had been filed more than the left side

Filing the wear plate to get it to match the lateral curve of the iron

Here's where the shave was in need of some significant work.  The write-up in the tool dealer's site said it was "in sound worker shape".  I guess our definitions of sound worker shape are somewhat different.  Check out the cutting edge of the iron!

Nice mountain range on the cutting edge

The bevel side of the iron shows the condition fairly well

Close-up of the middle portion of the iron's beveled edge

The back side was easy enough to clean with some sandpaper and diamond paddles.  A nice thing is that the back is slightly hollow front to back.  This allows a diamond paddle (held perpendicular to the iron's edge) to rest on the front and back edges and the work goes more quickly.

Fairly shiny after just a little work

The bevel side needed significantly more work to get the jagged cutting edge back to raw metal.  In the next pic, I've started the process of rehabbing the cutting edge.  You can see a thin line of shiny metal at the cutting edge, but there's still a LOT of roughness.  As the caption notes, the rear part of the bevel side is raised and I was able to rest sanding sticks and sharpening paddles on the bevel and the raised area to get a reasonably consistent bevel as I ground the edge down.

The bevel side has a raised portion at the back that helped a lot

Pic shows how the paddle rests on both the raised area and the bevel

Finally, a sharp iron!

At this point I had to give it a try.

First shavings in a VERY soft wood - so far, so good

Next a 3/4" wide edge of a harder wood and look at those chatter marks!

This is a problem I have with all my spokeshaves.  I can't seem to get rid of chatter.  I tried skewing the shave, taking a shallower cut, resharpening the iron and I don't get much improvement.  Need to look into this more.

Speaking of resharpening, I had to touch up the iron after a few dozen passes over a piece of wood.  My guess is that this iron won't hold up to hard work.  I'll evaluate it as I use it and may have to re-harden and temper it.

Finally, for the body, I scraped off the old finish, sanded, and put on a few coats of shellac.  Normally BLO is my go-to finish for wooden tools, but I thought I'd do something different with this one because it looked like the finish was originally something other than oil.  Time will tell if I like the shellac finish or not.

And there she is

Bottom side

This tool cleaned up very nicely.  I love how easy it is to adjust the iron and I also think the slightly curved iron will prove to be a great feature.  Keeping it sharp could be a challenge.