What is David Charlesworth using?

[Rob_H]

Just saw a video on YouTube where David Charlesworth puts the chisel into an small metal guIde to get the angle right for sharpening his chisel. Does anyone know which one he is using, please?

 

[MikeK]

He could be using the Lie Nielsen Honing Guide, or any of the other Eclipse variations.

 

[ED65]

Rob, if you need a honing jig think about making one of these. A quick-and-dirty one will take you about ten minutes. They're the ideal solution if you need a jig right now but actually they work as well or better than any guide you can buy.

They have numerous advantages over conventional wheel guides in that no portion of the jig rides on the stone, making it much easier to use the full length and prevent hollowing. And for chisels with their much smaller reference surface one of these is much more stable than any of the clones of the Eclipse guide which slavishly copied the narrow central wheel, which are prone to rocking side to side.

Read more about the jig, along with more than you ever wanted to know about sharpening, on Brent Beach's site here.

 

[DTR]

Rob, if you need a honing jig think about making one of these. A quick-and-dirty one will take you about ten minutes. They're the ideal solution if you need a jig right now but actually they work as well or better than any guide you can buy.

They have numerous advantages over conventional wheel guides in that no portion of the jig rides on the stone, making it much easier to use the full length and prevent hollowing. And for chisels with their much smaller reference surface one of these is much more stable than any of the clones of the Eclipse guide which slavishly copied the narrow central wheel, which are prone to rocking side to side.

Read more about the jig, along with more than you ever wanted to know about sharpening, on Brent Beach's site here.

I don't want to get involved in a sharpening debate, and I have even less interest in reading all that blurb about sharpening. However that claim about the jig never touching the stone is surely more a function of the media rather than the jig. Wet & Dry on glass naturally provides a reference surface the size of the glass. I cannot see how you'd use this jig on a stone without it riding on the stone itself. Unless you had some kind of plinth that matched the stone's height, but then that would also work for an Eclipse guide.

Sorry if I'm missing something.

 

[Yojevol]

Why use a jig? Craftsmen never used them before they were invented and plenty of us still don't.
If your worried about keeping the angle constant during sharpening do this:-
1. stand feet apart, shoulders parallel with the stone
2. Hold the blade with both hands at your required angle with pressure on the cutting edge
3. tuck your elbows into your sides so that your upper body is locked steady
4. create the sharpening motion by swaying your upper body with legs only.

With a bit of practice you'll soon get the hang of it
Brian

 

[custard]

Rob, if you need a honing jig think about making one of these.

There are loads of problems with that jig, just off the top of my head

1. It wouldn't take a shorter iron like a block plane iron
2. It's no good for a chisel (which is what the OP is interested in) because the chisel would swivel from side to side, plus there's no way to ensure you're honing at 90 degrees.
3. It certainly wouldn't take a partially worn chisel (he ferule would foul the block before the blade edge reached the desired length), and indeed the block may be too large for anything but a paring chisel.
4. You can't camber a plane iron on it
5. You can't use it put a back bevel on a plane iron
6. For an oil stone or diamond stone you'd need a platform ahead of the stone at the same height as the stone, if you use mixed sharpening stones you'd need multiple platforms

Basically it's designed for OCD sharpening fundamentalists to hone plane irons to a fixed 90 degree profile using the scary sharp method. For anyone else, and for any practical woodworker, it's pretty much useless.

 

[custard]

Why use a jig? Craftsmen never used them before they were invented and plenty of us still don't.

I've never quite got that logic.

I've seen newbies waste hours and hours getting absolutely nowhere with free hand sharpening. Furthermore many people taking up woodworking don't have that much finger strength to begin with. You wrote a fine post recently about retirement woodworking, would you deny others your enriching experiences just because they have a touch of arthritis?

I'm a full time cabinet maker with an immaculate pedigree of training, I make pieces that sell for thousands of pounds. Yet I'm happy to use a honing guide, maybe not everyday but whenever the occasion arises I won't hesitate to pick one up. I don't accept the craft snobbishness about free hand sharpening, I judge craftspeople on what they make, and as long as their tools are sharp it's irrelevant to me how they were sharpened.

Finally there's a curious inconsistency in all of this. The higher up the craft ladder a furniture maker goes, the more they'll use jigs of every description. That's just a fact of workshop life. So why not extend that same principle to sharpening and get jigged up with a honing guide?

 

[Jacob]

Why use a jig? Craftsmen never used them before they were invented and plenty of us still don't.

I've never quite got that logic.

I've seen newbies waste hours and hours getting absolutely nowhere with free hand sharpening. ........

I've seen a whole generation of woodworkers wasting millions of hours and vast amounts of money on complicated modern sharpening fashions and all the kit, to no obvious advantage. If only they had persisted a little longer with freehand! I guess they get put off by the gadget salesmen and the dodgy gurus.

So why not extend that same principle to sharpening and get jigged up with a honing guide?

Because it is quicker, cheaper and easier without.
They may seem a good idea for beginners, like training wheels, but people tend then to get stuck with them and never get the hang of it.

 

[transatlantic]

Why use a jig? Craftsmen never used them before they were invented and plenty of us still don't.

I've never quite got that logic.

I've seen newbies waste hours and hours getting absolutely nowhere with free hand sharpening. ........

I've seen a whole generation of woodworkers wasting millions of hours and vast amounts of money on complicated modern sharpening fashions and all the kit, to no obvious advantage. If only they had persisted a little longer with freehand! I guess they get put off by the gadget salesmen and the dodgy gurus.

So why not extend that same principle to sharpening and get jigged up with a honing guide?

Because it is quicker, cheaper and easier without.

Surely it should be the other way around. You start with the jig, and then when you gain experience and want to be that little be quicker, you start practising free hand.

Woodworking is a minefield of skills. As a beginner I'll take any help a jig can provide.

Don't forget that most people spend a few hours a week at their hobby. That's not a lot of sharpening time to build up the skill.

 

[PAC1]

I have Beer and popcorn can some one get the BBQ lit (hammer)

 

[ElectricFeet]

Just saw a video on YouTube where David Charlesworth puts the chisel into an small metal guIde to get the angle right for sharpening his chisel. Does anyone know which one he is using, please?

I presume the one you mean is the one shown at 33 seconds in on the "David's method for chisel sharpening" video (I don't have permissions to post links).

It looks to me to be similar as the one Axminster sell (Axminster's code 340147). They are pretty generic and can be found everywhere.

The Lie Nielsen, which looks similar, is more sophisticated, with interchangeable jaws.

I don't like either (I have the Axminster one, but not the Lie Nielsen). As they only have one wheel, the margin for error is just as great as going freehand: it's easy to tip to the left or right (or veer slightly). These types of guides also don't fit shorter, thicker Japanese chisels.

I prefer a two-wheel guide. My faves are Richard Kell's. They cost a fortune (they are hand made) but they are very precise (and the user guide is written by hand!)

Freehand is better than wheels in many respects; not least because you can move the blade at an angle to the direction of movement, which reduces the chances of digging into the finer stones. But I don't trust my ability to hold the blade at the correct angle for the several minutes it takes to prepare a chisel.

 

[Tasky]

Why use a jig? Craftsmen never used them before they were invented and plenty of us still don't.

Why use a car?
Craftsmen always did fine with just a horse and cart, so why don't hobbyists go out and grab themselves a cheap used nag off eBay to lug their wood back to their sheds?

Then again, we're not actual 'craftsmen' anyway, so haven't gone through apprenticeships at age 13, with nothing better to do with our bags of time than sit there practicing hand-sharpening over and over....

For my part, I needed a jig just to ensure my iron edges were square in the first place, else I'd have been hand-sharpening them into skew blades of some kind!

I have Beer and popcorn can some one get the BBQ lit (hammer)

Way ahead of you, bro...

I also have arguments prepared, since you've unwittingly opened several more age-old cans-o'-worms with that statement right there... Barbecue, BBQ, Barbie, grill or braai? Gas, coal or wood? Fish, chicken, burgers? Beer Can Chicken? So many more arguments!!!

 

[Ttrees]

To those wanting to teach themselves how to sharpen freehand, I suggest having a grinder to take off the enlarged secondary bevel
so you only need a few strokes to hone again,
Either that or having a plate with sandpaper attached.

Grinding often, you learn faster and have less time to mess up, and if you over do it (lifting up too much) it won't take much work to get back to the honing angle of choice.
Bevel on the rough stone, grab some shavings and lightly feel for the shavings catch on the burr, if you cant feel it, keep on the bevel and don't get off the rough stone until you feel that burr.
Dont snap that burr off with the shavings...turn the iron over, and work the back to fold up this burr
Rough stone again for a few strokes and onto the fine for the rest of it.

Look up David W's style on his videos, or Bill Carter's either...
Much easier approaching freehand this way with the edge along the length of the stone,
and not trying to emulate the orientation which the honing guide is doing.
Combine this with a nice tall table which you can rest your stomach against for stability is what works for me.

Starting off the cheap Eclipse copy server me well, but it was still messy...created problems that wasn't there
Anyways, It got a bit worn and wouldn't hone an edge without having a skew or a camber, and I wanted a near straight iron
for tearout elimination, and the jig got tossed
Summary
Its a cheap tool, for a fiver you can learn what sharp actually is...
If you cant shave your hair without getting skin dust refine the edge more until you get hair popping sharpness like in this video
Worth doing so just for the experience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jix5SDsfS5I


Tom

 

[Jacob]

........For my part, I needed a jig just to ensure my iron edges were square in the first place, else I'd have been hand-sharpening them into skew blades of some kind!....

Why?
Can't you just check with a square?
For most purposes just checking by eye is enough anyway.
For most purposes a camber is preferable, very few plane scenarios need a square edge - they actually make planing more difficult (tramlines etc) and they make sharpening more difficult - you have to flatten stones too and the amount of work (and kit) starts to rocket!

 

[Rob_H]

Gosh, I appear to have started a debate here, thanks everyone for the input. As someone who is a self taught amateur, and had gap of a few years since I had a workshop, I was of the view of David Charlesworth was using it, it was probably the done thing. I am keen to use my hand tools rather than just the machinery I have. I looked at doing one of his courses a while ago but couldn’t tie the dates in with availability. Appreciate the different views on the subject too.

 

[ED65]

Not your fault Rob, you had to ask the question and sometimes the mere smell of sharpening is enough to ignite the debate on the topic. Or the various topics, since people argue endlessly about literally every aspect of it :lol:

If you're interested in learning to freehand sharpen it would be good to get a lesson from someone who knows how to do it well if at all possible. But failing that Paul Sellers has at least one video devoted to sharpening and seeing him do it and talk about what he's doing is regularly cited as a "I finally got it" moment by guys who have struggled with sharpening for a long time. So well worth a gander.

But if you'd prefer not to and using a jig appeals then go for it, that's your prerogative. 99.9999% chance you'll get much better edges early on if you use a jig than you will without! And that's coming from an advocate of freehanding.

A point to remember: sharpening is a journey more than a destination. Your edges now will not match your edges in six months or a year (people progress at different rates) and two or three years further down the road you'll likely look back and laugh at what you considered to be sharp back in 2018

 

[ED65]

Unless you had some kind of plinth that matched the stone's height...

Yes that's it in a nutshell.

As you say the same thing would work with a Eclipse guide or anything built along similar lines, although it is surprising how seldom you see this. I've long wondered why and have come to suspect it's due to buying into an off-the-shelf solution rather than thinking through the problem from first principles the way Beach did.

 

[Racers]

Ignore all the people who demand you sharpen their way, find a method that works for you.
What you do in the privacy of your own workshop is no one else's business.

The eclipse or clone guide work well for most chisels and plane blades and are very cheap.

Pete

 

[ED65]

Woodworking is a minefield of skills. As a beginner I'll take any help a jig can provide.

Don't forget that most people spend a few hours a week at their hobby. That's not a lot of sharpening time to build up the skill.

That's certainly a big part of it.

I've said this before to Jacob, freehand sharpening is something that some struggle with for years. Not days, weeks or months. Years. I'm sure it sounds like an exaggeration but it isn't and there are countless posts on every woodworking forum in the world to prove it.

Some people get it early on but others don't. And rarely mentioned, some will never get it; not because they're not trying hard enough, they just aren't built to do it consistently to the required high standard (in the same way not everyone can learn to type fast and accurately, or play the piano).

 

[AES]

THANK GOODNESS! IMO anyway, someone (ED65 in this case) has spoken a bit of "common sense" on this subject. As per the new button "thanks" for that.