Input wanted from all selfbowyers

[crashcastle]

and one hell of a winch

[Eric Krewson]

Here is my take on excessively curved blades to hog out recesses, bad idea. On osage you always end up carefully scraping out the recesses with a curved scraper to keep from violating the grains on the sides of the recess.

I use two draw knives, a big, heavy blade straight one for bark, sapwood and grain chasing up to and through most pin knot clusters. Some times I need a little more finesse and I switch to a 5", very thin blade, Swedish drawknife. I finish up with a variety of scrapers.

I have tried curved blade drawknives and found them a lot less effective than straight bladed ones.

On past osage cutting binges I have spent over a month drawknifing every day until my hands went numb, quit for the day and start back the next. I have a lot of experience with draw knives

[Cody Cantrell]

I have to agree with the majority on this one a big heavy, staright blade for the rough work (lots of stock removal and prying of sapwood so the handles should be very stought as well) and a smaller, say 6" curved blade, for the final ring chasing.  

Cody

[the Ferret]

the Sorby..main blade is 10" x 1 3/4"

[Cody Cantrell]

Mickey How well does the littlest one on the left work?  I have looked at those in the past and thought of getting one.

[Bowjunkie]

I have one drawknife, gave the rest away. It's a Snow & Neally. I don't think they make them anymore. I use it for everything from bark to chasing a ring. I like it alot. Its blade is barely curved, almost straight, 8" cutting surface, 10" between the handles. The handles are in the same plane as the blade, but angled out slightly... perhaps 10-15 degrees.

If I was designing one, I would angle the handles out a little more, for a total of about 30 degrees.... 'out more' allows for harder pulling with less fatigue, but if you go out too far you begin to lose stability, or the ability to gauge and maintain up/down angle.

[the Ferret]

Cody I like to use that one for detail work...getting into a final ring, or cleaning up edges and making them straight. It's too small and fragile to do any real wood removal, but lets say you want to narrow a tip a bit, it's good for that. The straight one to the right of it I use mainly as a scraper.

[Cody Cantrell]

Thanks Mickey

[crashcastle]

i bought one of those straight ones mickey and havent got the chance to use it yet also just bought a little 4 inch flex knife frow wood craft that little beuty is almost to sharp but i like it for bending into the low spots