Reply To: How keen is your edge???
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Hey André,
it’s as you said. If you remember the performance of your tool after sharpening you will know when it’s time to reestablish the edge as it gets rounder and rounder. I don’t always go back through the stones. Especially while pairing with a chisel I sometimes repolish on the strop three or four times before I go back to the stones.
I had not realized the correlation between fineness of the sharpening and fineness of the surface that results from cutting with a correspondingly sharpened edge until Paul mentioned it. Of course I knew that the finer the sharpening the finer is the possible result but I never thought in the dimension “I polished to 8000 so the planed surface should be 8000, too”.
It’s different with every tool for me. I always thought that a scrub that takes of so much material needs to be sharpened more often than a smoother. In fact it’s the opposite.
[[the following is not part of the reply, just a thought, thus in brackets:
Paul’s way of sharpening has been one of the eye-openers for me. I spent so many hours on youtube watching master artisans celebrating waterstone sharpening. “Another 45 times, push-relax-push-relax… and after 8 minutes we can already move on to the next finer stone…” I was happy with the result on the waterstones as I am happy now on the diamond stones but I am a lot more relaxed now. “No phone calls in the next 75 minutes – I am flattening my waterstones!”
I don’t want to weaken waterstones but especially in our modern western world they need to be demystified. If you watch a traditional japanese or chinese woodworker you know how to use these stones. It’s no meditation like demonstrated by many western woodworkers. ]]