Plane and Chisel Sharpening Tools

[GAJ52]

Hi

After my retirement of being an Aircraft Engineer for 35 years, I decided to get back into my old hobby of wood working. With regard to sharpening my Plane blades and Chisels I thought I would come into the 21st Century and buy some precision methods of achieving a perfectly sharp cutting edge with these tools.

Having been very satisfied with both Record and Trend in the past, I bought a Record Power WG250 Wet Stone Grinder and a Trend Honing Guide Set, thinking these would give me precision sharp edges on my tools - wrong !!

I have read the included manuals several times and watched various YouTube videos on each product only to find I cannot get a true 90 degree sharp edge using both products. I appreciate the common denominator with these two items is me, but I have followed the manuals and videos to the letter, but still can't get a sharp 90 degree edge using either product.

Has anyone else had this problem and come up with a solution.

Thanks

Glen

 

[mynamehere]

Oh heck, this is gonna open a can of worms, I don't think that 90° is an angle to aim for on any cutting tool, 25-30 is kind of the angle to aim for, I'm sure other people will come in with some more tips...

Cheers!

Ferenc

 

[GAJ52]

Sorry I meant 90 degrees across the width of the tool, not the cutting angle which is 25 and 30 degrees.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

If they're only a degree or two out it doesn't make the slightest difference. If they're more than that you're doing something wrong.

 

[Cabinetman]

I don’t use a jig, never had one, but I suspect it’s the same effect -I’m a little heavy on the right hand side of the blade and mine are never quite 90° either, but that’s what the lateral adjustments for on the plane. Unless yours are way out of course. Ian

 

[bjm]

I have the Tormek version and have no problem. Is the stop on the holder not machined accurately?

 

[Ttrees]

David Weaver mentioned something in a recent video that I hadn't observed.
He mentioned placing your fingers exactly where you want metal to be removed, rather than leaning to remove the steel.
I have to say, it's made a difference to me most notably on a smoother plane,
and has taken some possible theory of my ark stone being inconsistent, as I have been getting an uneven camber leading me to try switching hands, and flipping stones around, plenty of differing techniques, all to no avail.

Another thing that I found useful which ol' Jacob mentioned before, is that you will achieve faster honing/correcting by not skewing your iron on the hone.

When correcting square make sure you take that burr off the edge whilst your making progress, as it may be giving an illusion of square, but could end up going out of true the other way if not removed.


Tom

 

[Nigel Burden]

As Phil said, a degree or two either way will make no difference. You still have to level the blade when you insert it after sharpening, which is what the lateral lever's for.

Nigel.

 

[GAJ52]

Many thanks for your comments.

Regarding the Trend Honing guide it has a 2 1/2 inch long roller so should maintain a constant straight cut if slight pressure is applied to the centre of the blade or chisel.

The main reason for this post was to see if anyone else used these products and had a similar problem.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

Many thanks for your comments.

Regarding the Trend Honing guide it has a 2 1/2 inch long roller so should maintain a constant straight cut if slight pressure is applied to the centre of the blade or chisel.

The main reason for this post was to see if anyone else used these products and had a similar problem.

What do you suspect to be the cause of your difficulty? Is the clamping/jig arrangement 'wobbly'/imprecise in some way. I agree with the other comments that - except for shoulder plane blades perhaps - 90.0 is an aspiration and 90+/-3 is acceptable.

 

[GAJ52]

Trend have agreed to send me a replacement honing guide as they said the odd faulty one does slip through. I'll report back if the new one produced a better edge.

 

[D_W]

David Weaver mentioned something in a recent video that I hadn't observed.
He mentioned placing your fingers exactly where you want metal to be removed, rather than leaning to remove the steel.

I used the term directed pressure. Anyone who has been using slower oilstones for a long time has probably done this as a matter of economy and sense, but it's lost in the idea of modern abrasives and "keeping everything flat". What happens is that in some kind of geometric ideal, people do a lot of work on bits of the tool that won't be in the cut, and will be later honed off before said part of the tool is ever close to it.

This came up because I put a long thread up on woodcentral showing tool edges under a microscope using various stones. It turns out that (especially in combination with a buffer on the bevel side) that a lot of supposedly slow stones do a better job of working the back of a tool and leaving a clean edge - and faster. Some of the times that I suggested were questioned as being realistic (10 seconds on a washita stone that's broken in with heavy pressure to work the back of a tool completely whereas some of the finer waterstones take 30 and the edge isn't practically better). The part folks are missing is keeping tools flat on stones where flat is important but putting all of their pressure right where the stone is to cut. Everything bends a lot more than we think it does.

If we try to detach ourselves from influence of where the sharpening is occurring (relying on jigs, etc) by avoiding this and hoping for faster stones to make up for it, the result is that sharpening takes longer, we're less flexible with it, and the job is ultimately worse.

"it's well known" that nobody can sharpen as finely freehand as they can with a jig.....

that's an often said and well accepted statement...........the only problem is that it's false. It takes some time to develop sense to know what part of the tool has to be worked with various stones, but a good freehand sharpener will complete the sharpening process more often than someone with a guide.

I also found in iron testing that using the ruler trick with a 0.5mm rule and the use of a cap iron, nobody will be able to remove the planing wear from the back of an iron without progressively making the ruler tricked strip bigger and bigger (this wear we're talking about doesn't remain with directed pressure and no ruler trick). It's OK to leave some of that wear in the back of an iron, but it's yet another forum truism that's not always true (that a ruler trick is faster to use and better at completing a sharpening job, and will not grow in size).

All that said, for someone who is new at sharpening, take your finest stone and put your finger pressure biased to one side and note how precisely the polish develops right under your finger tip. The follow up question to this is "if you do this for a while, won't you eventually belly an iron and not be able to reach the edge?"

no. I've got a couple of planes that see very heavy use and it's never occurred (for someone wanting to use a ruler trick and the cap iron, it's probably wise to use a slightly thicker rule).

The case to solve in all of this is when will it be advisable for someone to learn to do these things by touch, and when will someone be a case where sharpening won't occur often enough and with enough tools for it to make sense. I have no idea what the answer to that is. Sharpening something once a week is more than enough to learn and maintain the skill, I think.

 

[D_W]

Hi

After my retirement of being an Aircraft Engineer for 35 years, I decided to get back into my old hobby of wood working. With regard to sharpening my Plane blades and Chisels I thought I would come into the 21st Century and buy some precision methods of achieving a perfectly sharp cutting edge with these tools.

Having been very satisfied with both Record and Trend in the past, I bought a Record Power WG250 Wet Stone Grinder and a Trend Honing Guide Set, thinking these would give me precision sharp edges on my tools - wrong !!

I have read the included manuals several times and watched various YouTube videos on each product only to find I cannot get a true 90 degree sharp edge using both products. I appreciate the common denominator with these two items is me, but I have followed the manuals and videos to the letter, but still can't get a sharp 90 degree edge using either product.

Has anyone else had this problem and come up with a solution.

Thanks

Glen

This is really an issue that's to be addressed with each tool. If you get a degree or two out of square with a chisel, it doesn't matter. if you have an iron with a plane where the cap ion in the plane is a bit out of square, then what you really want to do is grind the iron to match the cap iron (if the cap iron is faulty, then it's fine to address it, but planes aren't really ground to square, they're ground within squareness tolerance of a plane, and if there's a cap iron, they're ground considering that and then to match the cap iron profile.

It goes back to the touch comment above. We grind tools close to square, and we hone them to keep them square and adjust with pressure to keep things square. That is, don't grind the entire edge off of a tool other than the first time you set it up, and if your tool is getting a bit out of square, then what you need to do is hone the side that's getting long slightly more each time you sharpen a tool.

Suddenly, with this, you've learned to maintain tools with skew irons without ever having to know what the skew angle is. The myriad of tools on the market that will hold and grind tools square never really are that square in use (and often the tools you're putting in them don't have perfectly parallel sides), so think of it less as a geometric experiment from an engineering standpoint, and more accommodating the work and managing small adjustments constantly when you hone. The more you can rely on your own touch to make small adjustments, the less time you'll spend watching videos about substandard products. Let them do the rough work - they're good enough for that, and then you do the fine when you notice something getting out of whack.

 

[GAJ52]

DW thankyou for your comments, most appreciated.

Regarding the Trend Honing Guide, the replacement arrived this afternoon. In my view the new guide cuts to a much better standard than the old one confirming the original guide had some issues - Thank you TREND for excellent after sales service.

I have done some checks on the Record WG250 and the guide arm seems to be parallel with the Wet Stone wheel, so assume it must be finger trouble on my part. I'll use some of the advice from DW and try harder

Thanks guys for your help

Glen

 

[David C]

D W I can assure that my polished back bevel does not get wider and wider.

I have blades used for 20 years where back bevel does not exceed 1.5 mm wide.

My only suggestion is that I sharpen more often than you ?

An interesting problem....

Best wishes, David

 

[D_W]

Hi, David - I'm guessing that the difference is the shape of the wear created by the cap iron. I don't remember the issue when I first started (I wasn't setting the cap iron so close and I'm sure the wear was longer and shallower). As you're aware, I started from day one with your video on sharpening, had a sharp edge the first time I tried by following your instructions precisely and have never been forced to understand what it's like to work with a dull edge. Since then, I'm searching for lazier at every turn without compromising results.

This is the flat side of an O1 iron, and the length of this wear is about 3-4 thousandths (the cap iron was set 2-2 1/2 times this length, but of course, it lifts the shaving some so the wear doesn't continue all the way to the cap).



My point with the commentary above is two-fold - we all think we're doing certain things, and sometimes the microscope says otherwise - I couldn't see the remaining wear with the naked eye, but it showed up clearly on the scope (think of removing the cupping on this iron but with a shallow angle). As long as the iron was worn but undamaged, it's no big deal to leave some of the wear in the back (no damage means it's smooth). That's #1. #2 was the idea of directing pressure exactly where you want a stone to cut and not considering an iron to be an unbending firm metal bar (the same conceptual error causes people to believe a frog surface should be milled and dead flat - in general, plane irons are never flat under cap tension, anyway). This becomes useful all over the place.

All of woodworking seems to be biasing. Much of sharpening and hand metal work seems to be the same. This biasing of pressure is the same thing that allowed me to demonstrate hollowing a piece of wood with through shavings.

All that said, if someone likes the ruler trick and has good luck with it, I think they should continue on - I am a defender of it when it comes to the folks who declared it a threat to geometry in the "clearance wars" 10+ years ago. If a person intends to spend a significant amount of time in a shop with hand tools, though, I think they will be further along with my methods, everything will become seemingly easier to sharpen and odd shaped tools and skews will just sort of seem intuitive to sharpen.

 

[D_W]

as a follow-on comment - the reason that I used your method when doing my plane iron testing was precisely because anyone can duplicate it. I figured that I would get static if the results didn't match some peoples' desires (we found that V11 in clean wood lasts a long time, I've found since that it has less tolerance for non-ideal situations). Since I was using your method, I knew I had to get my old duds out and use the same thing others would. I believe you suggested a 0.5mm rule, which means if I'm going to set a method in a test that others can duplicate, I'd sure better use what folks will have on hand from following your method.

All I can conclude from it since then is that maybe 1mm or something closer to 1 degree is better for close cap iron use if one wants to ruler trick (but I didn't continue to experiment -I feel experimented out for now). Steve elliott mentioned using a 2.5 degree situation and apparently set the lip of his cap iron so that it wouldn't be teetering over a gap.

I also knew that if I used your exact method, the critics of the test would find actually getting off of their chairs a bridge too far (whereas something less well defined would allow the trolls to assert poor sharpening or some other such nonsense).

Laziness has since pointed me back to using pressure directed right at the edge of tools on the back, and the microscope confirms that this works well and removes wear as well as the ruler trick. If it doesn't, the stone is too slow (and with such slow stones, the ruler trick often also comes up short).

I think this idea of pressure and biasing things is good for beginners from day one, but it never seems to catch on unless someone is literally addressing a problem when I type about it (winston chang mentioned something recently about poor finishing of the back edge, thus I suggested this, and he commented about how surprised he was that it actually works. All of freehand sharpening is kind of like this).

 

[Ttrees]

This came up because I put a long thread up on woodcentral showing tool edges under a microscope using various stones. It turns out that (especially in combination with a buffer on the bevel side) that a lot of supposedly slow stones do a better job of working the back of a tool and leaving a clean edge - and faster. Some of the times that I suggested were questioned as being realistic (10 seconds on a washita stone that's broken in with heavy pressure to work the back of a tool completely whereas some of the finer waterstones take 30 and the edge isn't practically better). The part folks are missing is keeping tools flat on stones where flat is important but putting all of their pressure right where the stone is to cut. Everything bends a lot more than we think it does.

David W, I presume you have inspected the good quality diamond hones, which when conditioned to a much finer grit gives a mirror polish.
I'm assuming you might include all sharpening media regarding polishing the back.

My extra fine Dia-sharp is very fine now, it has polished manys a back...
an utterly absolutely embarrassingly absurd amount of time it has gotten.
I still would be on the fence about it not being better than a washita and strop.
It certainly gives a more polished, infact a close to absolutely pristine mirror polish when lapped dry, compared to the a King 4000 waterstone I have which leaves a foggy scratch pattern.
I have some impression that some sort of inconsistency might happen occasionally for me, like your (old routine? washita&strop) demonstrates,
not a bother with that speed though.
I have noticed hit and miss that about 5 rubs off of a strop (just on the bevel) will give that hair pop like what a waterstone will tend to do, but half the other time
I notice a worser edge than I had before.

I am happy enough to take that extra few seconds or whatever, and let nothing but that fine diamond touch the backs of my tools.
Would love to see the scratch pattern of a conditioned fine diamond if you have a pic.
Cheers
Tom

 

[D_W]

I've never had one of the 3 micron diamond hones. I did have 2.5 and 5 micron diamond powder and tested those on a cast lap, but they are fresh and were too aggressive (edge life was about 65% of a 1 micron diamond edge, and for comparison, fine oilstones like a settled in washita were about 85% of the 1 micron diamond edge.

The pressure sensitivity of the washita makes it the best routine back conditioner that I know of (heavy leaning, 10 seconds removes all appreciable wear on most tools, another 10 seconds of light work and it betters anything in waterstones shy of a sigma power 13k - which itself is very slow at removing wear).

It's hard to tell by polish without looking under the scope, but there are two factors involved (I know most people think this is minutiae, but this is actually practicality):
1) the ability of a stone to be reasonably fine but get the edge done quickly and uniformly
2) the ability to use the stone without getting stray edge marks (in my testing, I've found it fairly difficult for an edge finished with pressure on a settled in black stone not to relieve itself of some bits on the edge when working finely and especially when subsequently stropped with clean leather).

These bits end up looking like this.



Buffing the bevel of the chisel actually improves edges like this because it wears out a thousandth or so eliminating all of this. Part of the reason people think they sharpen better than the unicorn edge, but they don't (and the first time they buff the tip of a chisel correctly, they find out just how perfect it is).

Even the microscope doesn't always tell the whole story - this is a 5 micron diamond edge. It looks GREAT. IT left a dull surface, never felt sharp and was completely dull early. I think the toothy start to the edge rounds off quickly and it never has a chance, but who knows. 2.5 micron did the same thing.



Compared to a 1 micron edge.



(the 1 micron edge outlasted all natural and synthetic stones - for whatever reason, the edge is actually finer looking than 0.73 micron sp13k. I don't have a shapton 30k, perhaps they'd be about the same)

 

[D_W]

(by the way, the 2.5 and 5 micron diamond powders are a lot more consistent than the diamond hones - that could be due to grading or mounting.

A very fine compound in a cotton buff does a better job on plane irons than everything except the micron and submicron compounds, and it does as good of a job as they do. On chisels, the buffer is superior - dominant in every way. There's no practical reason at this point to have a fine stone for chisels, and arguably, not for plane irons, either.