Sharpening

Hi,

Try your planes for sharpness before you strop. If they are really sharp before, you are probably rounding over the edge on the strop (I was for a while).

If they aren’t sharp, go back to coarse and make sure you have an even grind on the face, even if you start to get burr you still need a flat, even grind on the whole face.

I tend to remove burr on each stone as I go, rather than use the strop.

Work up through the grits. each grit need to remove the coarser grinding marks from the previous stone, eventually giving you a smooth, mostly shiny but definitely consistent face.

Only then go to your strop.

Hope that helps

Darren.

I wouldn’t go back to extra coarse each time. Start at coarse. If you are getting a burr with just a few strokes, perhaps you are holding the handle at too great an angle. Get a small piece of scrap, cut it at 30 degrees, and put on your stone as a template for the angle to use. The block just sits on the stone at the far end. Hold your tool against it when you start to sharpen to make sure you have the right angle. You only need to do this for a few sharpenings, then toss the block. You should also get a protractor or brad two small sticks together and examine your bevel not so much to measure the angle but to see if the tangent to the bevel at the tip is around 30 degrees or if you are making a semicircle that is 30 degrees in the middle but much steeper at the tip. You may find that, to get rid of the hint of light at the tip of the tool when examining with the protractor, you must open up to a really big angle.

The other suspicion is that you are developing such a large burr that you aren’t really getting it off. After sharpening, put the chisel across the grain on the face of a hard wood like oak and hit it with a mallet. Now feel the edge for a burr. You may find it has come back, indicating that you didn’t really get it off in the first place. If you have the DMT XX fine stone, you can skip the strop as an experiment. XX fine will give you a usable edge. If that feels sharp enough to cut, then you know the problem is with rounding over on the strop, so correct your strop technique and work it back into your sharpening.

Also, if you need to hog off a large amount of metal from the blade (if you are restoring an old plane for example, or you hit a nail etc.) go for 120 grit sandpaper on a flat surface first, before your extra course stone, it will grind fast and save your stones.

What Brian said – put enough pressure on the tool during sharpening while still being able to control it. I’ve been at this a few years and still have not mastered it. Keep working at it. It gets better. Experiment with things like others have suggested.