The art of hand scraping has been around for about 200 years and was first adopted in England for the specific purpose of creating flat, cast iron surface plates. The need to create “practically perfect” flat surfaces is a fundamental building block in the creation of machine tools. Flat reference planes are also a necessity in precision measurement and a variety of aspects of dimensional metrology.
Hand scraping, by definition, is a process by which material is removed from machined surfaces with a hand tool, in very small quantities. The object of scraping is to provide a surface of uniform geometry.