Shaving horse
Traditional woodworking tool
A shaving horse (also shave horse, shaving bench, or schnitzelbank) is a combination of vice and workbench, used for green woodworking. Typical usage of the shaving horse is to create a round profile along a square piece, such as for a chair leg or to prepare a workpiece for the pole lathe. They are used in crafts such as coopering and bowyery.
Operation
The shavehorse is commonly used in the preparation of stock prior to turning in a lathe, to roughly form cylindrical billets, the intermediate dressing phase between a crudely dressed raw split log and the final lathe work.
As the name "horse" suggests, the worker sits astride the shaving horse. The clamp is operated by the operator pressing their feet onto a treadle bar below.
A foot-actuated clamp holds the work piece securely against pulling forces, especially as when shaped with a drawknife or spokeshave.
The shavehorse provides a rapid and sturdy clamp, which allows the operator to use their legs and upper body weight as additional "power" for work. It is considered by some to result in less fatigue than generated by constantly standing.
Shaving green wood with the drawknife or spokeshave along the grain is far quicker and easier work than turning across it.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shaving horse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.