Shopsmith Forums

I'm trying to figure out an easy way of cutting a knife edge on the end of a board, getting down to a sharp edge at the end. The steeper the angle the better. Is there an easy way to do this?

Bandsaw the board at a shallow angle. Then use hand planes to really bring it to a sharp, knife like edge. If you have a good workbench, clamp the board with the edge to work facing you. Use the hand plane to then remove fine shavings to bring the board to shape. For this you must work with the grain. Any tear out on a fine edge like that will tear out the whole edge. Test the grain direction so you can clamp it up best. The belt sander approach works the same, just anothe suggestion.

Exacto knife?:D

Just curious, what is the reason for doing this?

I'm also interested in the reason you can get it pretty sharp but it wont hold an edge for long.

dlbristol wrote:Just curious, what is the reason for doing this?

I saw a grill scraper made of oak at the fair the other day. It was sharpened to a nice edge of the board and then the this edge was run over a hot grill to make the grooves to do the cleaning. Works pretty slick.

interesting. I would never have thought of using wood to do that.

But when I made some letter openers. I bandsawed them to the general shape, turned the handles, then I cut the blade portion on the bandsaw and used the disk sander to shape them to final shape. Piece of cake. They have held their edge for years only used to open letters.