a drawknife will do very rough cuts and fine cuts, while a spokeshave is limited to fine cutting. In untrained hands, though, or on bad days, a drawknife will make disastrous cuts that ruin your work.
Drawknives and spokeshaves are complementary tools, like jack and smoothing planes: the first (in each case) will get the work close to right, the second does the final adjusting.
A drawknife generally has 3 ways to work it.
1 Bevel up is mostly uncontrollable, but it hogs off stock like crazy.
2 If you flip it over and work with the bevel down, you have infinitely more control.
3 If you start your drawknife work at the very corner of the blade and slide across as you pull, you get a shearing cut that makes the most controlled cut of all and very smooth cutting.
Drawknives come in sizes from the smallest 3" blade to 12" and more for ships work etc.
Here are two of my small sized carving knives. The first an old joiner blade I reworked and the second a Charles Buck blade I got one time.
(Oh, if you only drill a pilot hole in handles for a push on tang, then heat just the tag to cherry red, and burn the tangs in, they won't pull off accidentally. Industry never did this, it takes too long)
Spokeshaves come in sizes and weights. The smallest having less than a 1" blade and the largest coming around 6". The big ones bite hard and the little ones fit onto lots of places!!
yours Scott
