Reply To: Stanley No. 4 – what am I doing wrong?
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The guide you showed is the same style as the Eclipse. Even once you master freehand sharpening, there will be times when you want to have a guide. Do yourself a favor and just get the guide. It will remove one variable from the equation by ensuring you get a usable angle and, by being constant, it will help you get all the way to the cutting edge. I disagree with the others in two regards. First, I believe that when you start using the guide, you are going to discover that you have a broad sweeping camber that is steep at the tip (even if it doesn’t reach the tip) and shallow at the heel. There may be a substantial amount of material to remove by hand because of the steep tip. Quite doable, but for that reason I’d set the guide at 30 degrees rather than 25. You’ll get an edge faster. Second, I believe it is possible to be too steep after a single sharpening when learning to sharpen freehand. I’ve done it. You can accidentally put something like a microbevel at the tip by lifting the blade too much at the end of the draw stroke and it doesn’t take many strokes to do it.
Just get the guide and gain confidence with it. It will give you an “it always works” approach that you can go back to when you are teaching yourself to sharpen freehand. It will help you square up blades now and then. It will be useful for narrow chisels and for joinery blades like rebate planes.
Sandpaper is fine but, as others mentioned, it can round over the edge. Get some spray adhesive and something flat like a piece of glass or tile. The lightest spritz of adhesive on the back of the paper will be good enough. You won’t need to do both it and the tile/glass. The paper can still cause problems even with glue, but you should be fine.
The final area where my opinion differs is with regard to the back. The back of your blade definitely needs work to get to really fine work, but I’d say don’t worry about that just now. Although there are scratches, the previous owner has already taken out the grinding marks. It is flat enough for you to get the burr off. Just let it be for now until you gain more experience. Raise a burr working the bevel, then flip over and draw the back of the blade on fine paper glued to something flat to remove the burr. You may need to go back and forth between bevel and back on the fine paper to get the burr off. The degree of scratching that I see will not keep you from cutting. You can tune further in the future when you need to. The gross skipping you are having now is from being nowhere near sharp.
Get some shavings. Enjoy the success. You can tune further in the future when you need to. The gross skipping you are having now is from being nowhere near sharp.
If you can get a decent sized strop (leather on wood) and some compound, that would be a good thing. The softness of the leather helps you to remove the burr from an imperfect back and imperfect bevel.