Chisel sharpening
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16 June 2019 at 1:50 am #581395
I’m switching over to Paul’s method and abandoning the honing guide. It’s going well except for chisels going out of square. Any wisdom on this?
Lots of folk ask about this. One thing to keep in mind is that chisels will still work pretty well, for many purposes, if they are a bit out of square. For me, the main exception is when chopping a mortise: if the chisel is out of square even a bit, it tends to rotate on the taller edge when you chop. That can mess up the mortise. But putting that aside, chisels come out of square because you are putting pressure more on one side than the other. So just add a bit of pressure to the other side. If a chisel is only a bit out of square, it will correct over a few sharpenings by changing the amount of pressure.
Here is one thing I found out. It is easy to get a chisel, especially a narrow one, seriously out of square very fast on the coarse stone. So be a bit delicate with that stone. Also, I like to start on the heal of the chisel, and a tad away from the edge, with the course stone and then check after a few strokes. If I am getting out of square with that stone, I can see it right away (th course stone produces easily visible scratches) before the course stone gets to the actual edge of the chisel. A slight shifting of pressure and I correct it before things are out of wack at the edge. The medium and fine stones are much less likely to mess things up if the edge is already square.
Here is another thing to try, especially with narrow chisels. Paul sharpens chisels and plane irons by holding them at an angle as he moves them over his stones. I found that difficult to do with narrower chisels. I could not keep pressure evenly on the edge and given how narrow they were, just a bit of uneven pressure got them seriously skewed. Instead, I found I could get a pretty good edge by holding the narrower chisels square to the stone, as if I were trying to cut into it. I then sharpen just as Paul does, though you might have to be careful not to get too much camber on the chisel doing it this way. saw this somewhere online, I think by a woodcarver.
When I got started with Paul’s method, my chisels kept getting seriously out of square. I actually reground the edges on all my chisels many times with my electric bench grinder to get them straight again. Luckily, I was using inexpensive Narex chisels so I did not feel too bad about shortening their life by a good bit! Good luck.
16 June 2019 at 2:13 pm #581526Thanks for that response Sanford. That’s pretty much what my common sense was telling me. Just takes determination and patience to develop the muscle memory in the hands. I will try that suggestion for narrow chisels. I’m really glad to get this down because the time I was spending fiddling with that honing guide was really getting annoying 😁
I consider myself just an ok hand sharpener and put in a fair amount of time getting there. But just out of curiosity, I recently went back and tried my fancy veritas sharpening system and waterstones that I used to use and found my chisels and planes were not noticeably sharper with them than what I got by hand. That was a surprise! At this point, having got some modest skill hand sharpening, I think the main advantages of the jigs is repeatability of precise angles. There is a tendency, when hand sharpening (at least for me) to get a steeper and steeper angle at the cutting edge. So it is important to focus a good bit on the heel of the blade — which is also where I find whether I am getting a square edge as explained above. Good luck to both of us!
A chisel edge that is a tiny amount out of square is not a serious handicap – it can usually be eliminated in future sharpening by recognising where the weight-bias is on the contact with the stone and adjusting your grip to correct it. In time, with regular sharpening, you will gain a form of muscular-memory which will largely eliminate it.
Narrow blades of all sorts – say less than 1/4 inch (or 6mm) – can be more prone to bias than wider ones and what often helps with these is to begin by positioning the blade square and level on your plate and to draw the blade backwards instead of pushing it forward. It can result in better contact control of the blade on the plate, plus the wire strand developing at the sharpening edge is drawn intact instead of being compressed on the push stroke.
Hope this helps
17 June 2019 at 4:30 am #581724You can go out of square even when using honing guides, even when using the veritas angle registration jig properly, if you don’t get the pressure right on the clamp it can de-square it.
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