If a students shows me a tool during class and asks: “Should I s….”
I cut them off. “Yes.”
I have found that when you ask yourself if a tool is dull, the poor pathetic thing is way past being dull and is on its way to getting chipped and trashed. I think you need to sharpen an edge before it actually occurs to you to sharpen that edge. Sounds impossible, but it’s not.
I sharpen a lot, and it is part of the rhythm of my day. As I finishing planing up panels with a jointer plane, I stop to sharpen the tool before I take on the parts for the lid – even if the plane is performing well.
When I chop dovetails, I touch up the tool between each corner of a carcase – even if the chisel is keen and cutting well.
This is the opposite of the way I was taught to evaluate edges. I was told: “The surface of the wood will tell you how your edge is performing. If the wood looks bad, it’s time to sharpen.”
While that makes sense on one level, I don’t want the wood to ever look bruised or scraped or chunked out. So I sharpen the smoothing plane several times a day if this is the day I’m smoothing things.
This approach not only ensures my parts will look their best, it also removes most concerns about what steel your tool is made of. If you keep an edge wicked sharp (and nothing less) then it really doesn’t matter if A4 steel holds an edge longer than Q4.
So shut up and sharpen.
— Christopher Schwarz
May I humbly suggest that “Shut up and Sharpen” make its a way onto a future LAP T-shirt?
Or lets get to the point !
You are right we let it go to long. We suggest to students that you have a natural concentration span of maybe 20 minutes. When your eyes glaze over, and your back creaks, look up, take the tool in your hand and just touch it up. Keep it in the register between keen and sharp never never let it get over to dull or blunt .
Very best .
David
Maybe why your block plane blade is one of the shortest around!
IS that sharpening or honing?
This is a semantic problem.
I use the word sharpening to mean “making something sharp” or any part of the process of grinding, honing and polishing the edge.
“Honing” is one of the things that happens during sharpening.
Everyone has different words.
Thanks for clarifying, sorry to be anal…
Well, if no one is sharpening enough, as you suggest, what does “enough” actually mean ?! Sound like it’s time for a beer, dude !
Beer? Yup, got one.
All I’m saying is that I am guilty of letting an edge go too long – I sux just like everyone else.
So, define “enough”. Please.
“Enough” is where you never have a dull edge. That’s enough.
This issue is clearly the one I need to address for sure if I ever want to move forward .
Your “shut up and sharpen” needs to be put on something and hung over my bench.
It’s clearly time for me to move past lazy. It’s up to me.
Hmm. You seem a little edgy.
But what’s the best way to sharpen? Oil stones, water stones, paper? I can’t move forward unless I get a definitive answer from somebody. (Emphasis on definitive.)
(Somebody had to stir the pot. 🙂 )
Pfft, the literati all know that armadillo shell is the only sharpening surface worth using.
😉
….with unicorn tears as the lubricant!!
It really does seem that all of the tool steel and sharpening crap as grown in its own egotistical imagination and spread like a disease in the forum world. No matter what you use, and who cares wether you have to sharpen your tool one or two times more the the forum guy who thinks “I bought this chisel because it stays sharper than yours on a microscopic level and on that bacis I highly recommend them” just remember the KISS principal “KEEP IT SHARP STUPID”
Touching up your sharp edge frequently hones your sharpening skills until they become second nature and you don’t even have to think about it.
WoodGods.
This makes a Clifton two-piece cap iron look even more attractive.
Always good to sharpen when one is done with the tool that way you don’t have to wait when starting the next project.
We all do… Need to sharpen more often!!
Because Wilbur Pan hasn’t jumped in to say it yet, I’ll say it for him:
“Sharpen more to sharpen less.”
as for my chisel when I set it in the work it had better dig in a little or it hits the stone. planes no so much. maybe more than 2 times a year is in order. I guess as long as I can grab a hand full of shavings and burnish the wood to a beautiful l shine the plane is sharp enough.