Reply To: Sharpening
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Hi everybody,
Mario Harrison from El Salvador, currently living in Guatemala. I would like to tell my experience with Paul’s sharpenning method. I am a sharpening nut case. I bought my first waterstones in Japan when I was very young, and I love to sharpen anything freehand that comes my way, specially kitchen knives.
After getting interested woodworking and learning on Paul’s methods, I decided to embrace them, it seemed very natural for me, I bought a coarse DMT and decided to use my bester 1200 and 5000 grit waterstones followed by stropping.
My first attempts were perfect with plane irons and chisels. Later it appeared that I have one hand very heavy since I started to skew the plane and chisel edges, and uncounsciosly started to raise the angles of the bevels, It has been very difficult to correct this. Oh and what did it for me to stop using pauls method is the water stones. The 500o grit stone is very soft and VERY easy to gouge it. With Paul’s method you definitely need to use diamond stones or you will ruin all your expensive waterstones.
I will not invest in diamond stones if I have good waterstones so my decision was to go with the eclipse jig and the Charlesworth method which I think it is fast and very accurate.
Oh, and by the way, I have tried Rob Cosmans method and it is as fast and accurate as Paul, but again one hand is too heavy and I keep gouging my fine waterstone.
So at the end of the day, if you are starting, Paul’s freehand method is fantastic if you can invest on the diamond stones from the get go and are very conscious on keeping a constant angle during convex sharpening and the only way on developing this muscle memory is to sharpen and sharpen and keep sharpening (practice with cheap tools!)
My only recommendation is to not obsess on sharpening, but find a fast method. I sometimes have 8 hour sharpening sessions obsessing on different angles and perfect planes and bevels, but that is my way of having fun…
It is good to get to know all of you.