Rasps & Files for woodworking

In wood sculpting, rasps are mainly used for material removal. With a rasp you can carve free shapes very well and precisely out of the wood, with cabinet rasps and half-round rasps also curved surfaces. Files are mainly used to smooth wood surfaces, e.g. after working on the wood with a rasp. At bildhau you will find rasps and files for wood sculpting in different shapes, sizes, cross-sections, with fine, medium and coarse cut, hand hewn or machine made.

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What are the types & shapes of rasps & files?

Rasps and files come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and lengths. Rasps and files made of steel or forged steel are mainly used for wood sculpting. There are handmade, i.e. forged and then hewn, rasps (e.g. from MILANI) and machine-milled rasps and files (e.g. from CORRADI).

Rasps and files very common in woodwork have a long blade and a handle, i.e. a handle made of wood or plastic at one end.

Riffle rasps are mainly used in sculpture, which is why they are often called sculptor's rasps. Ripple rasps do not have a handle, but a grip piece in the middle between two rasp ends.

Needle rasps and -files are probably the finest rasps and files available among hand tools, and are very good for bringing out even the smallest details.

Shell rasps are rasps with a handle and a curved rasp end. They are very good for working on shells and generally all kinds of cavities. Shell rasps are available in different sizes and with different curvatures. For small cavities, the round-headed rasp, which also has a handle, is very practical.
With a surface rasp with a handle and a bent (cranked) blade at the other end, you can best shape straight surfaces, and with a curved rasp concave surfaces, as you can comfortably guide the tool with both hands.

A ring rasp or stair builder's rasp is perfect for working deep cavities in larger sculptures.

The cross-section of a rasp or file

Depending on the application, rasps and files have a different cross-section. A few common shapes are:

The cross-section of flat rasps and files corresponds to a flat rectangle. These are very good for working on straight surfaces and edges.

Cabinet rasps and files are just like half-round rasps and files flat on one side and curved on the other. The cross-section looks like a half circle in the extreme case. Cabinet rasps usually have a flatter cross-section due to a larger radius.

Round rasps and filen have a circular cross-section. They can be used, for example, to work on breakthroughs and enlarge bores.

Triangular rasps have a triangular cross-section, Square rasps have a square.

What is a rasp?

In connection with rasps and files, the term chop comes up again and again: The 'working surface' of a rasp consists of individual teeth that are either hand hewn or machine milled – this is the cut. The teeth are usually staggered. A rasp is therefore also called a rasp cut or a pocket cut. In files, the cut usually consists of grooves that can run across, diagonally, curved (one cut) or crossed (cross cut) on the blade.

Distinctions are often made, especially in the craft, between the cut number and the cut number.

The cut number refers to the density of the cuts. For files, the number of strokes refers to the number of strokes per centimetre in the longitudinal direction of the blade. For rasps, it refers to the number of teeth per square centimetre.

The cut number is again a division that indicates how many cuts there are on the total area of the rasp or file blade. Rasps with the cut number 1 have the least number of teeth on the surface, the higher the number, the more teeth. Basically, the more teeth there are on the surface and the denser, the fine the tool, the fewer teeth, the coarser the tool. But beware: not all tools with the same cut number are equally coarse or fine. A short rasp, for example, is always finer than a long rasp with the same cut number, because even if both have the same number of teeth, the teeth are closer together on a short rasp because the surface area of the blade is smaller.

How sharp a rasp is depends not only on the cut, but also on the length of the teeth. There are also rasps with several rasp surfaces with different cuts, e.g. flat rasps. Cabinet and half-round rasps usually have a flat rasp surface in addition to the curved one.

Maintaining rasps and files

Rasps and files can not be resharpened . When used for wood sculpting, they usually stay sharp much longer than when used for stone sculpting. As rasps and files lose their sharpness when working on stone, we do not recommend reusing rasps and files that have already been used to work on stone for wood. It will probably not be possible to achieve satisfactory results. Conversely, use is less problematic.

For cleaning your rasp or file, we recommend a file brush.

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