Re: How do I "relieve" the blade on my Xmas presen
Moses Yoder in White Pigeon, MI
>A very cheap education in sharpening can be had at your local newstand in the form of a Popular Woodworking magazine on hand tools. The whole magazine is devoted to hand tools, and it is well worth the money just for the article on sharpening. For sharpening a smoother blade it is very important that the stones or whatever you use for honing is flat. Try a file first for rounding your smoother iron corners before you try anything else. You can lay the iron on a block of wood, set the file on edge and round it very precisely with this method. The file will take metal off slowly, and you have perfect control over how much the iron is rounded. It works well on my Hock iron, so I imagine a LN or LV iron would work about the same. If you round the corner on a power grinder without some experience there is a good chance you will remove a lot more than necessary. There are of course various ways to round the corners, and you can find one that suits you just fine and then stick with it until you learn something that you think might work better.
One thing to keep in mind if you are just starting to use a smoothing plane is that a smoother is meant to take off small amounts of wood with no tearout and leave a surface free from blemishes. If you pull a board off a power planer and clamp it down, then set your smoother to take very fine shavings, it will take quite a few passes before the wood is flat enough that you will get those fine wide shavings which are what planing of course is all about. It's about the shavings.
