Steel is a pain to scrape by hand and Biax Power. If your hand scraping use a carbide tip ground at a 60mm / 2.4" tip radius and a neg. 5 degree rake on booth sides. If your using a Biax Power scraper use a 60 mm / 2.4" tip radius with a positive rake. Yes a positive rake, like a wood chisel - one side. Try to keep not to have a long stroke - no more then 3/8" for roughing and down to 1/8 for finish. I would deburr it with a dull file and med grit sharpening stone. Steel and ductile gets a lot of burrs and slivers in the fingers. I would wear some leather gloves when deburring.
The Truth!
Started handscraping in the 80's because i was making a steel plate sled for small woodworking shapers. There was a local market and i was stupid. The sleds were machined from 1/2" steel plate (A36) flycut flat, and then scraped, so i could use that to scrape the top of the shapers in since none of them were flat. These were the little delta units, but a good machine, and shops set one up somewhere as a dedicated tenoner, using sleds like mine. Also had a set of scraped (by me) steel parallels to scrape the slots, since the tables never had straight parallel slots. And the keys on the bottom of the sled were scrape fitted to the table slots. I think i recall doing 7, for 4 different people and then came to my senses. But it was a good way to start.
Then my planes were made of ductile, and they were all handscraped.
Sometime at the end of the 90's when eBay came along, i won a Biax that turned out to be from Richard. He was not happy about it & refused to send it because i sniped it for cheap. We had an interesting phone conversation.
I watched and in a week or so it ran up again, so i sniped it again and got it for $50 less than the first time. This was when you could get a Biax on Ebay for $300 or so. (Mine was less) Richard was a grudging good sport about that, and sent it, and gave me some advice and comments on it. It had the cracked plastic but he had been clear about that in the ad. He had really done a good job of building it and new brushes, etc. I've liked him ever since.
My memory is "late 90's", think it was a few years before PM; but it could have been as late as 2002.
The following project photos are dated May, 2003
All steel bed in my RAMCO widebelt sander. 16" x 26" wide. It's basically 2 ea 8" channel irons welded parallel/crossways to form the platen. Wear swale in front (farthest from camera) is aprox 1/16" deep. You can see by the way the machine is constructed, it was easier to level the machine and scrape it in place, than to remove, schlep somewhere for grinding, go back to pick it up, and then re-erect the frame.
As Richard says, those slivers & burrs are nasty. After the first pass, I wore padded leather gloves the whole time and can still feel a few embedded in the side of my hand when looking at the pictures again.
