Official Luthiers Forum!

ok,
I am doing well with most all the tools, even becoming fairly competent with sharpening with a stone.

One thing is seriously bugging me so bad.
My cheap 20 dollar spoke shave. Why can I not figure out how to use this thing correctly? I repeatedly adjust to varying blade depths, and have sharpened the blade, but it just doesn't seem to work like i envisioned.

So I have been shaping necks with my files and rasps, but I hate having a tool that I just can't figure out.

Can someone give me some pointers, or better yet a tutorial?

Spokeshaves need serious tuning up to work near optimum. Like all planes you need a flat sole, but more important, you need to make sure the iron bed is flat to maximize contact area between the cutting iron and plane bed to reduce chatter. Flatten the part of the cap where it mates to the iron to keep chips from wedging between and to spread out the contact evenly. Adjust the cap to be close to the cutting edge. These tips are a starting point! I have a cheap curved sole spokeshave that I never got to cut well so a cheap spokeshave will be a challenge especially used for hardwood. I think the Lie-Nielsen and other carefully crafted spokeshave planes could potentially perform a lot better than the typical Stanley/Record types because the iron fits better, the throat is finer, etc.

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"Building guitars looks hard, but it's actually much harder than it looks." Tom Buck

^^totally agree with Steve here.

I'm still a complete newbie to woodworking, but I noticed that when I recently had a scary-sharp-fest to bring all my irons up to the best edge I could, it was the spokeshave which I noticed the biggest difference on (mine's one of the convex soled ones).

Without a wicked-sharp blade the spokeshave always chattered like crazy, with it - not so much...

To be honest, though, I'm generally not so crazy about the tool as a whole, I'm leaning towards getting myself a drawknife which strikes me as probably more useful to luthierie than a spokeshave in hindsight...

Ah well, you live and you learn...

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^^Above post posted by the artist formerly known as Dave Bamber^^

Thanks you guys,
I now feel vindicated.
I think I will hang the spoke shave up for now as I really don't need it for anything, it was just one of those nagging irritations.

I was thinking about a draw knife too, I saw this one on K. Matshusita's site and was thinking of giving it a try:
http://www.northbayforge.com/dk.htm

Really I was just using the spokeshave on mahoganey for my necks.
chatter chatter chatter

I've only used a shave a few times, but I loved using it. One of neck blanks I left way too thick and it made quick work of the blank and it was fun. I will say I have yet to buy myself a quality rasp, so I can't say it is better to use one or the other until I do so, my current rasp works, but its not great. Like the others said, the shave took quite a bit of prep, plus some trial and error with blade placement. I believe my local rockler sells better blades for the shaves, Hock blades, which should be thicker, which might help shrink the gap. Flattening everything and making it extremely sharp made it a useful and enjoyable tool, but like you at first attempts it was miserable for the most part. Either way its not the only tool for the job, so if it doesn't work out for you, not a big deal. Best of luck. J

I have had very good results with a wooden shave called "Dave's Shave" and also with the Veritas shave that is sold by Lee Valley. I used the shaves to do the rough work then switched to files to refine the shape and the to sand paper to do the finish work.

Now that I am building mostly violins I just use files because of the size of the neck is too small to really work efficiently with a shave.

These are just two methods to accomplish the same task of shaping the neck. I would use which ever method was the quickest, for me, and produced the best overall results. There is something nice about using old world tools like spoke shaves...but then I guess a file is a pretty old world tool also??

What Steve and Todd say about tuning the standard Stanley spokeshave. Most need a lot of work before going live. I use mine a lot on necks to keep down the dust. it works perfectly on Mahogany as well as straight-grained maple. Where I get chatter is in curly or highly figured wood. I either need to go to the next level like a LN or further tune as Todd suggested. I just love working with these planing tools and it makes all the sense in the world to me to learn how to tune them as well as to use them effectively.

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JJ
Napa, CA
http://www.DonohueGuitars.com