# making small grooves by hand



## Bifidus (Oct 9, 2012)

I'm working on a box that I want to insert a 16th inch glass pane near the front opening of - but I'm not really sure how one goes about making such a small groove (or really any groove) with hand tools. I know that tongue and groove planes exist, but are so expensive and specialized... is there a simpler (even if it's more labor intensive) way to do this? I thought about sawing the outsides of the groove with a handsaw and trying to "scrape" out the middle, but can't think of what tools would be useful for said "scraping"... maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong. Thanks for any help. Still quite new to hand tools.

Along the grain if that makes a difference.


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## Keith Mathewson (Sep 23, 2010)

You can make a simple scratch stock out of an old card scraper and insert it into a piece of wood with a fence.


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## firemedic (Dec 26, 2010)

Would making a rabbet with glass stay (small strips) behind it be an option or must the the glass be captive without means of being replaced were it broken?


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## Wrangler02 (Apr 15, 2011)

Before I had my Stanley 45 Combination Plane; I defined the edges of the groove with my marking gage and chopped the waste out with a cheap (Marples) chisel ground to the thickness of the glass.


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## Calzone (May 15, 2012)

Handsaw would work fine, I would think


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## HandToolGuy (Dec 10, 2011)

Calzone said:


> Handsaw would work fine, I would think


Except that this groove is stopped, right?


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## Bifidus (Oct 9, 2012)

It is a stopped groove. Since I'm trying, for the sake of learning, to avoid any hardware or glue, I think fashioning a card scraper for the job is exactly the answer I was looking for, though this _will_ make the glass difficult to replace, in which case I'll use the glass stay idea. Thanks for all your help!


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