honing guide

[Paul Chapman]

What is the Eclipse modification?

Unmodified on the left, modified on the right

Simply glue (Araldite) or screw some thin metal on so that the chisel can register from the flat side.

With the unmodified guide, the chisel fits into grooves each side and some chisels don't fit the grooves very well.

Cheers :wink:

Paul

 

[Anonymous]

Just read the review on the MK II. Was wondering about the Richard Kell honing guides. How do they stack up?

I have one and it is not a patch on my LV mk2 - good, but the LV is much better.

In fact, I am thinking of selling the Kell..............

 

[woodbloke]

What is the Eclipse modification?

Unmodified on the left, modified on the right

Simply glue (Araldite) or screw some thin metal on so that the chisel can register from the flat side.

With the unmodified guide, the chisel fits into grooves each side and some chisels don't fit the grooves very well.

Cheers :wink:

Paul

Paul's modified gauge is the same as mine except that I've used slightly thinner metal for the top so it's easier to hold plane blades...the one shown in the pic may have difficulty in gripping the sides of a plane blade. The main thing is that the mod is easy to do and makes the guide far more effective...but you still need a 'projection board' - Rob

 

[Harbo]

I use the LV mostly but have to resort to the Kell for the more chunky Japanese chisels I have.

Adrian - make a setting guide from a narrow scrap of wood. Cut out a notch to take the steel rods. Mark out the distances from the notch. I admit they are small - I think 30degrees is 1/2"?

Rod

 

[bugbear]

I beleive that the Kell guides are often misunderstood and at some stage in the future people will twig just how incredibly clever they are.

Going back to first principles they all have two wheels and all register (correctly) against the back of the blade. How anyone is supposed to establish the angle relative to the back by registering against the face side is beyond me. Two wheels means that the guide is master of the tool rather than the other way around, it also means that the guide 'shrinks' (as opposed to maginfying) any irregularity in the surface on which they are used. So if the rollers are 1" apart on centre and you are honing a 1/4" chisel, for example, the edge will be 4 times as square as the surface of your honing media is flat.

I've never found precision squareness a key requirment when sharpening!

In fact shoulder plane blades, the case often cited as needing a square grind, often need to be a gnats tadger OFF square to allow for (very)slight lateral skewing in the bed grind, which is amplified by the low angle.

Such tiny adjustments are best made by leaning slightly on one side when honing. It requires a certain degree of touch to differentiate between the kind of lean that makes a camber (a uniform curve) and the kind of lean that alters the angle of a straight cutting edge.

BugBear

 

[matthewwh]

"It requires a certain degree of touch..."

There's the point.

Because Richard's guides hold the blade square and can be adjusted by simply shimming under the rollers, you can establish a repeatable situation by making a note of which shims you used. Next time you come to hone the same blade you can go back to precisely the same arrangement.

I guess it depends where you want to be in terms of art vs science. Freehanding is an art that requires practice and maintaining a certain degree of muscle memory, Richards guides are at the opposite end of the spectrum, where everything can be predictably determined, and the eclipse is somewhere in the middle.

 

[bugbear]

"It requires a certain degree of touch..."

There's the point.

Because Richard's guides hold the blade square and can be adjusted by simply shimming under the rollers, you can establish a repeatable situation by making a note of which shims you used. Next time you come to hone the same blade you can go back to precisely the same arrangement.

If one of the wheels had a calibrated offset mechanism (like the one Veritas use on their roller to get a microbevel) you could avoid the shims!

Of course, all of this requires a stone wide enough - to me, a major failing of the Kell is that you can't sharpen the commonest plane blade (2" wide) on the commonest stone (2" wide).

That (to me) is a show stopper.

The Kell may well be the ultimate honing guide for chisels below 3/8" wide though, but it's a lot of money for a solution to such a narrowly defined task.

BugBear

 

[user 5024]

I would strongly recommend,before buying a honing jig, that you should take a look at Brent's articles on microbevels and jigs by following the links from his recent post on camber.
You might like me become a convert and save yourself the cost.

I did, a couple of days ago, and I discovered the reason why I was sometimes dissatisfied with my BU planes after resharpening.
I now think that I was not completely removing the wear bevel on the flat face of the blade even though I was using the David Charlesworth ruler trick.
Brent explains the importance of removing front and back wear bevels and recommends a final microbevel on the back of around 3 degrees which is more than the ruler trick can provide.
Clearly the ruler trick works fine on BD planes.

His jig design makes it very easy remove both front and back wear bevels with the absolute minimum of metal removal which also means much less wear on whatever abrasives are used. Of course the technique works for either BU or BDplanes

Could be abrasive films on glass as used by Brent diamond paste on MDF laps or diamond and ceramic stones or whatever you happen to have in the workshop.

There is no point in me repeating the theory behind all this as the articles explain it all in full.

Happy sharpening.

 

[matthewwh]

Of course, all of this requires a stone wide enough - to me, a major failing of the Kell is that you can't sharpen the commonest plane blade (2" wide) on the commonest stone (2" wide).

That (to me) is a show stopper.

The Kell may well be the ultimate honing guide for chisels below 3/8" wide though, but it's a lot of money for a solution to such a narrowly defined task.

BugBear

A simple board with a couple of accurately planed blocks attached 2" apart and you can slot the stone in between. Pop a cleat on the back and you can nip it up in the vice to provide a stable sharpening platform. Another easy modification is to set the projections for your commonly used honing angles, butt the wheels up to the edge of the board and knife in a mark on the top of the board where the tip of the blade is for each one. The next time you want the same angle, just butt the wheels up to the edge of the board, set your desired projection and tighten the knob - job done.

I use the No.3 Mk2 for plane irons with the scary sharp system, which will anything up to a No.8 blade. The Mk.2 can be set in a similar way, but with the blade laid flat and the wheels referanced off the edge of the bench / board.

 

[bugbear]

A simple board with a couple of accurately planed blocks attached 2" apart and you can slot the stone in between.

Yes - that would work for diamond stones, where the thickness doesn't change with wear, and all the stones are (hopefully) the same thickness.

With scary sharp, it's easy to have an abrasive that's wide enough, so blocks aren't needed.

But with oilstones and water stones, which are commonly of varying thickness, and which wear, you'd need to maintain a block-pair for each stone, and the changeover from grit to grit is more work than I care for.

The idea of a projection gauge is well known from it's application to the Eclipse #35 of course, and works well.

BugBear

 

[ivan]

The Kell isn't really suited to waterstones - or at least running on waterstones - the rollers are very thin so it's impossible to keep abrasive slurry out of the precision machining.

For blades narrower than the (wide) roller, the LV Mk2 can be tipped by shims under the roller to give a repeatable "Not-90-deg" angle if you want to.