Reply To: Sharpening plane iron: several newbie questions
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Hello everyone,
thanks a lot for all your detailed answers. The fact that none mentionned the other issues I was concerned with has reassured me a lot. From all your answers, I believe I have major problems sharpening correctly.
I have refined my issues around three aspects:
* I think my flat face was not polished correctly (even though I spent more than 1h on it Thursday evening). Possibly, my 1200 diamond plate is not fine enough to polish it.
* I have no correct stropping tool. I thought raw leather would be sufficient, but I believe from your comments that this is not a good idea.
* I really wanted to be able to sharpen free-handedly as Paul Sellers does. However, as a complete beginner this was not a good idea. I have discovered that I sharpened out of square (I had a 1mm distance from the square at one end of the blade). Furthermore, and I believe this may be the worst of my problems, I was sharpening at a 20, possibly 15° angle. Paul insisted a lot on not going beyond 30° when sharpening. I was so worried of not going beyond 30° that I resulted in sharpening at far less than 25°. I had a sliding bevel set at 30° to always check myself; this morning I set it at 25 and discovered I was far from 25°. I really hope this is the main issue because as I understand it, the angle is wrong for cutting properly, and the blade is thinner, which is probably why it fractured so fast.
So here are the solutions I am applying today:
1. I polished the back face this morning again. I also decided to use my japanese plate which is not very flat, but has a very fine grain (6000 grit) to polish it as suggested by @mechfish. I hope I will be able to remove the burr in one pull after that. Even if I cannot, I am less confused about how to remove the burr thanks to your advices and the different links. I will not use leather until I have polishing compound. I will order online the buffing compound as recommended by @bossyrangs (thanks!).
2. I decided to correct my sharpening bevel with a guide. I created an extremely simple guide (jig?) this morning and it works much better than I expected. I was amazed about the difference between a true 25° bevel and the bevel I created had when sharpening free handedly. It took me about 45 mn to grind the full bevel to 25°, and I think I removed something like 2.5-3mm of the blade before I had fully corrected it. This afternoon I will continue working on the bevel at finer grits. Finally, I will again try to apply the 30° microbevel free-handedly using Paul’s technique. I want to master that technique, and now that I have a guide to correct my mistakes, I feel much more confident to try it.
About end-grain shavings: I am reassured that I am not alone in struggling at this step. I believe from all your advices that sharpening properly should result in the ability to produce even small end-grain shavings. I will also study how my position and angle of attack affects the results. As @hugonotti stated, you have to engage all your senses when working wood. However, it is often difficult to be sure if what you felt was good or bad.
I have taken several pictures of my attempts this morning, and will continue this afternoon. I will post the pictures here after I have finished.
I am sincerely thankful for all your answers. I have many hopes that I understood the problems and now know how to fix them. This site has a beautiful community!
- This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by farewell.