Making your own cabinet scrappers.

[AJB Temple]

To the OP. From experience, a large scraper made to the exact radius is very difficult to use as you can't keep the burr in contact evenly and it is unwieldy.

I know this because years ago, when I was making guitars as a sideline, I made a couple of arch tops and I wanted a smooth concave undersurface. I made a scraper to fit half the required profile exactly (from an old saw as it happens). It didn't work well for the above reasons.

Years later I did a violin making course in Cremona for a few weeks. Brilliant fun, but you do need to speak the lingo or have a helper (wife in my case) who is fluent. Anyway there was a really old guy in the workshop making cellos and he was using a minuscule curved scraper, with a lot of elbow grease it seemed, to get really quite wide arches perfectly formed across a wide curve. I've copied his approach ever since.

 

[ED65]

Yes this ^. I was under the impression that the rule of thumb was you want a hand scraper to have a 'quicker curve' (smaller radius) than the surface to be scraped, because only this allows you to target a portion of the concavity that needs more attention (harder or impossible if the two curves matched exactly). Essentially this is an extension of the same principle as using a flexed – or actually curved, missing photo here – scraper to do a flat surface.

 

[mrpercysnodgrass]

I make scrapers out of glass for one off projects.......

I've seen African craftsmen who have nothing but a sharpened screwdriver and some pieces of broken Coke bottle produce some fantastic work, and even in the better woodshops the table tops etc will be finished with a piece of glass.

Where about in Africa were you? One dealer I know who trades in new African works of art gets most of his stock from Tanzania, where he says produces the best quality pieces. I restore tribal artefacts for a couple of dealers and the hardest thing to recreate is the surface markings, I have a growing collection of home made scraping and carving tools using glass, stone, shells, animal teeth and re-shaped chisels.

Apologies to the OP. we seem to have drifted off topic

 

[MikeG.]

.........Where about in Africa were you?........

I drove the entire length of Africa, from the UK to Cape Town in one trip. Then until recently I had a 4x4 stationed permanently in Africa, equipped with a roof tent and all the gear I needed to live in the bush for weeks at a time. It has been left variously in Zambia, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, but has been up as far as northern Tanzania. It's easier to say where I wasn't than where I was.