New to me the best wood scraper in the world

[CrealBilly]

New to me, my dad who is not a avid woodworker told me how my grandpa used it to make tool handles and all kinds of wooden stuff including spoons. I'm wondering why no one here has ever told me about the best wood scraper in the world? I'm putting my card scrapers in the junk drawer because they don't hold a candle to the best wood scraper in the world.

See if you can guess what it is, from the following 5 clues.

1) It's so abundant you use it every day
2) Chances are you have been cut but it more than once in your life.
3) It can be molded into many different shapes.
4) It's so clear you can see right through it but it also comes in many colors
5) it's extremely sharp and breaks pretty easy

Know what it it?

 

[ehpoole]

From your clues it sounds like you are scraping with glass... or is it obsidian (also glass). Or better still, and much longer lasting, perhaps 10,000k diamonds, neatly cleaved (long lasting or not, I'm not sure this one is too pracitcal).

 

[Gotcha6]

My guess is glass also.
BITD, I can remember watching an old school carpenter with a new wooden hammer handle taking a piece of broken glass and scraping it smooth.
Some things are often - regrettably- forgotten with time.

 

[Mike Davis]

It is glass, I used it some when I was living in the projects. An old man that lived next door made cedar turkey call boxes and used glass to scrape the top smooth. He showed me how to do it and let me try on one. The bad part is you have to break the glass to sharpen it and sometimes it goes all bad and bloody and stuff.

 

[JonT]

Wayne Henderson (master guitar maker, Rugby Virginia) mentions sitting in the floor and scraping down his guitar sides with a piece of glass when he was young.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZSb5_5eX3k

 

[CarvedTones]

It is glass,
...
sometimes it goes all bad and bloody and stuff.

Yep, it goes way back in history pretty much to the time man figured out how to make glass. After we figured out how to make it, we started trying to use it for all sorts of things. Glass is not so cut and dry as some of our discoveries; some of the things it can do it doesn't do reliably. Cutting is chief among them.

With all due respect, I strongly disagree with the title of this thread if you are talking about glass. It is far too fickle to be your friend as a cutting edge, especially at the lathe.