The Race Knife

It's a knife. It's a gouge. It's a fun way to add decoration to your furniture.

The best thing about hand-tool woodworking for me is this: Once you learn to (really) sharpen and use chisels and planes, then the learning curve for other edge tools becomes shockingly short.

When my race knife showed up in the mail a couple weeks ago, Megan Fitzpatrick asked: "What's that?"

"A race knife," I replied. "Some people call it a timber scribe."

"Do you know how to use it?"

"No, but give me a few minutes."

Race knives are used in the timber industry for several tasks, including marking your initials (or a shop mark) on logs that you cut down and send to the sawmill. The people at the mill know your mark and you get credit for the log – or the lumber from it.

In its simplest form, the race knife is a very tight-sweep gouge attached to a knife-like handle. The more complex forms of race knives have two cutters plus an awl-like point. One of …