Making A Butter Knife ~ by WoodlandsTV

Transcript

John Westcott: What we're making today is the butter knife. It's made out of sycamore. It's actually made out of a log, to start with. You split the log in half, and then normally you would quarter it. But, in this case, we won't be doing that, because we want the wider plank. What we've done is, we've cleaved off a flat off of there. So then we take it over to this horse, and we use the draw knife to flatten it out. Because what you get when you split it off, you get grain.

We want to take that out. We want to take the width down. Obviously this butter knife is nothing like as thick as this piece of wood was. To bring it over to this horse, very clever device. You just use this draw knife to draw it off. You can control the depth by moving it up and down. So you take off small pieces to do that.

Now, people take a look at me, and they say to me, "Why aren't you wearing a leather apron like those chaps in the photographs?" Well, we believe that, in a lot of cases, those chaps were actually wearing the leather aprons simply to protect their clothing, not to protect themselves.

Because if you bring that tool back to there, that's as far as it will go. It doesn't go any further, because your arms won't let it. It's actually quite painful, to try and pull it back any further. So it stops there, as long as you are careful.

What happens though, you can do that. So sometimes the piece of wood will shoot out, and that will hit your clothing. You can wear quite a hole in your clothing. We believe, really, that what they were doing, was wearing leather to protect themselves.

The idea is to work with it. You always find when you split this timber, that you get what's called a wind, which is this. Diagonally, that end and that end arise. So what you do, is you just work backwards and forwards until you can take the corners off, and get it basically flat. Because the last thing you need, is for your butter knife to be twisted.

That's getting close. We just take out some of the work dents. That now is complete. That's ready for marking out. We'll then take it over to the tool over there which is called a stock knife, and we'll shape it with the stock knife.

What we've got here is a pine version of what I'm making. It's the blank. All I do is mark around it. Place that one there, run a pencil around. Actually, sometimes I use the old ball pens, because they mark the wood as well, these don't mark the wood so well, these pencils.

There we are, three marked out. Over to the block. Now this is called a throw. It's not sharp. The idea is, it's just got an edge to it. It's what I use to split off the original blank off the log. All you do is, you apply that to there. I just split that off. It doesn't matter if I lost one. You get most of the rubbish off, with that...

Then you go to the stock knife. This is the stock knife. It's used by clog-makers for making clog blanks out of alder, but you can use it for all sorts of things. It's also called a pegging knife, because people make tent pegs with it.

It's just basically a blade, flat on the back side. You just use it, simply, like that. You press down on it. It just goes around the knife. The marks that you put on them, just follow it around. Try not to go over the line if you can help it. If it doesn't go too far, it doesn't really matter.

There we are. Almost done. The next bit is to use this small Swedish carving knife. When I said, earlier, it can give you blisters, the place it can give you blisters is in there and there. It's best to take it off with that, if you can.

Again, people may ask if you can cut yourself. Well, yes, if you're not careful. You will notice that if you look at it carefully, there's a gap in there. I'm always working with that gap, my thumb against there. Although, like the old gardeners, you get a callus on your thumb. It really doesn't matter then, too much. Really, it's just a case of carefully going round it.

Now, we go back to the shavehorse, which is quite an interesting tool, because it does actually give me quite a bit of control. I can either use it - my feet are down on the pedal, pushing hard. The piece of wood won't come out. In fact, what's happening is, it's pulling and it's pulling that on there as well.

It's quite a simple device. I can control it because there's a groove in here. I can put my piece of wood into there, and I can hold it quite simply. It's a vise, but it's a vise with a slight difference.

This is a small draw knife, a very neat little tool. But it gives me the benefit to get down into the grooves, into the curves. So I can take small amounts off, rather than necessarily using the knife, which is, I find, a short-range tool. You can get along with curve with this tool.

So having done that, I'm now faced with the fact that that's a bit thick. I would then spend a few minutes with this tool, taking it down, tapering it down. Then I would end up with something like that. This isn't the finished one. It's still rough.

What we would then do is, with a sheet of sandpaper laid on this, which is quite useful, you then spend 20 minutes or so - no, it's not that long. It takes about five, ten minutes. You take all the corners off, and you get the surface flat. It's ready for sale.