Sharpening advice please - Cosman vs 3M papers

[JonG]

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[MikeG.]

Hmmm, ok.... I’ll let the owner of workshop heaven and one of the UK’s best guitar makers know that they are just sucked in by hype and dont actually know what they are talking about.........

Oh dear. You want to turn this into some sort of conflict. OK, well crack on. Matthew, who I've known for decades, will tell you that I am correct about there being a lot of hype around "scary sharp", including the ridiculous name. That doesn't mean it isn't a legitimate and effective system for sharpening.....it just means that there is a lot of hype about it.

 

[JonG]

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[AJB Temple]

When I first started out making guitars, the only sharpening system I had was my dad's old oilstone. I think he got it from his dad. It was very dished and I needed to get my edges square (I thought at the time). So my father suggested wet and dry carborundum paper, which was stuck down on a metal plate with water. I used a cheap roller sharpening thing, which I've still got somewhere (Eclipse?) to maintain the angle. With water or 3 in 1 oil as a lubricant, two grades of paper would get anything sharp enough to shave the hairs off my arm. The paper was basically free as my dad worked at Jaguar. I was about 17.

This was way before the stupid "scary sharp" term arrived (I first saw it on knife forums). It works fine. Oilstones are fine, but I find them messy as they attract dust in the workshop. Diamond plates are OK. I have about six grades of high quality waterstones but only use them for my Japanese knives. (they do not need flattening after every use. No one in Japan does that.) In the workshop I use a power linisher because it is quick (seconds) and I am lazy. Plus a diamond plate for a quick hone if I feel super keen.

Anything works. You will eventually find what suits you. People obsess about sharpening almost as if it is an end in itself. I prefer to sharpen or hone little and often, before I feel the edge going off. I don't even bother checking the sharpness with my thumb now - I know it will be sharp enough for what I need, and for me focusing on the job in hand, rather than the tool, is more important.

 

[Gary_S]

I don't want a conflict either but I went from cheap diamond stones and water stones to Scary Sharp and wont be going back. I have never found using Scary Sharp a faff and neither have my sons who are guitar makers and fine furniture college students. It's presumptuous of you to think that its all hype when a lot of very good woodworkers and furniture makers use them including furniture schools.

 

[MikeG.]

Right, let's clear this up once and for all. Try and read what I say, and not what you think I am saying.

"Scary sharp" is an effective method of sharpening. It works really well. Anyone who chooses to use it is going to end up with beautifully sharp tools. OK, are you with me so far?

"Scary sharp" is also flavour of the month, fashionable, hyped........insert whatever term you like. I am not being perjorative about "scary sharp" when I say it is being hyped (or at least, it was being a year or two back).

That very clearly says that it is not "all hype".......an argument that you have just assigned to me, when I clearly didn't say that myself. It is not all hype (ie just a marketing exercise), because it works, and works well.

Is there anything about that which confuses you, or leaves my position ambiguous in any way? I want to clear this up now before someone else seeks offense.

 

[Ttrees]

My lapping plate only comes out when I' making a tool.
It normally resides in the metalwork area where the grinder is, when it's needed.
I couldn't stick that loose grit everywhere, if it was beside where I hone tools.

A big factor in this for me is that I have a bench grinder, so have no need to go to the effort making new primary bevels by the effort of lapping

If I didn't have a grinder, or a manual grinder or linisher...
then I would probably use a lapping plate, but not for honing.

I wonder what David_W, or anyone who has the ability to inspect an edge,
and has patience to stick with it, makes of daily SS use.

Tom

 

[AJB Temple]

It might be worth adding....stuff does not necessarily need to be ever so sharp. It just needs to be suitably sharp for the job in hand. A tomato easily proves this: I can get a Japanese knife sharp enough to shave with, on a 12000 grit water stone and impregnated leather strop. However, for slicing tomatoes this is not ideal. A knife run over say an 800 grit stone will cut a tomato much better in practice, because it ends up with a rougher edge that will deal with the skin better than the very sharp knife.

Same can apply to chisels. Because I do oak framing sometimes, I end up chopping out a lot of mortises. There is no way I mess about with creating secondary bevels and honing, when I am going to be belting a 2" Ward with a 3lb mallet.

 

[maznaz]

I'm relatively new to woodworking compared to the others in this thread. I've used sandpaper on glass (no idea why this variant gets a special name?), cheap oil stone, a nicer india double sided stone, and eventually diamond plates. All of them worked fine, and all of them got markedly better as I got better at it myself.

Now that I'm familiar with all of the methods, I use two ultex diamond plates (at about 25 quid each) and a leather strop. I'm selling all the other bits and bobs. I don't have to worry about buying oil, I just use window cleaner and water mixed in a spray bottle, and I don't have to faff around cleaning spray glue off glass. Sharpening isn't ever going to be fun, and this method takes the least time to set up and the least time to clean up after. My plane blades don't care either way.

 

[TJC]

Anything works...

I think this last para is the crux of where I am. I appreciate these various systems work well for different users, I'm trying to avoid chopping and changing in the future..

Appreciate all your input, it's all being taken in, thanks.

 

[Doug B]

I reckon you're the only person I've ever heard of, Doug, who has gone from diamond to abrasive paper. The journey is generally very much in the opposite direction. What was it about diamond plates that made you think "I should give lapping paper a try"?

Mike, I’d used oil stones for over 30 years when I joined this forum & it was Mathew who introduced me to scary sharp, this was my first change of sharpening medium & I really liked it. I then tried waterstones mainly because Alf was such an exponent of them but I found them too time consuming & messy though they worked well.
After this I figured I’d go the whole hog & bought some DMT diamond stones & I admit initially I was impressed with them but I found the more I used them the slower sharpening became & for that reason I went back to the 3M sheets.

I’ve never had any problems with the sheets other than the finest is easy to cut but I’ve got used to using this & this is no longer an issue. I use the self adhesive sheets so have never had problems with wrinkling, they are easy to peel off the pieces of glass I use & quick to reapply. I find them no more messy than diamond stones & what I particularly like is I can use a single A4 sheet on a big piece of glass for large sharpening jobs which is something no other option allows.

As I said in my previous reply it’s all personal choice, I went from free hand sharpening which I was taught & did for donkeys years to using a Veritas honing guide, most go the other way but I find the accuracy the guide gives me means resetting blades in planes is far quicker so the time lost using the guide is is made up by not loosing the plane setting. That said I use Veritas planes these days which have grub screws to align blade so this wouldn’t be important to users of other makes of planes.

 

[Trevanion]

I touched up one of my chisels today so I thought I'd take some pictures of the process to post up here

This is my set-up, one Norton India Stone (I think it is a Norton anyway, could be anything to be honest!), a piece of leather stuck to a piece of wood, a bit of polishing compound and some 3 in 1 oil for the stone. Buying new you'd be looking at around £30 for the stone, £3 for the oil, £3 for the bit of compound and the leather and wood is literally scraps.

Angle held and sharpened free-hand at roughly 30 degrees or so, the angle is not particularly critical in my humble opinion although some may argue it is detrimental to how the chisel operates. Sharpening in figure-eights of varying size trying to cover the majority of the stone until you can feel a burr developed on the cutting edge.

Now, it's not a very pretty perfectly flat and square bevel like you'd get off a honing guide but it works all the same.

Rub a little compound on the leather and 30 or so runs on the strop leaves you with a mirror finish and a very keen edge, a couple of swipes on the back of the chisel to remove any remaining burr pretty much finishes off the chisel.

On the flatness of the back of the chisel, you could only really call the first inch or so of my half inch chisel "relatively flat" as it may even be ever so slightly crowned rather than flat or dished, this doesn't really bother me too much. There is a very slight radius on the outer edges of the chisel which again, doesn't bother me too much since it means my fingers don't get all fish-gill slices when I'm doing paring work and the like.

I could shave hairs with the chisel like every other sod who wants to show off but I'll show you something even more impressive and let the results speak for themselves, perhaps not to the unknowing eye though. The timber is Accoya, Radiata Pine, it's extraordinarily difficult to pare the end grain because of the very hard winter growth and super soft summer growth plus the fact it's only circa ~4% moisture content (which is ridiculously low) and without razor-sharp chisels it would just chip out and pull chunks out of the end grain rather than pare sweetly like above.

Sharpening took all of two minutes, including photo taking. Sure, it ain't all that fashionable and 'hip' as scary sharp, diamond plates or waterstones but it literally does the same thing.

 

[MikeG.]

I could shave hairs with the chisel like every other sod who wants to show off.........

Nah, that's not showing off. Shave a sleeping mouse.......THAT'S showing off.

 

[topchippyles]

An indian oil stone is all you would have seen 30 years ago in any trades mans tool kit.All i have ever used and the one thing i also do is hollow grind my chisels and plane blades