Leather stropping wheel

[transatlantic]

You see a lot of wood carvers that use a leather (or MDF) stropping wheel attached to a what looks a like a bog standard bench grinder, and they seem to get excellent results.

Just wondering. Why isn't this more common with woodworking chisels?

Given the speed at which the wheel is spinning, wouldn't this alleviate having to maintain all the different bevels you use when hand sharpening? and also require less itermediate grits? ... and perhaps make it that much easier to hand sharpen as you're holding the chisel still?

I know that some of the slow speed machines like the Tormek have a leather stopping wheel, but those are very expensive.

Just curious more than anything. I'm guessing there are some short comings?

 

[Rorschach]

I use an MDF wheel on a grinder, get similar results.

 

[TheTiddles]

Sharpening thread alert!

Anyway, here’s something most don’t know…

With a leather strop you are honing, as in, you are refining the surface that’s been ground, averaging it off, reducing its roughness, which is great to make them cut better, especially with curved surfaces which are really hard to get a fine edge on consistently, as most sharpening methods using stones, papers etc… are…

…actually grinding methods, where the surface is abraded away to match a reference surface, i.e. that of the stone, the surface the paper is stuck to, etc… with a curved surface that’s hard to get a fine edge on all around unlike a chisel where a straight edge on a flat surface is not rocket science and you can use a fine stone/paper to get that lovely smooth edge straight off from grinding, no honing needed, but sometimes if the tool dulls it’s a quick way to polish it slightly before a re-grind.

So, most of the things people call honing… are not. But honing is good for some things, especially curved surfaces where the media carrying the abrasive (the leather, MDF, whatever) conforms to the tool as needed to abrade the entire edge.

Use whatever works, hones (in this instance) are not accurate, they take their reference and precision from the tool deforming them.

And remember sharp enough, is sharp enough, however you got there.

 

[transatlantic]

Sharpening thread alert!

Anyway, here’s something most don’t know…

With a leather strop you are honing, as in, you are refining the surface that’s been ground, averaging it off, reducing its roughness, which is great to make them cut better, especially with curved surfaces which are really hard to get a fine edge on consistently, as most sharpening methods using stones, papers etc… are…

…actually grinding methods, where the surface is abraded away to match a reference surface, i.e. that of the stone, the surface the paper is stuck to, etc… with a curved surface that’s hard to get a fine edge on all around unlike a chisel where a straight edge on a flat surface is not rocket science and you can use a fine stone/paper to get that lovely smooth edge straight off from grinding, no honing needed, but sometimes if the tool dulls it’s a quick way to polish it slightly before a re-grind.

So, most of the things people call honing… are not. But honing is good for some things, especially curved surfaces where the media carrying the abrasive (the leather, MDF, whatever) conforms to the tool as needed to abrade the entire edge.

Use whatever works, hones (in this instance) are not accurate, they take their reference and precision from the tool deforming them.

And remember sharp enough, is sharp enough, however you got there.

I get what you're saying, but isn't it surely the speed at which you're cutting the important factor?

So for example, if you're sanding with a ROS, you're much better to work through the grits, low to high. Where as if you're passing something through an industrial drumsander, you can get away with starting at a much higher grit.

 

[TheTiddles]

I get what you're saying, but isn't it surely the speed at which you're cutting the important factor?

So for example, if you're sanding with a ROS, you're much better to work through the grits, low to high. Where as if you're passing something through an industrial drumsander, you can get away with starting at a much higher grit.

I’m struggling to make that logic work, but I don’t work with industrial sanders.

Certainly for manufacturing surgical tools there’s a bank of grinding wheels of ever finer media each part goes through till they are onto the hones last of all.

 

[xy mosian]

I thought that a leather 'tyred' wheel would be a good idea for carving gouges. Having looked at the specifications of commercially produced units I dropped the speed of the wheel to give a slower rim speed, meters per second, than direct drive.
As a polishing device it works well. However I find it difficult to reference the existing bevel. My problem is that I can get a beautifully polished edge, but at an increasingly thick angle.
Other carvers I have come across have had similar problems with more conventional leather strops, glued to nominally flat wood. It seems that the thicker, or softer, the leather the more pronounced the problem becomes. As the blade is drawn over the leather some compression, of the leather, occurrs, this returns to normal at the edge and after a number of stroppings produces a thicker edge. Of course this happens more quickly under power.
At the moment I polish the edges with compound on mdf. That works well but needs the build up of compound scraping off now and again. As a suggestion, from a member of the International Association of Woodcarvers, not as grand as it sounds open to all, I am considering a move to pieces of cereal box cardboard, the dense card, mounted on backing. Once clogged this can quickly be swopped.
By the way I may have sharp, shining, gouges but my carving is no better.

geoff

 

[D_W]

You see a lot of wood carvers that use a leather (or MDF) stropping wheel attached to a what looks a like a bog standard bench grinder, and they seem to get excellent results.

Just wondering. Why isn't this more common with woodworking chisels?

Given the speed at which the wheel is spinning, wouldn't this alleviate having to maintain all the different bevels you use when hand sharpening? and also require less itermediate grits? ... and perhaps make it that much easier to hand sharpen as you're holding the chisel still?

I know that some of the slow speed machines like the Tormek have a leather stopping wheel, but those are very expensive.

Just curious more than anything. I'm guessing there are some short comings?

I think it's not uncommon for someone to finish woodworking tools with something spinning, but it's not taught as a matter of practice.

I tried felt and leather wheels in the past, but they are too aggressive and can make a lot of heat (the expensive koch system solved this to some extent by using smaller wheels at a lower speed and some kind of compound that liquifies).



I came up with a method early last year to use a cheap buffer and cheap stones - it's better than sharpening stones, and there isn't probably a group of 10 people on here together who have used more sharpening stones than I have.

(note, I get nothing from youtube - i have ads turned off, but this is no longer good enough for youtube, so they put an ad on the front of my videos and keep the money themselves. I can't stop it. This is a video that I made and isn't intended to be a promo or a "i want to grow my channel, so I'll make something light and skip some steps", it's a full on discussion of important bits about geometry embedded in the method. Any acceptable chisel will perform almost as well as the best chisel you can find with this. There's zero chance it hasn't been done before by someone lazy like me, but people who just go to a wheel and polish a whole bevel won't get the same results and will probably often end up with rounded over dull-feeling chisels).

 

[D_W]

(Separately, how people sharpen professionally and how David C or Paul Sellers or some other such method is taught are, I'm guessing, two drastically different things. I can't see a pro using either of the above methods unless they don't use hand tools much - the methods are too slow and have too much time wasted in them, but they're intended to get beginners going and that's generally not what a pro would do - use a collection of the easiest methods to master).

 

[Rorschach]

I think it's not uncommon for someone to finish woodworking tools with something spinning, but it's not taught as a matter of practice.

I tried felt and leather wheels in the past, but they are too aggressive and can make a lot of heat (the expensive koch system solved this to some extent by using smaller wheels at a lower speed and some kind of compound that liquifies).



I came up with a method early last year to use a cheap buffer and cheap stones - it's better than sharpening stones, and there isn't probably a group of 10 people on here together who have used more sharpening stones than I have.

(note, I get nothing from youtube - this is a video that I made and isn't intended to be a promo or a "i want to grow my channel, so I'll make something light and skip some steps", it's a full on discussion of important bits about geometry embedded in the method. Any acceptable chisel will perform almost as well as the best chisel you can find with this. There's zero chance it hasn't been done before by someone lazy like me, but people who just go to a wheel and polish a whole bevel won't get the same results and will probably often end up with rounded over dull-feeling chisels).

This is the main method I use now, really like it. Even do it on my beater chisel except that I go straight from the grinder to the buffer, a chipped edge goes to razor sharp in seconds.

For knives I use the MDF wheel but I start using a fine hard deburring wheel to create the edge and the mdf to remove the burr and refine the edge.

 

[D_W]

You make a good point - even though the method shown looks corny, it creates a fine edge. The honing step could be skipped and just use the buffer to buff off the wire edge for a chisel that's just headed for abuse.

 

[transatlantic]

Ah, interesting. So in short, establishing a secondary bevel on the stone by hand or using a guide. And then using a stitched mop on a grinder with compound to "strop" and purposely create a rounded tertiary bevel from strength?