sharpening quandry...

Before spending money *LINK*

Dick Coers

Read the bible of sharpening


https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/tools/books-and-dvds/32991-the-complete-guide-to-sharpening

Re: sharpening quandry...

Cameron

my $0.001

I am certainly not an expert when it comes to sharpening and have struggled for years. I fooled around with the scary sharp method on a piece of granite floor tile, I got a woodcraft rotating disk sharpener, tried some water stones and some of the cheaper diamond stones, free hand as well as on one of the cheap honing jigs. In all cases I would classify my routes as going towards the cheaper solution and ultimately I believe that this decision has made sharpening a pain for me with inconsistent results and a generally unenjoyable experience. I finally broke down and sunk some time into reasearching options better, bought some nice diamond stones that actually fit my plane blades (3" DMT), got a quality guide from LN (EXPENSIVE) and made a jig for different honing angles on a scrap piece of plywood. I also dedicated a piece of my general benchtop real estate to my gear. Through the last 4-5 months building my roubo workbench and a few other projects I can say that I am finally happy, I can quickly and accurately sharpen my tools, I'm not fighting keeping the plane blades on the crappy too narrow stones, not having to worry about flattening, have repeatable and accurate angles... I know people get by with cheaper routes but for me this has been money well spent and the stuff should last the rest of my life, I wish I had skipped the early steps and just made the investment (a lessen I have learned over and over, I've gotten better over the years but still am not cured)

Re: sharpening quandry...

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

The problem is everyone on the Forum sharpens differently and most end equivalently. The other problem is you don't know what success looks like to begin with. You will be groping in the dark trying to find it.

The cheapest route is some sort of abrasive stuck to something reasonably flat. Use a jig, even a cheap one. This method was popularized by someone that did not understand abrasives. As a result less than optimum abrasives were recommended which led to the method being implemented at less than optimum conditions. Most were disappointed with the result. To fix this situation Spencer and I wrote an article on this means of sharpening which can be found in the Articles Section of this forum. After a very long journey I am considering going back to it because when done optimally it is fastest if a jig is employed.

I don't recall in the Article whether we described an important detail. Don't stick a full sheet of abrasive onto 6 different plates. A 12 x 12 plate is a handy size. Cut the grades of abrasive in 3" strips. One 12 x 12 plate will hold up to 8 grades of abrasive. Everything you could need is now on one plate. If the steps between abrasive size is optimum it takes less than a minute to restore an edge and the abrasive lasts for many sharpenings.

That said, a mentor is best to find, if you can. Do what they do to get started.

Re: sharpening quandry...

Hank Knight

Ryan, your post has reopened a can of worms that has been opened and explored many, many times on this forum. You will get as many opinions on "the best" sharpening method as there are posters here. I'm not going to give my "best" method, but I do have some advice for you.

All of the methods work. Listen to the advice you get here and then pick one method. STICK WITH IT until you've mastered it before you try something else. All of them have a learning curve and it takes a while to get good results. Most beginners and many proficient woodworkers, myself included, are impatient and want to get to perfection immediately. They jump from one method to the next with the confidence that a new stone or a better jig or some new machine will give them instant results, only to find that it doesn't happen - not right away at least. I've spent a small fortune over the years on sharpening stuff, looking for sharpening Nirvana. Most of it is gathering dust in a drawer. I finally decided I would stick k with one system until I learned how to do it - how to get truly sharp edges with it. It took a while, but I learned it and I haven't changed in years. They all work, but it takes a while and a lot of patience. Impatience only produces frustration; it prolongs the learning curve and wastes a lot of money.

Also, I'll second what Bill said. Find somebody that knows how to sharpen and get them to show you what a truly sharp edge is. It's hard to find Nirvana if you don't know what it looks like. Most beginners don't know.

My $.02

Hank

The D&S Scary Sharp(TM) System

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

"Scary Sharp" has been around a long time - long before it was first described by Steve LaMantia in 1995.

Here is a copy of the original Scary Sharp post. This was back in the days of rec.woodworking, which was the first woodworking forum many of us shared on.

Regards from Perth

Derek

___________________________________________________

The D&S Scary Sharp(TM) System

[No, you can't sharpen sandpaper. And please don't ask me how I know that.]

[Required warnings:]

[If you don't like sharpening tales, or sandpaper, or handplanes, or any deviation from simple declarative sentences, please don't read this post. Also, it's a process gloat, and it's windbaggy, so be forewarned.]

[And if you prefer one-clause synopses, here: "I sharpened a plane blade with sandpaper." Now move along now.]

For anyone else:

I recently emailed a few folks about some attempts I made at sharpening a plane iron with sandpaper. Some suggested I post my story to the group.

So here it is.

(Rich and David, I've pretty much rehashed my email to you guys here, so you can move on out now, too.)

Let's see. Who's left? Oh.

Dear Mom,

I've recently been experimenting with using sandpaper for honing. I had been getting tired out with the oilstones getting unflat and glazed and needing to be lapped all the time, tired of oil all over the place and on my hands so I couldn't even scratch, tired of having to clean the stones after each use, tired of having to keep a conscious effort going to distribute wear on the stones evenly. So tired of all of this.

So I started thinking about abrasives and abrasive action in general, and read up a bit, and asked around, and found out that there's nothing different, in principle, between sandpaper and an oilstone. Silicon carbide sandpaper (i.e., wet-or-dry) goes up to 600 grit in the hardware and woodworking stores, but up to 2000 grit in the automotive finishing stores, as I learned from David Opincarne, a local rec.woodworker and admitted metalhead who works right here at the school and who sent me some 1200-and 2000-grit samples and who's recently been helping me greatly to understand the secrets of metal. For example, did you know that to produce high-carbon steel, crushed bone from the skull of an infidel is an excellent carburizing agent? Me, neither. Or that hardening the steel in cutting blades is achieved by the sudden and even cooling of the blade, and that the best known way to achieve these dual goals is to quench the blade in the still-living body of an enemy warrior? Same here; I had no idea. David's been teaching me a lot.

Me and him and some other wreck.the.woodwork folks had been talking lately about this abrasive business, and it got onto sandpaper somehow, and so I decided to test something out. For the sharpening-with-sandpaper experiment, I used a slightly-pitted 2" wide jack plane blade that came with an old beat-up Stanley Bedrock #605 I bought last year at a tool swap. The bevel on the plane iron had been somehow ground *concave* by the previous owner (or else it just wore that way), so I first straightened the edge out on the grinding wheel, grinding in straight at first so as not to create a thin edge that would burn, and then grinding in a bevel but stopping a bit short of a real edge, again to prevent burning. Because of this care not to burn the steel, this grinding goes slow and light, but it's time well spent. Time now to lap the back behind the cutting bevel. I took a page out of the plane-sole lapping book -- figuratively speaking of course, you should never tear pages out of a book -- and used very light coatings of 3M "77" spray adhesive to temporarily glue small 1-1/2" x 3-1/2" rectangular pieces of sandpaper along the edge of a sheet of 1/4" plate-glass. The paper I used was Aluminum Oxide in grits 50, 80, and 100, and Silicon Carbide (wet-or-dry to you lay people) in grits of 150, 180, 220, 320, 400, 600, 1200, and 2000. The plate glass was placed with its edge flush to the edge of the workbench.

I lapped the end one inch of the back of the iron on each grit in turn. I didn't use any water; I just went at it dry. So as I lapped -- can you call it lapping if it's dry? -- anyway, about every ten seconds or so I'd stop and brush off the sandpaper with a whisk broom and wipe the blade off on my shirt. (On the coarser grits, I found that a dustbuster vacuum actually cleaned up the paper quite thoroughly, much better than sweeping it off, but this sucking advantage disappeared at around 220 grit.) Since I progressed through the grits so gradually, I found I had to spend only about a minute or so on each grit, including the suck-down and sweep-off and shirt-wipe time.

One trick to efficiency is knowing when you've lapped the back sufficiently on each progressive grit. I had previously had trouble gauging this, and didn't know how to tell when enough is enough. Thanks to a clever suggestion from Jeff Gorman, I tried a trick that seemed to work wonderfully. I have a cheapie Radio Shack 30-power hand microscope -- "microscope" sounds impressive, but it's only $10, although I forget where I got it from -- and used that to tell when the striations from the new grit had replaced all the striations from the previous grit, and when they had, I stopped there and moved on to the next grit.

About ten minutes after starting, I had gone from 50 grit on up to 2000, and there was a mirror finish on the back of that iron the likes of which must be seen. The back of the iron became so shiny I could count my nose hairs in it; 98 on the left, 79 on the right, but 109 and 85 if you count the white ones.

I then jigged the blade in a Veritas honing jig -- which, by the way, Mr. Lee, should be called a honing fixture, not a jig, since a jig's for holding a tool and a fixture's for holding a workpiece and in the sharpening operation the plane iron, while usually thought of as a tool, or as a part of one, is actually in this instance the workpiece -- man, near-terminal digression there, almost lost it for good; Boy, snap out of it! -- I clamped the blade down in the Veritas blade-holder device, taking care to have the hollow-ground bevel resting on the glass perfectly along both edges of the hollow grind. I then adjusted the microbevel cam on the jig up to its full two-degree microbevel setting -- Robin, tell your uncle that Steve said "way to go, old dude" -- and honed away on the 2000-grit. Even though I had not ground a sharp edge on the primary bevel with the bench grinder, even on that little slip of fine 2000 grit it still took only about another couple of minutes before I had a nice sharp little 1/64" microbevel gleaming back at me.

I flipped the blade over on the sandpaper several times, hone and lap, hone and lap, each time gentler and gentler, to remove the little bit of wire edge. (Which, by the way, as a result of using such a fine grit must have been so tiny that it was very hard to see or feel, so pretty much just from my awareness of the process I assumed it was there.) The resulting little thin secondary bevel was shiny. I mean *clean* shiny, like nothing I'd ever seen before. Unlike the secondary bevels I'd previously coaxed out of my hard white Arkansas stone, this one was unbelievably Shiny with a capital S. I mean *clean* shiny, like nothing I'd ever seen before. Oh, I said that already. Okay, it's hard to describe; about the best I can do is to say that it looked almost *liquid* when you catch the light on it just right. I mean, it was so darn clean and shiny that it takes ten lines just to say it was so shiny it's hard to describe.

Of course, shine is not the ultimate goal. But sharpness *is*. Still, they equate. The more shiny, the more uniform the surface is microscopically, and the closer to the geometric ideal of a *line* is the edge, and hence the sharper it is. Cool. I mean *COOL*!!! I was trembling in my Mickey Mouse boots in anticipation. Hell, this cutting edge looked downright *dangerous*! I didn't dare touch it. But yet, there was still something I just *had* to try.

I removed the blade from the jig, and anxiously tried the old cliché "cut a finger off before you can notice and bleed all over your screaming wife in the car on the way to the hospital" test. Oops; no, wait. Sorry, that's the wrong test, for those other kinds of tools. Sorry. For the Neanderthals, it's the "shave some arm hairs off" test. Now I've done this test before, on other blades sharpened up on white Arkansas, and while these other blades would pop *some* hairs off the back of my wrist, many other hairs would just bend on over down under the blade's edge (probably from the sheer weight of four prepositions in a row), and those hairs that *did* pop off would do so quite painfully, as though the blade was more grabbing the hairs and *ripping* them out, and I could feel every one of them offering their stubborn and vengeful resistance. Not much fun, and nothing to be doing voluntarily in front of others.

But the edge on this blade was something else! Not only did it cut off every little hair in its path with total ease, but it didn't hurt at all. In fact, I couldn't feel a thing; for all I could tell, there were no hairs there in its path to begin with. But of course there were many, since I'm Italian and also since I could see the fallen hairs all over the back of the blade. And my arm where I had shaved it was a smooth as a non-Italian baby's butt.

Again, man, this had gotten downright *frightening*.

But of course, the ultimate test of a plane iron's sharpness is what it does on wood. So I put the blade back into the plane, that old early-model Bedrock jack, which I've not yet tuned in any way. I tried it on the edge of a piece of pine, and as I adjusted the blade for the finest cut possible, it glided through the wood with no effort. None whatsoever. In fact, it almost seemed like the plane was pulling itself along, or that the wood was *wanting* to be planed and was throwing itself into the blade -- no, I've not read Krenov -- it took that little effort.

I ended up getting a shaving that was so darn thin I could read newsprint through it easily. Unbelievably easily. So easily, in fact, that I thought for a moment about taking the iron back on out of the plane and putting the shaving over the shiny part of its back and counting my nose hairs again, but by this time I had grown weary of counting nose hairs, and of my concerned wife repeatedly asking me why I was doing that.

I thought, no way, this can't be! So skeptic that I am -- I'm so skeptical, that I can't be fully sure that I'm really that much of a skeptic -- I put a micrometer to the shaving, and get this: it measured .0004 thick! Four ten-thousandths of an inch! (Or, as my eternally-pestered but forever-patient metalmentor David Opincarne showed me, "four-tenths" in machinist talk.) No, I read the mike right. Less than one half way to the very first line after zero.

Man! That's a cubic hair less than one-half of a thousandth of an inch! Incredible! Amazing!

And it just gets better. For a while there, I actually thought I had taken off another shaving that was even thinner, one so thin in fact that it was invisible and of no measurable mass. I'm pretty sure I did, actually, but I'm having a hard time trying to think of a way to check this out, or even to find the spot on the ceiling that it floated up to.

And what about the planed wood itself? Well, the surface the plane iron left on the wood in indescribable! It's like glass! No, it's like glass wet down with water and a tad of liquid soap added and then some Slick-50 and then frozen and polished. And this is on pine, a softwood! Not only that, but I then gave it the torture test: end grain. I put the same piece of wood in my shooting board, and had a go at the endgrain. Man oh man, I've never seen such a smooth surface on *endgrain* in my life. And again, this is on *pine*! The endgrain was almost as smooth as the edgegrain!

This has gotten good! Still, having exclaimed all this, I'm making no claims to the throne of King of the Neanderthals. I'm the first to admit that this was kind of like when I was a kid and one year I batted a thousand in the Kiwanis Grasshoppers when I was really four years too young to actually play in the league but it was the last game of the year and Dad the team manager put me up in a losing game as the last batter just for the novelty of it and to stop my pestering -- he figured I'd get beaned and would shut up for a while -- and the opposing pitcher Terry Crowley the hotshot star started laughing at me because I was so scrawny and tiny and he taunted me who's this, Mickey Mantle or something, and he threw a pitch at my crutch and I just shut my eyes and said a curse and swung and slammed a hard grounder right down the line and under the legs of the first baseman 20 some odd years before Bill Buckner got his chance and I got a hit. I know it was kind of like that, because this shaving wasn't the minimum three feet long as per the Rules for the Contest to Become the King of the Neanderthals, so it shouldn't qualify. But it still feels just as nice. One more good thing is that in the process of taking this plane iron from misshapen funkiness to terrifying sharpness I used up all of about 25 cents worth of sandpaper, and probably about 3 cents worth of spray glue, and about fifteen or so minutes of my time, twenty if you stop for a nosehair count.

When it was all done, I peeled the sandpaper from the glass and threw it away -- well, actually I could have but in truth I stick them together back-to- back and save them in a "used-sandpaper" box for odd tasks that never come up. I then scraped the little bit of residual adhesive from the glass with a razor blade, a quick wipedown with acetone on a piece of paper towel, and the cleanup was done in a minute. No oil, no water, no mess, no glaze or flatness problems to worry about, and a cutting edge that is Scary-Sharp (TM).

I think I'll still keep my stones, though; they can sit atop the packets of sandpaper to help keep them flat.

-- Steve LaMantia [I'm talking about my oilstones.]

Seattle, WA

steel in the LV plane? *LINK*

David Weaver

V11?

linky, china diamond milled steel two sided hone and base - below:

These are generally flat within several thousandths and good quality (and before anyone asks, I've bought two of the same hone from different vendors, they are only just off of the quality of something like a DMT duo, and you get the rubber base for a total cost just over what some charge for the base).

You'll need a fine stone or media to follow it, and that fine stone doesn't have to be that fine if you're willing to use something like 1 micron diamonds on a strop. 1 micron diamonds on anything flat will make for a decent follower to the above hone (just look up graded diamond powder on ebay) - use it with anything. a 1 micron diamond edge is finer than any natural stone I've ever seen if you can manage to do it on a clean surface - on wood, it's even finer than metal.

If you have a nice hard flat piece of rosewood or something, it would be excellent with 1 micron diamonds (an offcut, whatever - don't buy something, just use whatever you have around).

a vial of 1 micron diamonds should be about 10 bucks.

The back of your tool never touches the diamond hone, only the finish media. There are techniques that you can use to deal with a slightly hollow or convex diamond hone, but that's down the road.

So far, we're at about 50 bucks plus some sandpaper and I'd use WD40 with the diamond hone and the loose diamonds. If you have any piece of scrap flat milled metal, that's also fine with the fine diamonds (but a rough milled surface - even if it looks like a good surface ground finish - will rough the edge of a tool up a little bit).

this setup is for sharpening and maintaining tools. The back of the LV plane iron will come flatter than you can get it - it can go right to 1 micron diamonds and never touch anything else (or whatever your finishing media is).

If you get less well finished tools that need to be flattened, PSA sandpaper is your friend to get you into service if the diamond hone isn't flat. You could luck out and find the diamond hone flat, too, and you're off to the races.

Truly flat for flattening the backs of things is only found (that I've seen) in DMT plastic duos (expensive, and just OK), ezelaps broken in - but they're not as consistent as is sometimes said, atoma diamond hones, and then up the ladder, the higher priced flattening plates like DMT - it's money wasted for what you're trying to do. Atoma is good, but you don't need to spend the money if you don't want to.


china hone

Re: The D&S Scary Sharp(TM) System

roger lance

Sharpening tools.....like chisels.....with sandpaper by carpenters.....has been around since there was sandpaper.

You're a carpenter.....out on a job site.....your chisel is dull.....what are your available options for sharpening??.......concrete walkway or that piece of sandpaper in your toolbox.

It was David Opincairne who first described

Bruce, a MN Galoot

Scary Sharp on rec.ww, but likely Steve who named it. He was an apprentice patternmaker, and his mentors taught him the method. It had been around for many years.

And, just to reopen an old debate, it was Steve LaMantia who called us “galoots,” though Paddy and I disagree with that.

Re: sharpening quandry...

John Jardin

I too have spent a small fortune on sharpening over the years. Beginning with emory paper on glass, then water stones and finally to Shapton Ceramic Waterstones plus a Tormek. The Tormec is used primarily for grinding a bevel.

Recently, a very interesting approach to sharpening a new set of chisels by Paul Salter, demonstrates an inexpensive and effective method ideal for beginners.

For those of us who strive to differentiate between woodworking and fine woodworking, sharpening books by Garrett Hack and Leonard Lee are essential.

Re: sharpening quandry...

JL

I use several methods of sharpening - depending on the tool.

For turning tools, I use an 8" two speed grinder w/ a coarse and a fine wheel.

For chisels, plane blades, straight spoke shave blades and draw knives I prefer water stones (220, 1000, 4000, 8000 grit).

For curved blades, I use various grits of sandpaper on a variety of forms that I've turned (220, 400, 600, 1000).

I've tried scary sharp for my flat blades - but I prefer water stones.

Find out what works for you.

Re: sharpening quandry...

Don Stephan

Couldn't find a description on the Lie Nielsen website, but there used to be guidelines for making a series of stops to set a blade extension in their honing guide to sharpen at various angles. Extremely quick and handy. You might call them and ask if the handout is still available.

Re: sharpening quandry... *LINK*

David Bassett

It's on their Honing Guide product page in the "Use" section (towards the bottom.)


Angle Setting Jig

Re: sharpening quandry...

Pat Riley

I have been sharpening for 43 years since I started carving seriously as a scout. Used sandpaper at first because it was cheap and easy, then stones. I still carve a great deal, with both knives and chisels, and do a lot of handtool based woodworking.

Depending on the tool and the task I still use sandpaper, water stones, oil stones, and now diamond stones. Each method has its pros and cons and I use what works best for each situation.

All that being said, my advice to new sharpeners is to just go straight to wide diamond stones and finish with a strop, and never look back. The reason is not method, but material. With all the new blade alloys these days, some of the new materials take forever using stones. With diamond you can move fast on anything. O1, A2, D2, S30V, etc. etc.

I can only imagine blade materials will just keep getting more and more complex. With a set of diamond stones you will be able to sharpen anything for life.

How do you sharpen your turning tools?

Re: sharpening quandry...

Ryan

Wow! Great input, thanks everyone. I wasn't looking for "best" system because I know that everyone has their favourite. Lots of great information and gave me some direction. And in answer to Mark, I'm using CBN wheels with a Wolverine/varigrind.

Re: sharpening quandry...

Dick Coers

I struggled for a decade with sharpening bench tools. Then I learned to grind. If you can grind a good bevel, the honing takes about 2 minutes. And often you only have to grind once a year. I use the long arm from the Wolverine for chisels, and a blade holder from Lee Valley and Wolverine platform for plane irons.

Re: sharpening quandry...

AZ in Colorado Springs

About ten years ago I was in the same place you describe. There's lots of different methods/ materials, so how to choose? I saw the worksharp 2000 on sale and got one. I built a stand for it so I could sharpen plane blades overhead (wider than the bevel guide) using a honing guide. It works great.

The worksharp 3000 had an adjustable guide (in terms of bevel) while the -2000 is fixed at 25°. The worksharp system uses sand paper for the abrasive. It's easy to get started and sharpen all your tools that afternoon.

A couple of years ago I got some chisels in PMV-11 and it's had no trouble with that steel.

Good luck

Probably this is a stale thread by now....

John in NM

But I'll mention something that has been on my mind, thinking about your question for almost a week.

It reminds me a bit of an Australian engineer I worked with years ago, who was a big fan of beer. People would always ask him which beer he thought was best, and he would invariably say "the one that is in your hand" and would never budge from that.

I would steal that from him and apply it to sharpening. The method that gets you to work in the next 10 minutes is the best one to use. The method that is not confusing in minutia of details so loved by us denizens of internet forums is the one to use. The method you can acquire and put to use as soon as possible is the one to use.

That method, the one that is convenient, intuitive to you, and at hand, is going to have its limitations. All these methods have their limitations, and different people choose to work around the limitations of different methods for their own various reasons. You're never going to find the best method by any means but trying them all and using the one you like best.