Re: neandering...

One of the nicer things you can do for yourself if you're going to use scrapers is to get the Veritas dial-a-curl burnisher. I used to believe conventional wisdom that softwoods were unscrapeable until I got one.

As to planing, softwoods are "easier" right up until you run your plane over a resin pocket or oozing knot, then they get downright difficult.

One use, certainly. The #71 1/2 is better for this than the #71, which tends to "fall into the throat" when working on narrow stock. Personally I rarely use mine, preferring the little #271

You might do it on pressed steel hinges, probably not for thicker brass ones. I use it as much as a depth gauge as anything - set it to the finished depth, then take the first cut or two without pressing the sole entirely flat.

More or less. Much depends on the size of the hook you form, and the angle you hold it at. There's a lot of variation between how you use scrapers.

It might approach that if you had a large hook and in soft timber. Generally scrapers work more reliably with a smaller hook (or a square edge) and better with a larger hook (or not at all). If you make the hook progressively bigger, then it makes shavings that are more and more like curlies (which is good), but it gets fussier about the timber it will do them on (which is bad). Some timbers (exotics) will never make shavings. Softwoods will easily tend to make big curly things, but then the surface quality may start to suffer.

If you have the time, look up the difference between Type I and Type II chips. Try Hoadley or the Wood Products handbook (you get pictures too)

Planes (when correctly adjusted and working along the grain) produce a Type II chip. There is an angled plane of shear ahead of the cutting edge, where the chip is deflected in a smooth curve. Cutting across the grain, as when trimming a shoulder, is a Type III chip. Chip formation is by compression, more than by tensile failure. For scrapers, Type II are the curlies, Type III is the dust.

The transition between these two formation mechanisms depends on the ratio between tensile strength along the cleavage plane and compression strength normal to the face of the edge. Using a blunt angled edge (like a scraper) rotates the cleavage plane forwards, increasing the effective tensile strength (along the fibres, not between them). Working cross-grain has a similar effect - reducing the compressive strength (across the fibres, rather than along them). No matter what you use as an edge here, you're into Type III chips.

Not surprisingly, the Type III chip is an ugly thing. A thick one is prone to tearout. To keep them under control and leave a good surface, they must be thin. This is done by either taking a thin shaving (as scrapers do) or by using a narrow mouth (as shoulder planes do).

If you mis-adjust the chip breaker, then you'll get a Type I chip. The timber splits ahead of the blade and the chip doesn't curve until long behind the edge, where it bends in a series of catastrophic breaks.

It won't hurt anything to try (on scrap). Personally, my #71 sees the most use for leveling stopped grooves and dados that I have begun with a chisel, drill and/or handsaw. They are reasonably similar operations, but for a hinge, you need to be really precise, and I find that the #71 is not the most precise tool around.

Right. They may be a bit thicker than the typical card scraper's shavings, but shoud be lighter than a bench-plane's.

IME, softwoods plane beautifully, but scrape poorly. Hardwoods may or may not plane well; it depends on the wood and the figure of the grain. But the nice thing is that most hardwoods that are difficult to plane do scrape nicely.

Another thing to consider when you are using a card scraper is the angle at which you approach the work. You should be able to get shavings with a fairly high angle of attack. If you are having to hold the scraper at a very low angle to the wood, you may have put too big a hook on the scraper's edge, so it won't engage the wood until you tilt the scraper way forward.

You might want to play around with putting different degrees of hooks on different edges of the scraper. I usually put a fairly aggressive hook on one edge, and then go progressively lighter until the last edge has just the slightest hint of a hook.

This gives you several choices depending on the wood and what you hope to achieve.

Chuck Vance

I don't know if anyone has said it isn't possible/practical. I do know that softwoods tend to come out looking "fuzzy" when scraped. Also, woods like SYP that have great variations in hardness between the annual rings can look bad, as the curlies from the harder wood are pushed across the softwood and leave little furrows.

And softwoods plane so easily and look so nice from a plane that going to a scraper is simply a waste of time in most cases. (Besides, the finish a scraper leaves is not as nice as a planed surface, IME.) A couple of light passes with a smoother and you're set.

Knots are a whole different thing, as they are more like endgrain than facegrain, and a scraper will help clean up the tearout that you usually get as you plane across the far side of a knot where the grain reverses. But even in those cases, if you use a circular motion when planing up to the knot, you can avoid tearout and get a fine surface on the knot. (Low angle planes are especially handy for this.)

Don't get me wrong, I love my scrapers and scraper planes, and use them when they are called for. But most of the time with softwoods, they are simply unnecessary, and in fact they detract from the surface you can get with a plane.

Chuck Vance Just say (tmPL) Of course there are exceptions to all of this. I have some "guato" pine from Mexico that is almost as dense and hard as maple, and has a fair amount of figure to it. Scrapers work beautifully on this stuff.