Repairs101's video: Wooden Kitchen Tools - How To Make Homestead Style

Making wooden kitchen tools for cooking, display and gifts. Focusing on a basic spatula and an advanced skills spoon. Transcript provided for the hearing impaired: Alright today on Repairs101 I’m going to show you how to take some ordinary lumber scraps and turn them into useful tools for the kitchen or campsite or – they make great gifts too. Everybody has their own idea of what type of wood to use but like the pioneers I use what’s grown locally. You know, I learned how to do this when I was eleven years old on a school field trip to one of those old time pioneer village tourist traps. Ever since then I’ve relied on this skill as a source of cheap and popular gifts for birthdays, Christmas, Mothers’ Day, housewarmings, Groundhog Day… So it’s really important that you keep the faces straight here and that you only carve the bottlenecks into the sides of the paddle. Keeping that in mind, you want to carve the paddle until it tapers to a nice, fine edge. The belt sander makes light work of removing all the scratches, and you can use it to make a really fine blade, like on this egg flipper. Now I’m not saying you can’t do this by hand… I’m just saying I can’t. Belt sander’s also great for rounding off ends, which is very difficult to do by hand. If you’re feeling more ambitious you can dig out the end of your paddle instead of tapering it and create a primitive spoon or even a scoop. Maybe add a little knob to the end of the handle. I made this one a couple of years ago and I’ll just more or less reproduce it here. Use your knife, your chisel, your axe, your rasp – whatever you’re comfortable using. Here I’m forming the back. This angle, on the lip of the bowl, defines the shape of the spoon. A little more sanding and it’s definitely getting closer. Now a lot of people carve the bowl first but I’ve learned to carve it last so that I have a solid block of wood to hold onto in the vise and so that you can adjust the center of it if you need to. Now you can make a whole career out of just trying to make the inside of a bowl look perfectly even and smooth. Use mineral oil on kitchen tools because it’s non-toxic and it doesn’t go rancid like food oils. Alright, thanks for watching and don’t forget to subscribe!