Cindy Drozda
“The Fine Art of Woodturning”
P.O. Box 19065 – Boulder, CO 80308 – 303-449-7170 – cindy@[Link] - [Link]
Negative Rake Scrapers
Welcome to the wonderful smooth cutting world of Negative Rake Scrapers!
The simple addition of a second bevel at the cutting edge has revolutionized scraping for
me. Stuart Batty gets the credit for showing this tip to me, and many others. It is a
traditional technique brought to us by the Old World Blackwood and Ivory trades of past
centuries.
Negative Rake Scrapers cut cleaner, with less tear-out and far fewer catches. They excel in
making a clean cut on burls and twisted grain, and offer a catch-resistant way to clean up
endgrain. Negative Rake Scrapers (basically like all scrapers) work much better on hard
dense wood than on very soft open grain wood. Some wood won’t scrape well at all, such as
punky wood. Cutting with the sharpening burr on a negative rake scraper, even fairly soft
wood can usually be cleaned up nicely.
In most cases, Negative Rake Scrapers are for final finishing, not for rough heavy shaping.
Anywhere that I can get a gouge into, such as an open bowl or box, I would rather use it for
most of the work, finishing up with the negative rake for a clean smooth surface finish.
When hollowing vessels, I do most of the work with a single bevel (not negative rake)
scraping cutter, or with a Hunter Carbide cutter or hook tool. For a clean finish and smooth
curves inside my vessels, I finish up with a negative rake teardrop-shaped scraper on my
hollowing rig. Since the negative rake makes a scraper less aggressive, anywhere that I do
want aggression, I don’t use it.
The way that I use a Negative Rake Scraper is to hold it level on the tool rest, or maybe with
the end of the handle a bit higher than the cutting edge. Like with any scraper, it is asking
for trouble to contact the cutting edge to the wood with the end of the handle lower than
the tip of the tool.
I use a negative rake on almost all of my scrapers. I still keep a single bevel on my
trapezoidal bedan tool because of its profile. And my roughing cutter for hollowing. The
bevel angles that I use vary between 65º on the hooked scraper and square recess scraper,
to 50º on the Arc tool and sometimes as little as 40º for very fine finishing scrapers.
Basically, the negative rake (which refers to the scraper having both a top and bottom bevel)
makes the scraper less “grabby”. It is more controllable, less aggressive, and less likely to
tear out the grain of the wood.
The more obtuse (larger) the included cutting bevel angle is, the less aggressive the tool will
be. And the longer the edge will stay sharp. The more acute (smaller number) the angle is,
the finer the finish will be, and the quicker it will get dull. If you are cutting with the burr
(Arc Tool, Square Recess Scraper), you will need to resharpen as soon as the burr is gone
(very frequently – as in less than a minute of use) in order to maintain the superior
performance of the tool. The tools will continue to cut after the burr is worn off, but the
finish will be much rougher and more cutting force will be required (sometimes causing
other problems.....)
Cindy Drozda – Negative Rake Scrapers
The Hooked Scraper is usually used more aggressively, for hollowing boxes and such, and
will cut well long after the burr is gone. It will, however, give a finer finish if it is sharpened,
or honed, before the final cut. I also sometimes cut without using the burr (either turn the
tool over, as in Arc, or hone the burr off, as in Hooked Scraper) to get an even less
aggressive, and also smoother, cut (particularly on end grain)
When you turn your other regular scrapers into negative rake, you will need to pay attention
to the included angle. That is the angle formed by the 2 bevels. If you add a top bevel to
your bottom bevel scraper, you probably will need to change the bottom bevel angle to get
the included angle that you want.
A scraper with an angle greater than 80º will not cut very easily (will require too much force
to get it to cut). A scraper with a greater than 90º angle will not cut at all. I would stick with
75º or less. General Tools makes a nice, inexpensive protractor that you can use to measure
these angles.
One thing that I have found is that the top and bottom bevels don’t need to be the same
angle. I often (Hooked Scraper, Square Recess Scraper) use just a 5º top bevel. That is all it
seems to take to make the negative rake difference. On shaped scrapers, like the Hooked
Scraper, the top bevel can be done freehand. On the Stuart-Batty-style negative rake
scraper, I use a 25º top and 40º bottom to get a 65º included angle that can be resharpened
on the same 40º platform that I use for gouges. For the Arc Tool, I use that platform set to
25º and grind both sides of the angle with the same setup.
When resharpening the negative rake scrapers, in general, only one of the bevels needs to
be ground. I will typically grind the bottom bevel (depending on how I plan to orient the
scraper in use) so there is a burr formed on the top by the grinder.
Negative Rake Scrapers are an excellent use for those high-tech “powder metal” alloy tools,
such as the Thompson, Hamlet 2060, Glaser A-11, and Stuart Batty CPM-10V. These very
hard steels will hold a burr many times longer than M2 HSS. Well worth the money, both in
sharpening time and in tool life!