Reply To: Stanley No. 4 – what am I doing wrong?
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I never wet the paper, even when I use wet/dry for the higher grits, but I don’t use paper much these days other than for setting up a blade initially.
Regarding the burr, you should be able to feel it. You work the bevel and then feel on the back side, because the burr will be pushed / developed on that face. Of course, don’t move your finger along the edge because you’ll likely cut yourself. Instead, put your finger tip on the back of the blade and drag it gently off the edge. I tend to use the edge, not tip, of my thumb, probably because there’s no callous there. It will feel like your fingerprint is catching on something. If you have fingernails, you can drag your fingernail gently off the edge (perpendicular to the edge so you don’t get cut), and sometimes you’ll be able to catch your nail on the burr.
One way to learn to feel the burr is to feel the edge *before* you sharpen, after doing some work with the iron. A dull edge (from doing work) often feels just like a burr. Not always, but often. You can also compare what it feels like when feeling the bevel side vs. the back side. The problem here is, with no one there to show you, the burr might be there or might not, so you as the student don’t know. Just keep feeling and you’ll become confident over time. Note that, when you develop the burr and then flip over and pull a couple strokes on the back, this will push the burr over to the bevel side. So, if you feel a burr on the back, try pushing it over to the bevel side and feeling for it on the bevel side. Again, no guarantees, because this is also how you remove the burr and it might come off before you feel it. Yes, sometimes you’ll see a thin wire come off, but it can also come off in little pieces you don’t see.
Keep at it. You’ll get it. You’re actually making fast progress. You’re likely to find that you spend a bunch of time on your coarse grit and then go quickly through the two finer ones. Rather than taking a fixed number of strokes, work the coarse grit until you feel the burr, then move on to the fine ones.