Sharpening Chisels and Plane Irons

One of the lessons I've learned in woodworking is that it's so much more dangerous to use a dull tool than a sharp tool. And your work just doesn't go anywhere near as well. What happens with a dull chisel or a dull plain is that you end up forcing it and in forcing it. One, you're increasing the chance that something bad is gonna happen 'cause you're pushing on that tool harder than you should have to. Two your workmanship is gonna suffer because you're not getting the result from that tool that you should get. So really the lesson out of this is you got to keep your tools nice and sharp. I'm going to walk you through a bunch of different approaches here. Some are some free hand sharpening methods that I've mastered. Some are taking advantage of mechanical devices to help you make sure you get the right angle. We're gonna talk about plain irons bench chisels, lathe chisels, carving chisels all tools that really need to be kept nice and sharp so that they work well. First thing I wanna talk about is plain irons. And I've got a rule here that also applies to your bench chisels which is don't forget the back of the tool. We need to do an operation to start with here that's called lapping the tool and in lapping the tool what that means is we're gonna make sure that the back of this is nice and flat. If the back is flat, we can expect more out of the front. It's gonna perform better. Key to this is simply holding the plain iron or the bench chisel onto a nice flat surface. So it has the opportunity to flatten the back looking something like this. Here's a tip on a power sharpener like this one what we wanna do is start high and then lower into it so that we don't take a chance of rolling that cutting edge. I'm on a 220 grit abrasive right now. We can see by where that abrasive mark is how much of the plain iron we've contacted. I'm gonna go just a little more. It's not gonna take too much more to have this set start high, roll down. That's great. We're done with that abrasive at this point we're ready to move on. Now one of the things we can do to maintain on a power sharpener like this one maintain our abrasive is keep it clean just like sand and wood If that clogs up with dust in this case metal filings it's not gonna work as well. Abrasive cleaner works great for this. I've got a 220 grit on this side and it's a glass plate. So I know the glass is nice and flat which is a great benefit when we're sharpening in general. And especially when we're lapping the back of a planer or a chisel flip this over. Now I'm gonna have access to 400 grit abrasive. Let me give you a little tip here right there on the edge. What I like to do is use a felt tip and I write the number of the abrasive. So it's right side up for that face. That helps me keep track. So I knew that when I was oriented this way I was using my 220 oriented this way. Now we're gonna do 400 And the approach is gonna be identical to what we just did. Start high, rock down. coming along for us. That is looking great already. Let's clean up our abrasive. Once we've got the backset, let's have a look at what we need to do at the bevel. First part of this is we need to know what angle we're gonna sharpen at so that we can duplicate that and a real handy way to do that is with a angle gauge and pretty simple concept. What we're gonna do is simply put the cutting tool into our kind of sawtooth looking. see which one it matches up with. That's gonna tell us where we're at and what we need to duplicate 25 degrees. This is what we have here pretty common angle for cutting tools like this. Next step, duplicate that angle, these sharpeners are sharpen of guides with rollers on them. Great way to make sure that you get good repeatable results when you're sharpening. 'Cause what it does is it allows the tool to project out a fixed distance. Then keeping it at that distance. It's gonna duplicate the angle every after. So here's how this works. We go, into the jig, come up to the 25 degrees setting. 'Cause that's what we just measured. Lock that in place. I'm gonna flip back over. So I'm using my 220 side Now we'll see what happens here prior to this there were some free hand sharpening that happened on this plane iron problem that people can add with free hand sharpening, including me is that you don't always get your edge nice and straight and true. And we can see that a little bit there right now we're producing a judge straight line because of the benefit of the jig. And as a result, this is what happened with our free hand sharpening is that bevel wasn't quite as straight as it could have been stop and flip. so this approach got a couple of things going on here. The key points out of this lap the backs, it's great to use a device to help you duplicate those angles and make sure you're doing them the same every time. Walk the cutting tool through a series of grits until you get it nice and sharp. I'm at 400 right now. We can actually take this a step further up into the micro-mesh range and look it out good we're looking already. So this gives you the technique but before I'm ready to use this plain iron I'm gonna walk it up through some finer grits to make sure it's ready to cut. One more step here. Just in case we kicked up a little burr on the back. It's a good idea to bring this down onto the abrasive disc, Knock that burr off, start high, come down. That'll take care of that burr on the back. That's some advice on plain irons. Let me show you a little bit different approach for bench chisels and what we're looking for there. Next step here I am working on my bench chisel and I wanna do a couple things for you here. One is I mentioned earlier, the idea of taking this to a finer abrasive, I've got a thousand grit on the bottom of the wheel, 3,600 currently on the top. And you can see where we're going with this, getting a finer and finer finish on the lapping can just about see myself in there and on the bevel on this side. Now let's talk about benches. Step one, once again, we wanna know what angle it is that we're trying to cut out here. A couple of tips on that. One thing I was taught was that if you're primarily working with hardwoods a 30 degree angle is a little bit more robust. 25 degree angle is good in softwoods. However, 25 degrees is a very common sharpen angle. Now we can mix both worlds here. What I was just doing was working on my bevel at 25 degrees. by sliding that up in now what's happening is I'm hitting the thousand grit abrasive on the bottom of the wheel. Now we can introduce to this. What's called a micro bevel. And the way to do that is we sharpen the bevel at 25 but we kissed just the tip at 30. That's done by changing the angle to 30 degrees kind of second verse same as the first. Now have a look at what's happening there. It's saddled but see how I've only touched the very tip of the chisel. That's my micro bevel. What that does is it makes it really easy to maintain the cutting edge on this chisel. A micro bevel does because now when I come back and I wanna kiss that to just refresh the edge and do a little bit of sharpening I don't have to take metal off the entire bevel. I only have to take it off of the micro bevel. Now let me give it a little pass on that 3,600 on top. So you can see what that's gonna start to look like on our lapping. Kind of turning my chisel into a mirror that's pretty cool. One of the things regardless of what you're sharpening you really wanna be careful about is any prospect of overheating. Some devices like this one have incorporated aspects into it where it's gonna help prevent the chisel from overheating ways to take some of the heat off the chisel through heat sinks. So just be really careful as you're doing power sharpening that you're not taking any chance of overheating the tip of the chisel. Like I said, some devices like this one, I've already built that in for you and taking care of that aspect. Next thing let's get away from these straight edges and look at a curved edge on a carving chisel. Next tool we're gonna have a look at is a carving gouge. And we're gonna do a little bit of free hand and a little bit of free hand with training wheels here. So first off, let's have a look at free hands and I'm running my thousand grit abrasive on here and on a free hand pass like this what I wanna do is lay that bevel onto my sharpening device so that the bevel is on there nice and flat. And the key with round tools, curve tools like this is to roll through the entire cutting-edge. Well, we don't want to do is sharpen sharpen sharpen sharpen, what we'll end up with our pebbles on the backside and the tool's not gonna work very well. So we've got to get this to roll one fluid motion. Here we go. See how we're doing. That really looks great. Now what if you're not a hundred percent sure you're holding the bevel, right. Let me give you a tip here. And the tip is to use a felt tip before you start color that in. That's gonna give us an indicator. Now we'll come back to our free hand pass. And check your work. Now, what that shows me is that I had the handle up too high. I took material off of the tip, not off the heel. So I need to bring my handle down just a little bit, make a correction, try again. much better. The felt tip is a great way to gauge if you really are hitting the entire bevel of your tool. Now free hand with training wheels. What's that all about what I mean by that is using a tool arrest like this one. So instead of just supporting this with my fingers I can support it on a tool arrest by controlling how much or how little chisel is projecting beyond the rest. That helps me with the angle. And it does take a variable out of the sharping equation. So if you find that you're not quite comfortable with just completely free handing it, try a tool arrests like this, and that'll really help you. Nice, now onto some more curve tools. Next step is gonna be a lay chisel lathe. And we're gonna have a look at sharpening a lathe chisel using a real unique device. It's actually slotted. We're gonna take a completely different approach on this lathe chisel this is a half inch gouge gonna show you a free hand approach for this. In this case, what we're gonna do is we are gonna sharpen on the bottom of the disc and the disc is slotted so we can see through it. So this is pretty cool. It's a free hand operation but you can see what you're doing the whole time It really makes it easy to follow the bevel and the curve and make sure we get that laid gouge nice and sharp. Now let's do our felt tip trick again kind of a tongue twister and then looking down through those spokes to see what happens here is our contact. And am just manipulating the handle of the chisel to hold this in the right spot to consistently take that felt tip. That really did a nice job bringing that edge where we want it. So this chisel is gonna cut just great free hand work but because we can see what we're doing makes it really easy to follow the curve. Now, one of the things I wanna talk about before we wrap up here is sharpening or honing versus grinding. So definitions here, if I'm grinding I'm reshaping the tip. If I'm sharpening or honing, I'm just refreshing the edge. What it really comes down to is abrasive. So when you're starting your work, you wanna make sure that you're using the right abrasive for what you're doing. Something really aggressive. This one is set up with a 81 20 combination for doing some reshaping, some grinding all the way up to finer wheels like we've talked about or honing with leather strapping with leather. Like we've got here to really finish that edge up. So make sure you're set up with the right abrasive for what it is you're trying to do and make sure to keep your work looking good and your tools cut and safely that you're keeping your tools nice and sharp.