My Father's Spoke Shave

On my desk sits a woodworking tool: a spoke shave, ‘designed for smoothing curved surfaces’. It is slightly wider than my outstretched hand and made of carved wood: yellow, hard, warm and smooth. It was probably itself made by a craftman’s hand. Its sturdy hard blade appears to grow from the wood itself: wood and metal entwined.

The spoke shave is an oddity. A remnant of yesteryear’s toolbox. A reminder of a time before power tools and cheap DIY hard wares like Bunnings; when skilled hands worked rather than tapped keyboards and pressed buttons. 

Its purpose isn’t immediately obvious to the uninitiated. Yet to pick it up is to give yourself over to the shape, to feel how this small instrument wants to be held. To work out how to skim, scrape and shape edges.

These days, the hand that wield it are uncertain, unskilled and clumsy. Distinguished by not being the hands of a craftsman. I use it, I’m sure quite incorrectly, in a way that would make a skilled woodworker cringe, to shave the top edges off my warped desk drawers. In winter, the drawers bloat and stick so that I cannot open them without force.  In the summer heat, they shrink and stick at odd angles. I cannot win, it seems. 

My memory of Year 8 Woodwork class tells me that shaving the top and bottom of the drawers will help, but it is always a quick fix. The drawers feel like they have an energy of their own, one that renews with each shift in the weather. And so I keep my father’s spoke shave on my desk.

Yet it is not for this most purely practical of reasons that I keep this craftsman’s tool. I know that I keep it most purely because it was my father’s and I want to keep something of him, of his essence, with me.