A Card Cabinet Scraper vs Sandpaper

If only I had known sooner. I have gone through so many packages of sandpaper trying to smooth out the shellac I applied to the woodwork. Friction and/or heat balls up the shellac into little corns on the sandpaper making it useless almost after the first stroke. Using mineral spirits with wet/dry sandpaper on shellac does help but I still had to use a lot of sandpaper.

I had a card cabinet scraper but I never could get it to work well for me. I knew I didn't have the right sharpening technique. That was then, this is now. I'm the happy owner of a new sharpening system for my cabinet scraper and have become a scraping fool (among other things, ha).

I doubt I'll have to use much more sandpaper because my shellac finish is now flat and smooth, ready to be waxed with 0000 steel wool and dark wax. It is so much cheaper to use the scraper than buying all that sandpaper. Of course you always need a little fine grit on some projects but for the woodwork, steel wool is my last step.

The only downside to this is the curved areas. I think I'll have to purchase a curved scraper for that. I still need the sandpaper for the moldings.

I'll let you know how the curved scraper works for the curved moldings.