Paul Chapman
Established Member
Following this recent thread https://www.ukworkshop.co.uk/forums/view ... hp?t=11400 I had a go today at making an MDF wheel for my hand grinder for honing the curved part of combination/multi plane irons. I will need to make several of different thicknesses to cater for different size blades, but I started with a scrap of 8mm MDF. I cut a disc using a 3 inch bi-metalic hole saw in my drill stand.
After mounting the disc on the grinder I found it was fairly easy to shape it using a coarse file and it wasn't that difficult to get a good match of the profile of the cutter. Ideally I would have used a larger disc but the hand grinder I have takes a maximum of 3 inch wheels.
The cutter I tried it out on was a 3/8" beading cutter from my Stanley #50. I had never honed the curved part of this particular blade before, so I used a fairly coarse grade of polishing compound. I found that this brought it to a very good finish very quickly. Being a hand grinder it was all very controllable and quite easy to polish the curved part of the blade evenly. I finished off polishing the flat parts of the blade on my leather strop and tried it out on a scrap piece of pine.
The results were excellent and certainly better than I had achieved previously with beading cutters in this plane. I had previously tried using slip stones (which you never seem to be able to get in the right sizes) and pieces of abrasive wrapped around dowelling, which I've never found particularly satisfactory. The MDF wheel I made gave a far better result and produced it very fast.
This was only a first go and I'm sure that with a bit more time, and using finer polishing compounds, I can get even better results. But certainly I'm very pleased with the results so far :wink:
Paul
After mounting the disc on the grinder I found it was fairly easy to shape it using a coarse file and it wasn't that difficult to get a good match of the profile of the cutter. Ideally I would have used a larger disc but the hand grinder I have takes a maximum of 3 inch wheels.
The cutter I tried it out on was a 3/8" beading cutter from my Stanley #50. I had never honed the curved part of this particular blade before, so I used a fairly coarse grade of polishing compound. I found that this brought it to a very good finish very quickly. Being a hand grinder it was all very controllable and quite easy to polish the curved part of the blade evenly. I finished off polishing the flat parts of the blade on my leather strop and tried it out on a scrap piece of pine.
The results were excellent and certainly better than I had achieved previously with beading cutters in this plane. I had previously tried using slip stones (which you never seem to be able to get in the right sizes) and pieces of abrasive wrapped around dowelling, which I've never found particularly satisfactory. The MDF wheel I made gave a far better result and produced it very fast.
This was only a first go and I'm sure that with a bit more time, and using finer polishing compounds, I can get even better results. But certainly I'm very pleased with the results so far :wink:
Paul
