Reply To: Goals

I’ve been setting myself small goals and am working through them now I’ve got a better understanding of what’s required for the craft and made a lot of mistakes!

My recent goal has been to get a couple of handsaws set up for dimensioning 3/4″ thick timber. I’ve now got 8pt rip and 10pt crosscut saws sharpened, set and working nicely.

The next job is sorting out my chisels. When I was mortising the timber for my workbench I put 30 degree bevels on a couple of them because the 25 degree ones required sharpening too often, and have ruined the bevel on a couple others while learning to hand sharpen. Now the bench is complete and my sharpening skills are more refined I’m reverting them to 25 and will, at some point, get a different set for mortising. I’ve been learning to use my electric grinder, grinding bevels onto an old set of Irwin chisels as practice. I’m glad I did – turns out it’s easy to blue tool steel! Once I’m confident with it and grind some new bevels on my Narex chisels I’ll hone them on my new stones (arrived this morning! Woo!).

As soon as my chisels are in good shape again, I’ll be at a good point to get cracking on some actual projects. One of the biggest hurdles I’ve found when getting into the craft is the real basics are pretty difficult – sourcing good timber, getting it cut to size and having a set of semi-decent tools to use to cut joints.

George.