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 the cutters is used in conjunction with the pointy bit to cut arcs. The other cutter folds out of the handle and makes straight cuts.

(There are still other similar forms that I'll discuss later. I want to start off simple.)

Many of the symbols cut into Eastern European vernacular pieces use tools that are similar to a race knife or are indeed a race knife. The tool is used against a scrap of wood to make a straight line. Or it can be mounted in a large wooden compass to make arcs.

I am now working with a blacksmith to make some new tools that look and work much like the ones in Eastern Europe. For now, I've been farting around with antique race knives and a folding one I bought from a German store.

Here's the new one I bought. The shipping was as much as the tool. It needed some regrinding because the cutter's front edge was wavy. But once I fixed that and polished a 5° bevel on the outside of the tool’s cutting edge it cut quite well.

There are other similar tools out there. Like this. And that. I'm sure y'all could find other ones if you are playing a copy of our American Peasant Home Game.

I've been practicing with the race knife a bit here and there to get a feel for how it works. But today came the time to actually put it to work on some legs for this Cottage Table. I warmed up on a piece of scrap (always a good idea). Then I dove in.

First thing. Be like Joseph Moxon and take "easy trials" with a tool. Before I tried to cut a deep gash, I made a light cut to feel how the grain was running. If the knife cut beautiful spirals, then I took a deeper cut. If it chattered, then I rotated the bevel of the knife toward the straight scrap/fence a tad. As always, a little bit of skewing (but not too much) can radically improve the cut.

Also, slightly skewing the bevel toward the fence tended to pull the tool toward the fence. So it wouldn't wander away from the fence as much.

Then it was a matter of tilting the tool forward or back a bit to get a clean cut. Just like with all hand tools, here are the tricks: get it sharp, get the cutting angle right, skew a tiny bit if need be.

Each of these legs took about five minutes to do. It's meditative work and requires concentration (at least it does for me). But I'm also quickly finding that the order of operations makes a huge difference in the speed and accuracy of the work.

OK, enough for a Sunday night. I need some dinner and a beer.

Future entries will feature some racy movies (movies with a race knife).