Drawknife

A traditional woodworking hand tool, also called a drawing knife or a draw shave, with a blade set between two handles and drawn or pulled toward the user to shave wood away in long strokes. Its blade is much longer along the cutting edge than it is deep, ground to a chisel bevel of around 25 degrees, and unlike a spokeshave it has no closed mouth over the blade, which makes it a coarser tool suited to rough shaping rather than fine finishing. Woodworkers use it to remove large slices of wood for flat, faceted surfaces, to strip bark from felled logs, to round a piece roughly before turning it on a lathe, and to shape items such as cricket bats. It is worked most safely and effectively with the operator seated at a shaving horse, a bench that grips the workpiece with a foot-operated clamp so both hands and the body's own weight can control the cut, pulling the blade at a slight upward diagonal rather than straight across.