A swell little 4 in hand tapered rasp

Ryan Mooney

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The Gorge Area, Oregon
The stocking stuffers just keep on rolling in ;)

I picked this little jobbie up back in April:
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000H1VZ5G

and what a fantastic little rasp it is. The fine side cuts as fine as most files. The coarse is just coarse enough to remove material reasonable fast but not so coarse it causes noticeable tear out. The pointy ends are just pointy enough to get into all of the tight little spots but its wide enough you can flatted a dovetail side with it. I don't think I've used it quite enough to get a feel for the longevity but it seems to be staying sharp so far so tentatively looks good (a judicious file test on an inside corner looked pretty ok as well).

I've been using is for fairing curves, cleaning up small tenon shoulders or mortise holes, touching up dovetail sides.. basically anywhere I need a small rasp/file and its quickly become my medium sized goto tool (I still have rifflers,, needle files and larger rasps/files of course - but I've been grabbing this one ~5:1 compared to anything else for a lot of work).

The fine side doesn't leave a finished show surface but its plenty good enough for inside joinery or the like. It is close enough that it doesn't take a lot of cleanup to get it to a show surface though. The teeth on the one I have are sharp enough to not really cause much/any tearout. The fine toothed side even worked for cleaning up end grain pine, had to put a small chamfer on the outside of the cut but other than that left a nice smooth/clean surface.

Its not big enough for large jobs (like fairing a chair leg) but for small/medium sized stuff its just the cat's pajamas[1]

[1]
One source (cough) claims that the term "cat's pajamas" originates from E.B. Katz, an English tailor of the late 1700's and early 1800's, who made the finest silk pajamas for royalty and other wealth patrons. This phrase is often likened to and/or confused with the 20's term "cat's meow".

Wikipedia claims that it was coined by popular cartoonist TAD Dorgan https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cat's_pajamas

But perhaps its both: https://idiomation.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/cats-pyjamas/
 
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