New hand planes?

[Jacob]

.......
The fattening and polishing of the back of the blade is a one off process in the life of an iron, so between 10 and 40 minutes for a blade that lasts years.

But all the old planes I've ever seen don't have this done, old woody or a Stanley. I've had several job lots of oldies in all conditions so I have seen a lot of them. The reason it isn't done is because it isn't necessary. Instead they all seem to have used the ruler trick without a ruler i.e. just a little flattening towards the edge.
In any case it wouldn't last for life - the face gets wear as well, not to mention rust and other accidental events

....This is common practice with a chisel

No it isn't - it's a recent fashion

and it doesn't seem to be a major issue,

It is a major issue when you read the misinformed struggles of a newby who had been desperately flattening the faces of a perfectly OK set of new chisels because of some nonsense he has picked up off the net, and spoiling them in the process - working his way through reams of ever finer wet n dry and wittering on about glass/granite plates etc.
Sharpening a chisel is never easier than when it's brand new and should take half a minute or so.

PS the new sharpeners obsession with removing grinding marks is also pointless - any friction they cause disappears very quickly with use, or or even quicker with a quick pass over a fine stone, to take the sharpness off.

 

[Trafalgar]

The thing about the lift is that it never need be done on a stone. A strop works just fine, probably better for purposes of general polish and removal of the burr. To the extent you've seen what amounts to a profound back bevel which could never be produced by stropping alone, then it's my belief you were in fact looking at something intentional, just not something intentionally done for convenience in honing.

Chisels will often warp during heat treatment. If the manufacturer is on the ball, they'll produce the bevel on the convex side leaving the concave side as the flat face. This is the state my old Marples Blue Chips bought in a blister pack of five over twenty years ago were in. Same for a set of four butt chisels by Buck bought a couple of years ago at a big box home store. Lifting wasn't necessary and would have been a needless complication of the process.

 

[David C]

How can Jacob distinguish between "lifting" and the effect of a hollow stone?

I'm afraid I don't believe in this "lifting".

Something exactly repeatable is required, not variable lifting. It makes no sense.

Flat on a strop is at least repeatable.

David Charlesworth

 

[Jacob]

.....
Something exactly repeatable is required, .....

or just the usual ad hoc adjustments according to circumstances. I understand that people like the idea of perfect flatness, precise angles, total control, but these things aren't necessary. With freehand are impossible - doesn't prevent sharpening though, and usually quicker and easier than the "precision engineering" approach.

 

[ED65]

Something exactly repeatable is required, not variable lifting. It makes no sense.

Isn't this viewing the process through modern eyes and applying our standards? It's hard not to, but if repeatability of the kind we think of as necessary today was thought to be vital 100 years ago and more, then some sort of jigging would have been used (the ruler being a jig of sorts). But as we all know I'm sure freehanding was the order of the day in all aspects of sharpening.

So I have no difficulty in believing that IF a back bevel was formed intentionally and deliberately (not arising naturally from the sharpening media) it was done by just "lifting a bit", in much the same way as whetting after grinding.

 

[David C]

The ad hoc approach gives rise to the need for tearing off wire edges in endgrain and stropping.

Accurate waterstone methods do not.

I am always astonished by the amount of time Paul Sellers spends on stropping. (Was it 50 strokes on each side?)

David

 

[Jacob]

The ad hoc approach gives rise to the need for tearing off wire edges in endgrain and stropping.

Does it? News to me![ I do a quick strop on my hand and sometimes on a piece of leather - it's more about polishing near the edge rather than a contribution to sharpening

Accurate waterstone methods do not.

Waterstones aren't accurate though - unless you spend hours flattening them.

 

[D_W]

The ad hoc approach gives rise to the need for tearing off wire edges in endgrain and stropping.

Accurate waterstone methods do not.

I am always astonished by the amount of time Paul Sellers spends on stropping. (Was it 50 strokes on each side?)

David

Paul Sellers is honing and polishing with an abrasive stick, and not stropping. I can't see his sharpening method as being the bar to judge all by - my older books suggest "emery" on carving tool strops, but not flat irons.

Someone using an oilstone will strop (with bare leather), because the abrasive doesn't cut as deep of grooves and the wire edge remains in a like-sharpness edge. Or in the case of something like a washita stone, the slightly coarser finish will leave a wire edge that detatches only on leather (hopefully skillfully thinned out by the sharpener).

On a waterstone sharpened stone, you can strop the wire edge off with your palm if you choose not to do the ruler trick.

Before declaring it the replacement of a strop, I'd flip the iron over both ways and find out if the entire foil is actually removed (if it is, the iron will shave equally well on either side of the bevel).

 

[David C]

I find that the wire edge floats off on the stone.

If it does no, something is not quite right and I repeat.

David

 

[Trafalgar]

I had read somewhere that leather either naturally has silica or it is introduced in the tanning process. So a natural leather strop, even 'untreated' has an abrasive quality though obviously an extraordinarily mild one. I am by no means an expert on leather, and do not use a leather strop but rather a hard rubber strop.

 

[Trafalgar]

How can Jacob distinguish between "lifting" and the effect of a hollow stone?

I'm afraid I don't believe in this "lifting".

Something exactly repeatable is required, not variable lifting. It makes no sense.

Flat on a strop is at least repeatable.

David Charlesworth

That same argument could be repeated for virtually any hand process in woodworking. Where would one draw the line?

 

[D_W]

I had read somewhere that leather either naturally has silica or it is introduced in the tanning process. So a natural leather strop, even 'untreated' has an abrasive quality though obviously an extraordinarily mild one. I am by no means an expert on leather, and do not use a leather strop but rather a hard rubber strop.

It does have silica in it, but the effect of it is dependent on type of leather, and how much it's broken in and how well it was tanned (and whether or not it's oiled, etc).

What you're hoping for in a leather only strop (if the edge is truly ready without the wire edge being strong) is one that doesn't do too much. Something like fresh horse butt has an abrasive quality that you'll *see* for a short period of time (it will haze an edge).

Not much of it matters for woodworking, only razoring, where you can feel the difference between the types (cordovan and horse butt - broken in - doing the least abrading of an edge and without rounding) and bovine where the leather is both soft and slow cutting (the softness is less desirable - or must've been in the past, because horse leather was always used when there used to be a ready supply - pig and bovine were lower market stuff).

On a broken in strop, if you don't finish a hard edge that well, there's not enough abrasive power to make up for anything. Add chromium oxide, then all of the sudden that is different.

The ruler trick or not stuff is a bit odd - assertions of this or that, or the wire edge always leaves completely. You can't see it when it's tiny, not even under an optical microscope. Which means it probably doesn't matter at all for woodworking - but part of the arguments probably hinge on assertions made about things you can't see. I always found it interesting that before learning to shave (and forgoing stropping of tools) that an iron always cut better on one side or another. No matter how fine the stone, if you honed a stroke on a very fine stone, the best cutting side always was the side facing up from the stone. If you strop with bare leather, then the difference between sides goes away (meaning that the ruler trick or honing and stropping are not the same thing).

 

[D_W]

I can't believe we have these same discussions over and over, as if each of us can't tell whether or not our tools are sharp enough to work and/or hit our marked lines.

No wonder the beginners talk about this crap over and over and over.

 

[Derek Cohen (Perth Oz)]

The ruler trick or not stuff is a bit odd - assertions of this or that, or the wire edge always leaves completely. You can't see it when it's tiny, not even under an optical microscope. Which means it probably doesn't matter at all for woodworking

I can't believe we have these same discussions over and over, as if each of us can't tell whether or not our tools are sharp enough to work and/or hit our marked lines.

No wonder the beginners talk about this rubbish over and over and over.

Sharpening discussions really seem to threaten most - as if they challenge your sexuality, religion, or political views.

I do not use the RT, but have done so, and it works very well. Many of us owe David C a huge debt for teaching us enough to get started, and to develop the skills to make further decisions for ourselves.

It does not surprise me that. the RT works so well. And it DOES work well. Flattening the back of a blade is NOT a one-time operation. Bevels wear on BOTH sides, and a wear bevel must be removed when sharpening before the edge is pronounced done. I do this well enough not to need the RT, and I assume that many others do as well. However many have not learned to do this proficiently, and they benefit from David's RT.

Regards from Yorkshire

Derek

 

[D_W]

I don't disagree with that, i cut my teeth on the DVD, too. I've moved on, some don't, and it doesn't really matter too much either way. David's method is slower than what I do now, which is why I changed (laziness).

It's sort of like white or red wine, except in this case there seems to be something among the instructors that involves them ending with an assertion that implies their method is best.

As soon as we understand sharpening, we can do it just about any way - I'm curious about why we argue over it, to some extent. I nutted over all kinds of stuff, the stones, the methods, etc, got a microscope and looked at things out of curiosity only to find that all of it was not more than interesting (it was interesting, though) and that some of the definites that I took away from David's video weren't very definite, and learned later as charlie and jacob said, a lot of those older tools have the lift on purpose (my engineer friend and I assumed early on it was lack of care, but quite often I'd imagine it was skill).

I never fully had to understand what was going on with everything until shaving with a straight razor, but those folks can go way over the edge, too, and the same argument goes on there as here (progression of 10 stones, very prescriptive methods, etc, while the people who have been shaving for decades ignore all of it and do something fairly simple - specifically, their methodology looks a lot more like what a barber would've done 100 years ago - a single stone and a strop with a linen. Another side curiosity is the resin stones being touted as something new, but they show up in droves 100 years ago in various touch up hones and bench stones, they just never unseated much while good natural stones were available for professional users).

Another aside, the ten stone progressions and specific "strokes" for newbies on the razor boards address the same thing, I guess, trying to create a guaranteed result - and then ultimately the folks who are loyal do not believe in what Warren refers to as craftsman's subtlety, and assume all prior lived in the dark ages.

 

[Jacob]

Personally I think the new sharpening is all about the jig. They barely existed 50 years ago and sharpening wasn't half as interesting and challenging as it now is! :lol:

 

[iNewbie]

Whenever these threads come up you have a jig of our own Jacob - on a blarney stone.

 

[sploo]

I can't help but feel that a lot of the "musts" (ruler/no ruler, strop/no strop etc.) are derived from a particular person's method of sharpening.

For example, looking at David's article here http://www.popularwoodworking.com/techn ... uler_trick, the first few images neatly illustrate the problem with a worn stone causing a belly on the underside of the plane iron; meaning the edge cannot be hit after the stone is flattened. But... if a person only ever used abrasive sheets on glass, or diamond plates (which I understand stay flat), would that not render this whole bellying problem irrelevant?

My point being that any particular stage in a sharpening technique isn't always required/irrelevant in isolation; it's about the whole process you use.

 

[Jacob]

I can't help but feel that a lot of the "musts" (ruler/no ruler, strop/no strop etc.) are derived from a particular person's method of sharpening.

For example, looking at David's article here http://www.popularwoodworking.com/techn ... uler_trick, the first few images neatly illustrate the problem with a worn stone causing a belly on the underside of the plane iron; ....

Not really. The diagrams make no sense. "Belly" is Dave's term for an imaginary problem. In reality hollow stones are normal and not a problem. They don't get hollow across the width, only along the length. They don't need flattening (and so on :roll: ). He has a very individual approach to all this which you can follow if you want to, it will work no doubt, but there are easier methods, both quicker and cheaper, which have been in use from day one.

PS and the ruler trick produces a "belly" of it's own (albeit a little one)! There's nothing wrong with bellies. He's right about how you don't need to remove grinding marks or flatten except very near the edge itself. And you don't need a ruler for the ruler trick - it's easier without and you get a finer angle (if that's what you want).

By all means follow Dave's methods if you want to but don't take them as gospel.

 

[sploo]

He has a very individual approach to all this which you can follow if you want to.

I think that could be said of just about anyone that's posted on this thread, TBH. My point is less about whether certain steps are fundamentally right or wrong in isolation (that's a separate argument) but how certain steps are or aren't appropriate for different techniques and sharpening hardware.