Some days I wish there were a Google Translate filter for woodworking forums and podcasts. It would allow people to understand what is really being said. Below are some actual quotes I’ve heard through the years and my rough translation of them.
Statement: “As soon as you pick up a hand tool you are losing money.”
Translation: “I can’t sharpen.”
Statement: “Some of my students went down the hand-tool route and became frustrated when the tools didn’t do what was promised.”
Translation: “I cannot sharpen, and I encourage my students to skip it.”
Statement:
“With reverent pause, I turn on the switch
And submit to the roar and the sounds that bewitch.
Abrasion, vibration, my only sensations
My art I pursue of instant creations.”
Translation: “I can’t sharpen or write poetry.”
Statement: “To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.”
Translation: “Wanna find out if I can sharpen, whale?”
Statement: “When tools were rude, great precision and nicety of finish could not be expected. To return to the crude joints of our ancestors would be a distinctly retrograde move.”
Translation: “I cuddle with my Kreg Jig.”
Statement: “Let machinery be honest – and make its own machine buildings and its own machine furniture; let it make its chairs and tables of stamped aluminum if it likes: Why not?”
Read the other installments in the “Sharpen This” series viathis link.
When it comes to the topic of honing guides, I’d sooner have a double colonoscopy than discuss them. But here goes.
Honing guides are jigs. They hold a cutter to perform an operation, much like a scratch stock holds a moulding cutter, a slitting gauge holds a knife for cutting veneer or a router holds a dovetail bit for cutting joinery. Sometimes jigs are a good idea; sometimes they are a fool’s errand.
But to dismiss them entirely relegates you to the realm of woodworkers who populate the food court at the Woodworking Show, yammering to the ketchup dispenser about the finer points of mustard. Don’t be that guy.
As someone who has used almost every honing guide on the planet and who started life as a devoted freehand sharpener, here’s my take: You can’t do all of your sharpening with a honing guide (or the accessories to the accessories for the honing guide). But you’re also a fool if you don’t acknowledge that a simple honing guide can bring consistency and speed to sharpening simple blades.
If you want to explore honing guides, first buy the cheapest one – the Chinese-made side-clamp honing guide that costs $10 to $20. This is one case where spending a lot of money isn’t a great idea. Expensive honing guides are usually part of some sort of system, like Amway.
Try the honing guide. Compare its edges to the edges you get when you sharpen freehand. And – whatever you do – make your decision without consulting the Internet. It will only radicalize you one way or the other.
Personally I use a honing guide for straight chisels and simple plane blades. Everything else – moulding plane cutters, carving tools, knives, weird chisels, awls, etc. – are sharpened freehand. And when I’m working in the field, I sharpen chisels and bench plane blades freehand – it’s not difficult, stressful or even inconvenient.
I use a guide at times because, like all jigs, it can speed the operation of routine chores (I think of it like using a table saw for ripping lots of lumber). But I’d never use a honing guide that required a setup time of more than two minutes – by that time I’d have the edge sharp and ready to go back to work.
But most of all, don’t let any debate about sharpening equipment or techniques get in the way of your sharpening.
Read the other installments in the “Sharpen This” series viathis link.
One of the misguided mantras in sharpening is this: Polish the edge until you remove all the scratches left from the previous grit. Then move to the next finer stone and remove all the scratches left by the earlier grit.
This ridiculousness is why it can take beginning sharpeners 30 minutes to sharpen a chisel.
Polishing doesn’t make the edge sharper (see this), it makes the edge more durable. So having a few errant scratches remaining on your edge means you might have to sharpen a little sooner than if you had achieved a perfect scratch-free edge.
Sharpening priests and priestesses will counter my statement with: Tiny scratches in the edge will leave tiny scratches on the work when using a smooth plane.
To which, I’ll counter: Yes, but sandpaper. (See this entry for a discussion of the traditional way to prepare surfaces for finishing.)
Coarse scratches left by manufacturing, grinding or a coarse stone.
Scratches left by a #1,000-grit waterstone with a few deep scratches visible.
Polishing on a #4,000-grit waterstone with a few errant scratches noted.
Polishing with an #8,000-grit waterstone with one scratch noted.
Sanity on Scratches When you polish an edge, a few errant scratches are fine. When I sharpen on a polishing stone, here are the steps:
Rub the bevel on the stone for about 10-12 strokes.
Observe the bevel; if there are scratches, return to step 1.
If there are still scratches after three visits to a stone, I move up to the next grit (or get back to work if that’s my final grit).
Sometimes I manage to remove all the scratches from an edge. Sometimes I don’t. Regardless, sharpening a tool never takes longer than one song on the radio.
On Cleanliness One of the ways to improve your polishing has nothing to do with the brand of stones or your skill. It’s cleanliness.
In my experience, the primary cause of scratches that are difficult to polish out is stray grit on your sharpening stones. If you get big rocks on your small-rock stones, the big rocks will scratch the edge. These big rocks can be loose abrasive on the stone or even get embedded in a soft stone.
So keep your stones clean. If a stone is giving you trouble, put some lubricant on it and wipe it off with your hand. That removes loose grit. If grit has become embedded in the stone, flatten the stone and clean it off. That fixes almost every problem except for a stone that was poorly made and has coarse grit embedded throughout (yes, this happens).
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. One more entry and then we get to sharpen things!
Read the other installments in the “Sharpen This” series via this link.
The burr – how to make it and how to remove it – confuses many beginners. Many underestimate its importance. Others disagree on how to remove it.
First, what the heck is it? The burr is a tiny curl of metal that appears on your edge when you birth a zero-radius intersection. It’s important because it’s the only practical way to ascertain that you have created a zero-radius intersection and that your edge is ready to polish.
Here is what is important (and not) about the burr:
The burr needs to exist along the entire edge of the tool. If you have a burr in a few places but not others, you need to rub the edge on your stones until you create a consistent burr.
If you cannot create a consistent burr, do not polish that edge with finer abrasives. Instead, switch to a coarser sharpening media. The coarser abrasive will quickly remove the dull areas of your edge and give you that consistent burr.
If you have a consistent burr, don’t worry too much about the scratch pattern on its edge. The scratch pattern becomes more important at the polishing stage (which is the topic of the next entry on this series).
Don’t try to break off the burr with your fingernail. I have damaged some edges this way, sending me back to the coarse stones to make a new burr.
Once you have a consistent burr, there are several schools of thought on what to do next.
Leave the burr alone until the very last. Polish the bevel as high as you want to go. Then remove the remnants of the burr using your finest sharpening stone by rubbing the back of your edge against your finest stone. This strategy works quite well.
Deal with the burr on every stone during your sharpening process. So after you create the burr on your first stone, rub the back of the tool on that first stone to remove the burr. Then move to the next polishing stone. Work the bevel and then work the back on that stone. And so on. Likely you won’t be able to feel a burr created by the finer stones. Work both the bevel and the back on every stone, all the way to your finest stone. This strategy also works quite well.
Sliding the edge through softwood will remove the remnants of a fine burr.
3. After polishing the bevel, remove the remnants of the burr on the back (you might not be able to feel it) with a non-sharpening media, such as a piece of wood or your palm. This strategy is old school. You rub the bevel and back against your palm. Or you slide the edge through a piece of softwood. No surprise: This strategy works quite well.
Removing the Burr The debate on how to remove the burr has caused a few small wars in the Balkan states. Don’t fall for the fundamentalist talk on the topic. The only “wrong” way to remove the burr is when you use a soft media, such as a waterstone. You can actually mash the burr into the soft surface of the stone, break it off and embed it in the stone.
This is bad because the next time you sharpen, the broken burr will act like a piece of glass sticking out of the asphalt – it will mangle your new edge. This has happened to me. It sucks. (To avoid this problem on soft stones, begin with the back of the tool cantilevered off the stone and then pull it onto the stone. The corner of the stone will remove the burr, preventing it from embedding in the stone.)
So you might remove the burr by putting the tool’s back flat on your polishing stone and moving the tool. That works fine.
Avert your eyes! It’s the tricksy ruler trick.
Or you might prop up the back of the blade on a thin ruler so you polish only the tip of the back to remove the burr (people call this David Charlesworth’s “Ruler Trick”). While some will tell you that using the Ruler Trick will make you sterile, reduce your IQ and make toe fungus grow on your face, that’s crap. The Ruler Trick is just another way to remove the burr. It works fine.
I apologize if these entries seem to have the same pattern (you need to do this; how you do it is unimportant). But that’s exactly the same with the burr. You have to create one to get a zero-radius intersection. Then you have to remove it. How you do this is fairly unimportant.
Next up: How to polish an edge and how your particular method is unimportant.
“Der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen (The narcissism of small differences).”
— Sigmund Freud, 1917
The topic of sharpening is plagued by Freud’s “narcissism of small differences,” and the best example of this is all the noise about the shape and angle of the tool’s bevel.
Almost every word written about this topic is nonsense, at least from a practical perspective. Let’s talk first about the shape of the bevel.
Convex, Concave or Flat? All the wood can see is the tiny intersection of the bevel with the back. It cares only about two things: the angle at which the edge is cutting and whether or not the edge comes to a zero-radius intersection.
The wood doesn’t care if you hollow-grind your bevel and hone it flat on stones. It doesn’t care if you have a dead-flat bevel. It doesn’t care if you add a secondary bevel. Or if your bevel is convex.
The wood never sees the bevel – only you can.
So from a practical standpoint, the shape of the bevel is unimportant (I’ve worked extensively with all of these shapes). Unfortunately, theory and speculation cloud what is – at the bench – dead simple.
A hollow-ground edge is not weaker than other edges. You might draw diagrams that show how the cutting edge isn’t as well-supported by the iron atoms behind the edge, but you are only making noise. Please stop that. A hollow-ground bevel works very well.
A flat bevel that is fully polished is not particularly difficult to sharpen. Yes, it might take a little longer to polish the scratches out because you are polishing a lot of iron and steel. But the time difference is not significant enough to warrant discussion. If it were, entire woodworking cultures wouldn’t have done it for thousands of years. So a flat-sharpened bevel also works very well.
A secondary bevel works very well. The wood has no clue you are using one.
And a convex bevel isn’t any more robust or easier to sharpen than any other bevel. Yes, there is theory that our human brains might ponder, but the wood doesn’t care about your theories. Bottom line: A convex bevel works very well.
Animosity Toward Angles Another source of intense noise is the exact angle of the bevel. I’ve written about this red herring before. It seems logical that low sharpening angles are best for end grain, and high sharpening angles are good for mortising.
What’s is far more important than the angle, however, is the zero-radius intersection. You can pare end grain with a sharp chisel honed at 35°. I do this all the time. In fact, almost every tool in my chest is honed at about 35°, which keeps my sharpening regimen simple.
Pre-industrial woodworkers didn’t seem to care much about angles, either. In the old texts, a wide variety of angles are acceptable (check out Joseph Moxon’s discussion in his ‘Mechanick Exercises’” for a good example). The advice of the dead: If the edge crumbles easily, raise the sharpening angle. If the tool becomes too hard to push or won’t take a shaving, lower it.
So pick a practical angle – somewhere between 20° and 35° – and see what the wood and steel tell you. Soon you’ll forget the sharpening angle you’re using (I certainly do) and focus more on that zero-radius intersection and less on the shape of the bevel or its angle.
— Christopher Schwarz
Read the other installments in the “Sharpen This” series via this link.
