The final action is smoothing the outside surface. The inside is modeled completely with the different knives. The outside however, which is to be seen, should usually be as smooth as possible. Nowadays you can do that easily by hand with sand paper or with a machine with a sand paper belt. In the early days when sand paper didn't exist, people used a piece of glass to scrape the wooden shoe.

For this purpose the wooden shoe maker breaks a piece of glass in two. The art is to prevent that during breaking, the edges of both pieces touch and cause distortions. When that happens, the sharpness is quickly gone and you may also see tracks that the distortions leave behind. Then both wooden shoes are scraped as shown on photo 55.

Now the final inspection of the wooden shoes takes place. In this case it is easy because the wooden shoes have the size of their creator.

Afterwards you can see how many hews and cuts were needed to create a pair of wooden shoes by hand.


As such, 5 pairs of wooden shoes leave you with a full bag of chips.