A utility knife is any type of knife used for general manual work purposes. Such knives were originally fixed-blade knives with durable cutting edges suitable for rough work such as cutting cordage, cutting/scraping hides, butchering animals, cleaning fish scales, reshaping timber, and other tasks. Craft knives are small utility knives used as precision-oriented tools for finer, more delicate tasks such as carving and papercutting.
Woodworking is the skill of making items from wood, and includes cabinetry, furniture making, wood carving, joinery, carpentry, and woodturning.
A block plane is a small metal-bodied woodworking hand plane which typically has the blade bedded at a lower angle than other planes, with the bevel up. It is designed to cut end grain and do touchup or finish work. It is typically small enough to be used with one hand.
A hand plane is a tool for shaping wood using muscle power to force the cutting blade over the wood surface. Some rotary power planers are motorized power tools used for the same types of larger tasks, but are unsuitable for fine-scale planing, where a miniature hand plane is used.
A spokeshave is a hand tool used to shape and smooth woods in woodworking jobs such as making cart wheel spokes, chair legs, paddles, bows, and arrows. The tool consists of a blade fixed into the body of the tool, which has a handle for each hand. Historically, a spokeshave was made with a wooden body and metal cutting blade. With industrialization metal bodies displaced wood in mass-produced tools. Being a small tool, spokeshaves are not suited to working large surfaces.
A card scraper or cabinet scraper is a woodworking shaping and finishing tool. It is used to manually remove small amounts of material and excels in tricky grain areas where hand planes would cause tear out. Card scrapers are most suitable for working with hardwoods, and can be used instead of sandpaper. Scraping produces a cleaner surface than sanding; it does not clog the pores of the wood with dust, and does not leave a fuzz of torn fibers.
A grater, also known as a shredder, is a kitchen utensil used to grate foods into fine pieces.
A drawknife is a traditional woodworking hand tool used to shape wood by removing shavings. It consists of a blade with a handle at each end. The blade is much longer than it is deep. It is pulled or "drawn" toward the user.
A rasp is a coarse form of file used for coarsely shaping wood or other material. Typically a hand tool, it consists of a generally tapered rectangular, round, or half-round sectioned bar of case hardened steel with distinct, individually cut teeth. A narrow, pointed tang is common at one end, to which a handle may be fitted.
A kitchen knife is any knife that is intended to be used in food preparation. While much of this work can be accomplished with a few general-purpose knives – notably a large chef's knife, a tough cleaver, a small paring knife and some sort of serrated blade – there are also many specialized knives that are designed for specific tasks. Kitchen knives can be made from several different materials.
Sharpening stones, or whetstones, are used to sharpen the edges of steel tools such as knives through grinding and honing.
A marking knife or striking knife is a woodworking layout tool used for accurately marking workpieces. It is used to cut a visible line, which can then be used to guide a hand saw, chisel or plane when making woodworking joints and other operations. They are generally used when marking across the grain of the wood, with scratch awls better suited for marking with the grain.
Although an antique tool might be said to be one that is more than a hundred years old, the term is often used to describe any old tool of quality that might be deemed collectable.
A zester is a kitchen utensil for obtaining zest from lemons and other citrus fruit. A kitchen zester is approximately four inches (100 mm) long, with a handle and a curved metal end, the top of which is perforated with a row of round holes with sharpened rims. To operate, the zester is pressed with moderate force against the fruit and drawn across its peel. The rims cut the zest from the pith underneath. The zest is cut into ribbons, one drawn through each hole.
This glossary of woodworking lists a number of specialized terms and concepts used in woodworking, carpentry, and related disciplines.
Microplane is a registered trademark of Grace Manufacturing Inc., a company that makes photo etched steel tools for grating, grinding and sanding. It was created by Richard Grace in the mid-1990s. Grace set out to make a wood-carving rasper and ended up with a new invention, which in 1991 would come to be called Microplane.
A woodworking float, also called a planemaker's float, is a tapered, flat, single cut file of two types: edge float and the flat sided float which are traditional woodworking tools generally used when making a wooden plane. The float is used to cut, flatten, and smooth key areas of wood by abrasion. Despite the name its woodworking uses go well beyond planemaking.
A cheese knife is a type of kitchen knife specialized for the cutting of cheese. Different cheeses require different knives, according primarily to hardness. There are also a number of other kitchen tools designed for cutting or slicing cheese, especially the harder types. These include the cheese cutter, cheese slicer, cheese plane, cheese scoop for soft cheese and others, collectively known as cheese servers.
Bedrock is a design of bench planes developed by Stanley Works as an attempt to improve over the Bailey plane design. It was introduced in the early 20th century.
Chip formation is part of the process of cutting materials by mechanical means, using tools such as saws, lathes and milling cutters.
