Question for David

Re: The safety aspect...

Wiley Horne

David,

Safety from sharp flying steel was indeed a big concern of yours from the outset.

And rightly so, because Murphy’s Law never sleeps.

I’m trying to recall if your upcoming Article covers safety and correct presentation.

Wiley

habit makes us forget....

David Weaver

my habit now is to stand over the buffer and stick things down on the front side. since the buffer wanders, I put my foot on the front corner.

I like the overhead orientation because everything is at my feet and i'd have to put something around the back to get in trouble.

as the discussion has worn on, I've forgotten that early on, I had the buffer snap a few straight razors with some "vummer".

If 10 people use one, I think it's unlikely anyone will have a serious issue other than possibly snapping a small knife out of their hands and breaking it on something. If 1000 people use one for a period of time and some of them have never sharpened much and see it as the ultimate shortcut, we may get some interesting stories. I'd prefer not to see any of them, but the experience with the leather wheel put me off of the power sharpening thing for a little while.

Re: Some History

Steve Voigt

I did the tip modification for the majority of the last decade, but "rolling" the chisel up on the stones. For whatever reason (apologies for repeating), nobody really seemed interested in that.

You've mentioned this a couple times; here's some personal perspective.

A couple years ago, you sent me a chisel you made. First thing I noticed--chiseling the cross-grain chamfers on a plane--was that it sliced through with considerably less resistance than what I was used to. Unfortunately it did not hold up--I got the little lines (that we know is caused by micro chipping) after a few chamfers. Nonetheless, the result was impressive. I had a paranoid moment of "oh shit, am I really not as good at sharpening as I thought" but I got over that, and we emailed about it.

Anyway, you mentioned the rolling technique, and I tried it, but your description was not very specific, so I didn't have a clear idea of what I was trying to accomplish, and I gave up pretty quickly. Probably the biggest factor was that I didn't have a clear sense of the geometry I was aiming for.

Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, I think I understand what happened. The bevel angle was lower than mine (probably low 20s) which caused the lower resistance. The rolling technique, which (based on your descriptions) probably terminated in the low to mid 30s, was not quite enough to increase durability, which is part of the wow factor of the unicorn.

So, what's different about the unicorn is in part is that the pictures clearly show what geometry is being aimed for, and why it is desirable. Then there's the added benefit of the buffer being an easy, cheap, and intuitive way of getting the right geometry.

That's my two cents on why "nobody seemed interested." It's a little like what happened with the cap iron. Before 2012, there were a few people--Warren, Bob Strawn--who advocated it, but the descriptions were not enough to really catch fire. It was the KK video, your article, videos by Kees and others, that allowed the concept to reach critical mass.

Slower, safer

Winston

With the 4" wheel on the drill that I've used, I worried about safety. What if I had the switch set so that it was spinning toward me instead of away from me?

I tried this with a roughly chisel-sized flat stick of wood: I stuck it into the buffing wheel when it was spinning backward. All it seems to do is flip the stick upward, but not with enough force to pull it out of my hand.

I've also mounted a 6" wheel on my bench grinder, and while I do slightly prefer it to the drill, if it were in a setting where inexperienced people were using it, I'd feel better about them using a slower buffing wheel. I'm not sure that the bench buffer does a better job than the drill, though it certainly is is faster.

Or maybe all that's needed for a bench buffer is a shield on the upper side so that you just can't put anything there. (But not a full guard like on a bench grinder, where tools could get stuck.)

That's a very good explanation

David Weaver

That I just didn't provide enough explanation.

I was chasing other unicorns with that file chisel. I tempered it hard , it crumbled easily, then I tempered it slightly more and it held up ok in malleting and then i sent it.

The unicorn I was chasing was making a western chisel that sharpened as finely as possible on natural stones and had super desirable behavior with the wire edge.

It just turned out to be a little too hard.

The hand roll works better with a hard chisel that won't roll too far, but I wasn't swift enough to realize that one more temper would've made it better.

Has it held up ok since the temper? I found a lot of 10 half round files from that brand but haven't forged another chisel yet. Suddenly, trying to come up with the perfect chisel doesn't seem like such an emergency!

Re: That's a very good explanation

Steve Voigt

It's one thing to provide an explanation that is clear…it's another thing to provide one that is so obvious and compelling that the light bulb comes on. Most people, me included, need to be hit over the head in order to pay attention. Especially if it's something we already do well. I can sharpen a chisel just fine, so unless there's super compelling evidence, right in my face, I'm probably not paying attention. I suspect a lot of people are the same way. In other words, it's not that nobody was interested in the chisel rolling technique--it just wasn't registering.

The chisel is great and is holding up fine. I know I lift the handle a tick or two more than some some of the others in my starting lineup, but that seems to do the trick. And it's not the only chisel I do that with…my 3/8" bench chisel is the same (for the opposite reason--it's a tad soft). Couldn't put a number on that, it's just a feel thing, but I know where the handle needs to be to get it to hold up.

I had been thinking that if I made a new handle, I might temper it a click a or two hotter. But the unicorn may have made that unnecessary. I will experiment.

For sure it is a very pleasant tool to sharpen. Very hard, but not the icy feel on oilstones that a Japanese chisel has.And the burr basically melts away.

I have an ulterior motive...

David Weaver

..on the chisel, about asking how it turned out. It's not so much a skill thing from my side. What I do to them is akin to low temperature forging. It should make good tools out of good steel.

The real question is what the files are made of and how. I was reading translated info from a chinese file supplier and their viewpoint was that files wear better if the material intentionally precipitates large carbides (not sure how to put that, but you guys know what i mean). For razors, knives and tools, we kind of like high carbon steel to have as fine of a grain structure as possible, but metal on metal has adherents that large carbides are more valuable for tool life.

I've hammered a bunch of saw files and every one of them has made an excellent knife where the wire edge just goes away without much attention, but I also tried hammering a chisel that wasn't that great into a large knife thinking maybe hammering would improve it and it still sucks. lakeside brand chisel, I think.

Re: Some History

Warren in Lancaster, PA

In 1975 I had minor problems with tear out. I did not rest until I had solved the problems. If I had had any problems at all with chisels chipping or folding, in 1975 or at any time since, I likewise would not have rested until I solved the problem.

The Kato material surfaced on this forum in 2007 in a post by Wiley Horne. I wrote that I had used the double iron for over thirty years. Chris Schwarz wrote that Kato's "numbers don't add up. ... Do the math." Larry Williams wrote "I think the idea that double irons are an improvement may well be the most successful marketing fabrication and gimmick of all time. That nonsense still shows up in almost every woodworking book published today." The arrogance of these people is beyond belief.

Bob Strawn first advocated for the double iron in February 2012. Before that he was reluctant to stand up to the bullies. When David Weaver changed his tune a month later and admitted success, I said to myself "The long battle is over." What we had needed was one more outspoken advocate. That was before the Kato video, before Bill Tindall knew what a double iron plane was.

In 2011, Bill Tindall wrote about how my chisels were inadequate because they were chipping and folding. An obvious misstatement. My reply had to be censored by Bill Houghton because I called Bill Tindall a pensioner, an obvious truth. Lies are OK, but the truth is painful.

These things are kind of like a virus...

David Weaver

....I didn't really pay much attention to anyone about the double iron until I put my power tools aside and started woodworking by hand. I got a nice early 1800s jointer, made an infill smoother and I can't remember what the jack plane was. It was agonizing if everything on the wood wasn't easy to plane and pointing in the same direction. I blew past depth marks changing tearout and frankly didn't last that long giving single iron planes much time because the issues that I had with them weren't a matter of future improvement - they would dictate that I had to faff around getting perfect stock and do annoying things like choose glue orientation at the joint rather than based on flatness stability of boards. I hated that.

They need to be sharpened constantly, too, because they can't stay in a cut as long, they can't take as deep of a cut without problems, and both of those things compound each other. I was sharpening something every 10 minutes or less and the feel of the plane in the wood was transient, whether it was a new infill plane with a hard hock-made iron or the old jointer with a wonderfully smooth but not long lasting butcher iron (strangely, my second double iron plane has a butcher iron that Jim Matthews horse traded with me on and I still have it and still use it. The iron is a little better. The plane is 100 times better for the work (that being from rough to fine work in anything short perhaps of hard maple and other resistive woods that plane well in a finer cut but are just a turd to do heavy hand planing work in). There are much harder woods that work by hand fine.

The real drive was that I'd heard you worked entirely by hand, I wasn't aware of anyone else that did, and I was desperate. I saw some of bob strawns comments off and on, but he was too polite and I may have missed the work context, but I needed someone to tell me exactly what to do in exactly what I was doing. Absent of that, I put everything else aside and forced use of some stanley or stanley style planes and without the option to use anything else, figuring out the cap iron was pretty easy. It was the urge to go elsewhere to solve issues prior to that that was a problem. Set the cap too close, the plane is too hard to use, surface is fuzzy. Set it too far away, and it doesn't work. I did both of those in brief stints and wrote it off. In less than a week I could beat my infill with it (which took 70 or 80 hours to make by hand and I still have it - the mouth is around 3 to 4 thousandths. The infill panel plane that I had at the time had a mouth of 1 hundredth. It still tore out a little - enough to make working with it really inefficient because it couldn't go thicker than some fraction of that in cut, but it also couldn't take an even cut. I had some regret about making the infill as I was only working bits here and there in that week experimenting, it's not like it took 20 hours to figure it out. When I couldn't beat a bailey style plane with $300 worth of materials and parts in a plane that I spent that long on, but rather pretty easily beat the infill even just for tearout control on same board testing with (i think it was a millers falls at the time) $12 #4 style smoother, I resented a bunch of things at once. If I could figure that out, anyone else working in more than clean pine by hand would've gotten there, too. I think the reality is few people are actually doing all of their work by hand or even most of it and trying to get anything done.

Enough of that - the disease part is that once someone walks into some change that big all at once, it's hard not to talk about it everywhere. Something intolerable is turned into something that's actually pleasant. The idea of finding sources of perfect wood was not attractive for long when I was using the single iron planes because the cost difference is a factor of 4-6. Making furniture items that I don't really want that badly with $1200 worth of wood isn't a good alternative.

Who knows how that would've gone if the video hadn't come out shortly after. I don't think bob had the desire to be as repetitive and pushy as I am.

I took a lot of crap from people when I first started pushing that, too. One was a lifetime troll, the others were planemakers who said they'd only met one or two people who ever actually used a double iron so the idea of it being that useful wasn't worthwhile and that made it not worth putting in a plane.

The disease spread, though, a little at first, and more after that. There is a pro furniture maker on the UK board who read the article after we posted it and started posting work using double iron planes where it was more convenient to do the work by hand (large glued surfaces, setting up and truing large joints). He went to barnsley, was working professionally and found use from the online discussions. When he was confronted by trolls on that board, he said "of course I can do all of these things other ways. This one just works faster and better than all of them". So, suddenly there was someone who didn't use only hand tools who still found it economically useful.

If the "disease" only ever affects one person and doesn't get transmitted, then it may end there. Once there are several people walking around with it and they're at the critical point where it's intensely interesting at the outset, then the discussion begins and it's accepted as proven and viable. The quasi-fact arguments against it go into the background because they're proven by more than one person whereas they were promoted in the opposite direction only by one person who didn't use the method in the first place.

This roundover isn't as big of a deal to me. I was really pleased with buffer sharpness after exploring that and I expected it to get no response and die a fast death. Bill and wiley requested precise information on profile and I didn't want to do it. It's time consuming to find out tiny bits of information that you're already past needing. The only reason I've been obnoxious about it ever since is curiosity to see how fast people are successful with it, what their level was before and to see if someone comes up with something better. It makes hand work pleasant for me. But the factor is a tenth of what the double iron does for me. Everything about working entirely or mostly by hand is about figuring out what makes the work pleasant and intuitive rather than difficult and needing some ridiculous amount of precision in routine use. When a discussion goes as long as this one has about rounding things over, I may not do any significant anything in the shop for 3 weeks and I start to resent it, but curiosity about the success of it keeps drawing me back in. Right now, I resent it some. It's taken a lot of time, but so far of the adopters of it, it seems like most are the photographic negative of me. They will be spending a lot of their time cutting joints and not much dimensioning. I miss the physical feel of dimensioning when I don't get to do it and could probably go for a year without cutting joints and it would be no big deal.

It takes someone who is a little bit of a jerk (as I can be) and who is insistent about the substance of something, and who thinks the following:

* people think i'm an obsessive overbearing jerk

* they are making some improvement that makes work more pleasant even though they think bullet point 1

is better than the converse of those. I'm not trying to be that, it just happens. If the motivation for someone to get better at something is because they can't stand the thought that they're being one-upped by someone who irritates them, then good enough.

also..

David Weaver

I also have some interest in following up just for a little while to make sure a bunch of bloggers who have spent years learning to do something don't try to make qualified dismissive results of what I'm proposing it because they're willing to use a method that's taken them 200 iterations to perfect, but they'll write off something else in 3 tries and insist to others that it doesn't work well.

That isn't really happening in any volume, but it probably will. Even Bill and Winston had to remind me when I was dismissive of using a buffer on a plane that it was worth figuring out. It seemed annoying that it took about 10 tries to get the feel of it.

10 tries. I don't know much else that I could get right in ten tries that took a fraction of a minute each.

Re: Slower, safer

Bruce Mack

I took your cue, Winston, and got the Ryobi kit. The mid-diameter wheel works for me, now using the chromium oxide honing medium. I took my Ridgid nimh drill out of retirement and clamp the beast securely in my woodworking vise. It feels safe but I am really careful (so far) with blade positioning. My drill will not lock on, so I don't have 2 hand control of the blade. I'll try a 6" buffing wheel on the unused side of my 3450 rpm grinder. This will certainly put me at more risk should I do something stupid but I may feel more secure with 2 hands holding the chisel or blade. I envision a local ER with 2 rooms, one for stupid woodworkers and the other for everyone else.

Re: Slower, safer

Wiley Horne

I’ve settled on a drill press. Had an extra cheapie one just sitting in a corner. Set it for 1100rpm with a 4” wheel—still going through wheels, but they all work. 1 micron green from McMaster. Drill press frees up both hands.

The drill press has a small footprint which is a plus in my space, and it places the spinning wheel up in my eyes and at an angle where I can see the exact presentation. It’s a fixture at the sharpening station now, and used for almost everything.

Wiley

Stop mucking about

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

I have two stitched wheels, both 8", one 1" wide and the other 2" wide. These run on a half-speed Rikon bench grinder (1450 rpm in Oz).

Regards from Perth

Derek

summary of what David just said

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

David is a teacher. But beyond that he doesn't teach to teach, he teaches to pass along information that will be useful to those that build stuff. In two words- Needle Mover.

If you aren't moving needles you are at most an entertainer, audience, or something worse.

Re: Stop mucking about

Bruce Mack

Proponents of each method demonstrate their intactness after no alcohol and after a stiff Scotch whiskey. This will not be compared to any other method as we all know the susceptibility to wounds from newly sharpened edges off the freehand stone.

VROOM VROOM!!!

Re: hard felt buff

les winter

Is there somewhere in here any discussion of a hard felt buff or would anyone care to comment on their experience with one? I have a hard felt from Lee Valley with the green stick. It works well on plane irons and chisels.

Any advantage in switching to a stitched buff?

thanks for any input.

Re: hard felt buff

David Weaver

hard felt works well at lower speeds. It works OK at high speeds.

I have two felt wheels and used them off and on for a while, and then retried them at lower speed in the drill press with this.

If you're getting good results with felt, then I wouldn't buy a stitched wheel.

At high speed, my felt wheels would batter plane irons, but that's on a 3600 rpm buffer, so that's really high speed. the koch system uses smaller wheels at 1350 rpm, which solves the mystery of why they don't beat up edges, and nora hall mentions that she doesn't think the 4" wheels should be used above 2k because she sees edge damage when they are.

But at low speed, I don't see the edge damage on hard felt, it's just easier to use the cotton buff for a couple of reasons (it's less aggressive and getting it to do a uniform job without really influencing anything at the tip other than gentle removal is easier).

Re: hard felt buff

les winter

Thanks David.