Flattening a Hard Silicon Carbide Honing Stone

[Jacob]

.... Holtzapffel, vol.3 (1850), p.1142, agrees that "even distribution of wear" is important,

Yep. That's all you need to do

but then says that stones occasionally need to be flattened. .......

OK yes, in extremis, if somebody hasn't been doing as above, or using a stone in a very clumsy way.
Obviously there will be a point beyond which a badly misused stone might need remedial work but there is no need to let them get into that condition. Can't say I've ever needed to myself and I have no problem sharpening.

You seem to be unlucky with your saw purchases! I've had some brilliant old saws - corrosion blunts them but often they can be got going again in minutes, rust and all.

 

[Jacob]

.....
The old saws mentioned in a previous post were likely ruined by users from the 1940s onward, and have little to do with honing stones. You can ruin a saw in a couple of sharpenings (It usually only takes me one time to ruin one :wink: ). It takes years to put a decent swale into a stone, even a man-made stone. The chance that some amateur working in a garage a weekend or so out of the month could do it is pretty remote. That leaves stones with a pronounced swale coming out of some sort of professional shop, or a busy but capable amateur's. And a lot of stones on EBay, natural and man-made, have this very "flaw."

Yes it's taken me many years to hollow some new stones!

All this said, it's pretty easy to keep one flat (to the naked eye kind of flat, not to a machine room grade spec). You just use the whole surface, and of course, both sides.

Yep.

PS "swale" is N American apparently, but survives here in Swaledale, so we know what it means immediately!

PPS - for any newbies reading this - sharpening is much easier, quicker, cheaper, sharper, if you avoid all the modern fads and fashions. Sharpening used to cost absolutely F.A. but now is a major cost, both in time and money

 

[swagman]

The Grimsdale Method goes by the moniker Mr. Grimsdale. His real name is Jacob Butler.

http://www.closegrain.com/2010/04/grimsdale-method.html

 

[swagman]

Jacob Butler's Joinery Workshop: Woodwork Tips

http://www.owdman.co.uk/howto/howto.htm

The following is a link that Jacob recommends you read; http://www.finewoodworking.com/how-to/a ... ening.aspx

After hollow-grinding the bevel on a chisel or plane iron (a crucial step, see sidebar below), it’s time to hone. I use aggressive Norton waterstones, but oilstones or sandpaper on glass or granite also works. I start with a 1,000-grit stone, followed by 4,000 and 8,000 grits. Make sure the stones are flat before you start. I flatten stones by rubbing them against a 220-grit waterstone that I flatten on glass with silicon carbide powder.

In my experience, a hollow grind on a blade’s bevel is critical for honing freehand. A flat bevel rocks too easily, forming a convex shape that is nearly impossible to hold consistently against the stone. In contrast, a concave bevel has two contact points, so it is easy to maintain the correct angle.

When your tool’s edge gets dull, you’ll begin to see small nicks or a tip that reflects light at its very edge (meaning it is slightly rounded). To get a fresh edge, repeat the above steps without the hollow grinding. At some point, though, you’ll need to return to the grinder. This is because each time you hone a tool, you expand the polished, flattened surfaces at both the tip and the heel, filling in the hollow between them and leaving too much metal for your finest stones to handle.

And this was the latest recommendation by Jacob on this thread;

PPS - for any newbies reading this - sharpening is much easier, quicker, cheaper, sharper, if you avoid all the modern fads and fashions. Sharpening used to cost absolutely F.A. but now is a major cost, both in time and money

 

[Jacob]

Jacob Butler's Joinery Workshop: Woodwork Tips

http://www.owdman.co.uk/howto/howto.htm

The following is a link that Jacob recommends you read; http://www.finewoodworking.com/how-to/a ... ening.aspx

After hollow-grinding the bevel on a chisel or plane iron (a crucial step, see sidebar below), it’s time to hone. I use aggressive Norton waterstones, but oilstones or sandpaper on glass or granite also works. I start with a 1,000-grit stone, followed by 4,000 and 8,000 grits. Make sure the stones are flat before you start. I flatten stones by rubbing them against a 220-grit waterstone that I flatten on glass with silicon carbide powder.

In my experience, a hollow grind on a blade’s bevel is critical for honing freehand. A flat bevel rocks too easily, forming a convex shape that is nearly impossible to hold consistently against the stone. In contrast, a concave bevel has two contact points, so it is easy to maintain the correct angle.

When your tool’s edge gets dull, you’ll begin to see small nicks or a tip that reflects light at its very edge (meaning it is slightly rounded). To get a fresh edge, repeat the above steps without the hollow grinding. At some point, though, you’ll need to return to the grinder. This is because each time you hone a tool, you expand the polished, flattened surfaces at both the tip and the heel, filling in the hollow between them and leaving too much metal for your finest stones to handle.

And this was the latest recommendation by Jacob on this thread;

PPS - for any newbies reading this - sharpening is much easier, quicker, cheaper, sharper, if you avoid all the modern fads and fashions. Sharpening used to cost absolutely F.A. but now is a major cost, both in time and money

Flattered that you take such an interest in my site. If you read a little more closely you would see that I don't necessarily commend all the content of the various links I quoted - they were there to expand the discussion.
In fact that link is to an article full of nonsense, thanks for the tip off! I'll get around to editing the site sooner or later and let people know that the instructions on that site are total b****cks, to avoid misunderstanding!
A bit out of date my site. New one along sooner or later!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Hmmm ...

 

[Trafalgar]

The Grimsdale Method goes by the moniker Mr. Grimsdale. His real name is Jacob Butler.

http://www.closegrain.com/2010/04/grimsdale-method.html

And an excerpt of the bloggist's conclusion on Jacob's method:

My conclusion: this is a simple, fast, effective technique. Good enough that it's encouraged me to give old-fashioned India stones another try (since the old fellers didn't have these high-tech diamonds; would Roy allow DMT's in his classroom?).

The end result is that I'm extremely happy with this method. It's fast and effective for various sharpening media; I have no doubt it would work just as well with waterstones. It's completely portable with fast setup. The India and Arkansas stones should last me 30 years, which is one reason I chose them over waterstones. While waterstones may cut faster, they also wear faster. These stones get the job done just fine with only a few minutes of effort. So no fussing around, back to working wood quickly.

 

[D_W]

That blogger refers to steve branham, who had made a blog post a couple of years ago touting Paul Sellers' method. In the comments below that post, if I recall the dates correctly, someone had asked Steve about his use of the Sellers method about a year after the original post, and already by then (after spending money on equipment), he said "it works, but I no longer use that method". Something of that sort.

Sharpening involves very little - removing wear and establishing a new edge, and being able to reach the wire edge and remove it. when someone has to adopt someone else's method paint by number lock stock and barrel, it's a problem.

Out of curiosity last night, I went down to my bench because I know I had a carborundum 108 at one point and for novelty, I'm going to make the next kitchen cabinet in my menu of cabinets with just that stone and a strop.....except I threw it away, because they're only worth about $2 or $3 on the open market and it wasn't worth selling. Since I have a fetish with such a thing, I'll just order another one.

I'm sure they could be sharpened with 15 different ways, with or without the sway left in the stone, and the result would still be tools good enough to use as long as some dope didn't forget to sharpen to the edge itself, or if they left a huge strong wire edge on whatever they were sharpening.

 

[Trafalgar]

Your larger point is well-taken David. It might be best not to take bloggists too literally. They're famous for doing an about-face, some of the most notable being Chris Schwarz's. My son's kit is pretty much exclusively honed this way -- I didn't want him on the grinder at the time we put it all together. The planes and chisels work just as well as those hollow ground and subsequently honed. It's the essence of simplicity and at that time, he was 11, his edges didn't leave anything to be desired.

 

[Jacob]

It's odd that the normal more or less universal way of sharpening only 60 years ago (when I first had a go at school) and still going in 1982 when I did a C&G course, is now seen as weird, verging on perversion!

 

[Trafalgar]

It is indeed. I'm happy to have found the technique. I don't know why so many people turn their nose up at it, other than it doesn't really feed a need to spend lots of money.

 

[Carl P]

Just recently bought a wheelwrights tool chest that had three stones in it, an India with little use therefore perfectly flat, a coticule well used with a slight hollow, and what I assume is an Arkansas which was well used and quite flat - they all looked like they'd been used freehand but with care as regards flatness, not perfectly flat of course, but certainly more than flat enough to sharpen with. Probably dates from the 1930's and judging by the other remaining tools they haven't been abused by other family members. I imagine these stones would be fairly typical of those of a good craftsman of the period. Must admit though, I don't really understand what all the fuss is about - I like my stones to be quite flat but I can't say that I feel anything except mild interest in how other people choose to do things. Also I feel poitively interested in how other people flatten stones, I haven't had to myself, except for some slate stones that are obviously easily flattened, but you never know when the information might be useful for something one day.

Cheerio,

Carl

 

[Trafalgar]

Did you check both sides of these stones?

 

[Jacob]

... I don't really understand what all the fuss is about -....l

It's about the new sharpeners, who are convinced that the only way to sharpen is to indulge in a set of time consuming and expensive procedures recently invented (about 1985 at a guess).
It wouldn't matter except a lot of beginners might assume that this is the only and the proper way.
You read of buyers of sets of expensive chisels who spend hours on the ritual of "flattening the backs" - expensive and completely unnecessary.
NB by "backs" they mean "faces". "Backs" is a sort of code to say "I am a new sharpener and everything I know is from mags, web sites, tool catalogues." :lol: :lol:

 

[Steve Voigt]

It's odd that the normal more or less universal way of sharpening only 60 years ago … is now seen as weird, verging on perversion!

"Perversion" is probably too strong; I'd call it a historical aberration, or degenerate technique.

It gets at an issue that is wider than just sharpening stones. Guys like you and Sellers talk about the techniques you learned in the 1950s as though they were some sort of "normal, universal" way of working. It's as if the fifties were the Golden Age of hand tools, when in reality they were more like the Dark Ages. Hand tool skills started declining in the mid-19th c. and probably bottomed out in the late 20th c.; By 1950 they were basically circling the drain.

If we look at the techniques that were commonly taught and practiced in the mid-20th c., we'd see that most (not all) woodworkers:

- rarely flattened stones and often used badly hollowed ones.
- routinely rounded or dubbed the backs of tools.
- used convex bevels or eclipse-style guides.
- had no idea how chipbreakers worked.
- used shoulder or router planes to pare tenons (after deliberately sawing them fat).
- chopped mortises undersize and then pared them to size.

I could go on, but hopefully everyone gets the point.

On the other hand, if we have even a tiny bit of intellectual curiosity and we try to figure out what woodworkers (again most, not claiming all) did in the 18th/19th centuries, we see that they:

- both flattened stones when necessary and (as Jacob rightly stresses) made an effort to keep them flat in use.
- avoided rounding or dubbing of backs.
- used a primary bevel/ secondary bevel freehand sharpening technique, and considered convex bevels to be bad form.
- sawed tenons to size and if necessary pared them with a broad chisel.
- chopped mortises right to size, without drilling, paring, or other complications.

In every case, the earlier technique is faster or more accurate or produces a better surface. Now, it's no skin off my nose if you want to use any or all of the less effective methods; why would I care? What bugs me, and the reason I posted in the first place, is that you constantly misrepresent these methods as "normal," "universal," "what everyone did," etc. And no doubt you'll keep repeating these claims forever, but people should know that they're not true. That's all.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Convex bevels!!! how very dare they! :shock: :lol: =D>

 

[iNewbie]

It's odd that the normal more or less universal way of sharpening only 60 years ago … is now seen as weird, verging on perversion!

"Perversion" is probably too strong; I'd call it a historical aberration, or degenerate technique.

It gets at an issue that is wider than just sharpening stones. Guys like you and Sellers talk about the techniques you learned in the 1950s as though they were some sort of "normal, universal" way of working. It's as if the fifties were the Golden Age of hand tools, when in reality they were more like the Dark Ages. Hand tool skills started declining in the mid-19th c. and probably bottomed out in the late 20th c.; By 1950 they were basically circling the drain.
.

What you need to understand steve is that Jacob worshipped at the alter of Mr. Sellers. He's been his Guru. Which is why he sounds like him. You'll find him on his blog pages some years back.

Here he is hatching like a butterfly into Jacob from his chrysalis of Mr. Grimsdale.


https://paulsellers.com/2011/12/sharpen ... ow-stones/


And Mr. Sellers distancing himself once he goes-off-on-one; once again, about "crazy sharpeners". :roll:

https://paulsellers.com/2012/05/more-de ... mysteries/

 

[Trafalgar]

Steve Voigt wrote:

If we look at the techniques that were commonly taught and practiced in the mid-20th c., we'd see that most (not all) woodworkers:

- rarely flattened stones and often used badly hollowed ones.
- routinely rounded or dubbed the backs of tools.
- used convex bevels or eclipse-style guides.
- had no idea how chipbreakers worked.
- used shoulder or router planes to pare tenons (after deliberately sawing them fat).
- chopped mortises undersize and then pared them to size.

This is even more asinine than the fellow who ruined his DMT flattening his SiC stone. Unfortunately Steve, you're showing how poorly read you really are -- all of this and more is either in the nine editions of Planecraft published from the 1930s to 1980s or in one of Charles Hayward's many books, Wells & Hooper, Joyce, Joyce as revised and expanded by Alan Peters, Wearing, et al. I'm not sure how you've determined that these techniques were (or were not) 'commonly taught and practiced' and where these deficiencies actually occurred but these are not the techniques memorialized in the better 20th century woodworking handbooks, all of which should be in your library but apparently are not.

It's as if you are asserting that all of these books were written, most in at least two, three or more editions, and they never sold a copy and nobody ever used them, and they referred to technique nobody would recognize.

 

[Jacob]

..
If we look at the techniques that were commonly taught and practiced in the mid-20th c., we'd see that most (not all) woodworkers:

- rarely flattened stones and often used badly hollowed ones.
- routinely rounded or dubbed the backs of tools.
- used convex bevels or eclipse-style guides.
- had no idea how chipbreakers worked.
- used shoulder or router planes to pare tenons (after deliberately sawing them fat).
- chopped mortises undersize and then pared them to size.

I could go on, but hopefully everyone gets the point.

Dear me you had some dreadful teachers! I must have been lucky I claim no credit.

 

[Trafalgar]

..
If we look at the techniques that were commonly taught and practiced in the mid-20th c., we'd see that most (not all) woodworkers:

- rarely flattened stones and often used badly hollowed ones.
- routinely rounded or dubbed the backs of tools.
- used convex bevels or eclipse-style guides.
- had no idea how chipbreakers worked.
- used shoulder or router planes to pare tenons (after deliberately sawing them fat).
- chopped mortises undersize and then pared them to size.

I could go on, but hopefully everyone gets the point.

Dear me you had some dreadful teachers! I must have been lucky I claim no credit.

Most of the jokers who have a come-apart and start running around like Chicken Little over a vintage but hollowed stone lack the sense to take it out of its box and look at the other side. Grooves and hollows, places to hone a turning tool, a firmer gouge, a few carving tools, camber an iron automatically... none of this ever seems to occur to them as explanations for the non-flat side. And when you find one with two non-flat sides you are likely looking at a stone used by a turner, carver, or somebody not in a wood trade at all.

And again, all that said, even on the non-flat side there is almost always enough space at each end to back off the face.

The admonition "keep your stone flat" doesn't mean, or have to mean, both sides.