Reply To: Sharpening
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It shouldn’t take 90 minutes and, given the reviews of those diamond plates, I’m concerned that there is very little abrasive on the plates. They may be fine, but the reviews are concerning.
This may be a good time to try sandpaper. You could use 220 for coarse, 600 for fine and 1200 for superfine. Get some spray adhesive at the art store to glue the paper to something flat. You could use a machine table if you have one or a piece of tile. Let me suggest that you absolutely, positively stay away from the back of the chisel. Let it be. I’ve had paper dub the corners making it horrifically hard to flatten later. So, for now, just use the paper on the bevel. For the back, just use the finest side of your current diamond plate followed by the strop you’re about to make. Since you will only be using the sandpaper on the bevel, it really doesn’t matter how flat the surface is that you glue it to. Stick it on a hunk of ply or scrap you’ve planed somewhat flat.
This should be fairly cheap and you’ll know absolutely that you have abrasive. If you don’t get sharp, you’ll know it’s your method. Long term, paper is expensive, but short term I think it may help you. A couple final things: First, there are various grit systems, so poke around with google to find suitable grits in the grit system you find at your store. Second, just the barest minimum waft of spray adhesive is enough. That way, you can pull the paper up and put down new. Which brings us to #3, especially when learning, don’t be surprised if you gouge big hunks out of that paper. When you are hogging material off grinding and when you are honing but are not quite at the edge, it all goes smoothly, but when the honing or grinding reaches the edge, there is a tendency for the edge to try to dig into the abrasive. You can feel it (a bit of a catch or stick sort of feel) and hear it (a higher, sibilant scratchy sound). There’s a tendency, at least for me, to catch if I’m not paying attention or being ham fisted. On a diamond plate, you sort of catch and flop over but on paper you’ll likely tear the paper. On water stones, you can score the surface or even take out a divot.
As soon as you have that scratchy sound / feel, you are starting to raise a burr and only need half a dozen strokes, maybe a dozen on the medium grit. Sometimes, you just need a few strokes. When you learn to feel it and hear it, you can get it on a single draw stroke, which is just enough to fold the burr over to the other side, so you can flop back and forth to refine the burr until it is off. That’s for later after you get more confidence and start to recognize how things feel.