Taking a holiday break - will be accepting orders on January 1
Click here to watch the video!
Hey guys it's Brad from Earlywood here, trying to answer a question that we get pretty often.
I've got one of our new big tera scrapers right here. From time to time we get emails from people when the ends on their tera scrapers are kind of mushroomed out like this and kind of fuzzy and not quite as sharp as they used to be. I've never really had this problem too much with my tera scrapers but I know it happens.
This one was used by my kids the other day. I'm assuming they were cooking in cast iron or something like that and they must have really been banging this on the pan. Who knows what they were doing, they are 8 and 10!
So we're going to try and fix this today.
As you can see, it's mushroomed out quite a bit on this tip here and then over here on this corner it's mushroomed out just a little bit too. We have a couple options here. We've got the Scotch-Brite pad that you got with your order, we have a piece of sandpaper. This happens to be 80 grit but that's only because that's all I could find downstairs. We also have a razor blade if it really comes down to that. We're going to start with the least aggressive solution first which is the Scotch-Brite pad. This is just a fabric-y sandpaper. So, I'm going to start with the corner that doesn't need much and I'm just going to rub that edge off and see if that works.
These Scotch-Brites are more for the surface usually but let's see if they work on the corner here. I'm rubbing it off a little bit in the direction of the grain. That pretty much fixed that corner, so the Scotch-Brite will fix that side but this one that's really mushroomed out and has really been beaten on. I doubt the Scotch-Brite is going to work to tell you the truth, it's probably not aggressive enough.
It made it maybe a smidge better but not much, so let's step it up to the sandpaper. This is 80 grit, but I would probably suggest using 100 or 120 grit. Let's take a few sands on this here... Oh yeah that's taking that right off.
Alright, so that took off all the mushrooming but as you can see it's not quite as flat and sharp as it used to be anymore.
Fixing it kind of rounded the corner. Who knows, that might be nice, and you might end up liking the rounded off corner. If you want to fix that or if you ever want to sharpen the tip you can take your piece of sandpaper, lay it flat on a table, and put your scraper down on it like this and just pull your scraper along it sideways. It's kind of like, well it's not really like sharpening a knife, I guess. So, what this will do is just shorten the whole thing by the tiniest bit but as you do this, it gives you a nice sharp edge here. You might want to knock those edges down a smidge so they're not too sharp. I made a little bit of progress there. If you kept doing that you could get by all of this rounded off area and get back to where you have one nice sharp edge and two nice corners. One thing we do, you'll notice when you get a scraper in the mail, it's got the corners knocked off here a little bit already. So, while you have your paper down you can take this and knock your corners down like that and knocking the corners down just makes it a little bit stronger.
You don't have this end sticking out here to catch on and potentially break or mushroom out like it just did. I had the razor blade here in case I needed to slice some of this off if the mushrooming was too bad, but it turns out that 80 grit sandpaper did just fine.
So, if you get yourself in that situation where your utensil is getting dull, and you want it to scrape a little better or you've got a corner that's kind of banged up, get yourself a piece of sandpaper or the Scotch-Brite pad it came with. Don't forget if you're using it by hand like this you're probably not going to get that nice flat front, so make sure you lay your paper flat, put that down there and then scrape across real even like that and you should be back in action. After you do this, don't forget to oil it and you should be good shape.
All right, thanks guys!
