How can you tell if a drawknife is bevel-up or bevel-down?

How can you tell if a drawknife cuts bevel up or bevel down?

The best way to determine this is to simply try the drawknife in both orientations and see which way feels right.  A small percentage of antique drawknives are pretty comfortable to use both ways, but most will be decisively one or the other.  

Suppose you find a drawknife at a flea or antique market and want to know which way it cuts before purchasing it.  How can you tell then, without being able to try it out?  The easiest thing to do is to just hold the drawknife horizontal with the blade parallel to the floor and the flat back of the blade facing down.  With the drawknife kept in this position,  it will be a bevel up if the handles are obviously cranked downward.  It will be a bevel down if the handles are also parallel to the floor.  If there is a modest amount of handle crank or it is hard to tell if they are cranked, it might work well enough both ways.  

Now let’s suppose you’re holding the drawknife as described and the handles are cranked down.  That means it’s a bevel up, so you’re holding it just as you would in use.  The downward crank of the handles gives the right neutral wrist position to guide the blade intuitively, with fairly equal range of motion up or down from the neutral position, as the flat back of the blade travels across the horizontal surface of the wood, roughly parallel to it.

Imagine now the drawknife you’re holding has the handles parallel to the floor, meaning it’s a bevel down.  Flip it over so the bevel faces down.  Starting with the handles parallel to the floor, tilt the butt ends of the handles downward until the actual bevel is parallel to the floor.  Notice how, in this position with the bevel itself approximately horizontal to match the top surface of a hypothetical workpiece, the handles are now cranked down to that ergonomically correct neutral wrist position described previously?  That’s the key idea.

If you practice this visualization exercise, you will get a grasp of the relationship between handle crank and bevel orientation, and should be able to tell with pretty good confidence which category most drawknives fall into just by picking them up, if not at a glance.

Bevel-down (left) vs. Bevel-up (right)