Reply To: honing guide suggestions wanted
Welcome! / Forums / General Woodworking Discussions / Tools and Tool Maintenance/Restoration / honing guide suggestions wanted / Reply To: honing guide suggestions wanted
You should look for a honing guide, that has lateral guides, possibly something similar to what Paul Sellers is using in some of his videos. I have a guide without these guides and it is very difficult to get a square edge. Even if you manage to get the blade absolutely square, it might move slightly over time. However, with some care, it does work, and I only paid 10 Euro, including an oil stone and a bottle of oil.
But I decided to give free-hand sharpening another try, because squaring blades in that guide is really time consuming – with a lot of success. If you follow Paul Seller’s method to the letter, you still cannot achieve a bevel of exactly 25° or whatever number you chose, but you can maintain an existing bevel or change it gradually. If your father took good care of the blade, it should be no problem at all. Simply keep the bevel as it is, until you find out, that you want another angle. And do check your progress often, and make sure, you have a good light source, so you can see exactly, what you are doing. With more experience, you can add variations to the edge that are impossible with a honing guide (though perhaps not really necessary at all).
Narrow chisels are a bit harder free-hand, because it is fairly easy to rotate them just a little, and then get the edge out of square or even round. If you start with the plane iron and then do the larger chisels first, you already have some experience, when you turn to the smaller ones.
Apart from that, there is nothing bad about using honing guides, they only limit your possibilities, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Dieter