spokeshave

Spokeshave is a compound English word: spoke (the radial member of a wheel, from Old English spāc) joined to shave (to cut thinly, from Old English sceafan, related to 'shave' in the grooming sense — removing thin layers). The compound names the tool's original purpose exactly: a spoke-shaving instrument, designed to smooth and shape the octagonal rough spokes of a wooden wheel into their final round or oval cross-section. The word is self-explanatory to anyone who knows what a spoke is, which in an era of wooden wheels meant everyone. The tool's name assumed a world of wheelwrights.

The traditional spokeshave consisted of a flat or curved blade held between two tangs — wooden handles projecting from each end of the blade. The worker grasped both handles and drew or pushed the blade along the work, shaving thin curls of wood from a curved surface. The cutting geometry was similar to a hand plane — a flat sole holding the blade at a fixed cutting angle — but the two-handled form gave the worker control over curved surfaces that a conventional plane could not easily follow. A wheelwright would shave a spoke from its rough-split octagonal section to its final circular cross-section in minutes, rotating it between strokes to remove material evenly.

The tool's application expanded far beyond wheels almost immediately after its invention. Chair makers discovered that the spokeshave was ideal for shaping curved chair backs, arms, and legs — components that a plane could not reach and a drawknife could not control precisely enough. Windsor chair makers used it to shape the spindles of chair backs and the bows of the back rails. Boat builders used it to fair the curves of ribs and rails. Coopers used it to shape stave edges. Any craft that worked with curved surfaces found a use for the spokeshave, and the wheelwright's specialized tool became the universal tool for curves.

Modern spokeshaves are made entirely of cast iron or steel — the wooden-handled originals replaced in the nineteenth century by the same standardized metal construction that transformed hand planes. The Stanley No. 151 flat-face spokeshave and No. 151R round-face version, designed in the 1870s, are still manufactured in essentially unchanged form. The flat sole is for convex curves; the curved sole follows concave ones. Setting the blade requires adjustment with a small set screw — less intuitive than a conventional plane, more sensitive to small changes. Woodworkers who learn to set and use a spokeshave well find that it is among the most responsive tools in the kit: the work communicates through the handles in a way that the feedback from most tools does not.