![]() ![]() II Honing Guide: Available through Lee Valley for $64.50. One includes everything you need and clamps flat blades a bit more securely the less-expensive version works just fine with a shopmade jig. So, if the guide’s roller(s) ride beside or behind the stone, you’ll have to re-adjust it for each new stone, and you won’t know if you are back at the same exact angle.Īfter that, it doesn’t much matter, but you need a quick and accurate way to set up your guide for a variety of angles. Not all waterstones, for example, are the same thickness. To be sure your blades are staying at the same exact angle regardless of the abrasive, you need a guide that rides on the stones, not on your workbench. Like most tools, there are better honing guides and worse ones. Take the blade out of the guide and take a few quick strokes on your finest stone to remove the burr that formed there as you honed the bevel. Do this on your finest stone, typically 8,000-grit.Ħ) Back to the Back. ![]() The honed bevel doesn’t need to be the same thickness across the width of the blade, but it should extend from edge to edge.ĥ) Hone it to perfection. Apply light pressure equally to both sides of the blade (just behind the cutting edge) to keep the edge square to the blade.Ĥ) Primary vs. Grinding can leave deep scratches, so start on a 1,000-grit stone, and then use a 4,000-grit.ģ) Keep the edge straight. You only have to do this once, when you first get the blade.Ģ) Now prep the secondary bevel. Work up through your stones so that it’s flat and highly polished. You’ll know that every grit is reaching the very tip, where it matters.ġ) Start with the back. And the blade will never budge from its honing angle. It works for hollow- ground bevels and flat bevels alike. Now set up your honing jig to raise the tool to 27° or 28° (go higher for chisels that you will pound and chop with, and forĬertain bevel-up planes), and start honing. Just grind at a slightly shallower angle than you want for your secondary (honed) bevel. Sandpaper platter, or any way that is convenient. So feel free to use your honing guide to form the primary bevel on a few sheets of sandpaper stuck on glass or granite, on a coarse diamond plate, on a motorized Bench grinders take a bit of skill to avoid burning the edges and softening the steel. Now you’re a goner, because you have no good way of knowing if each successive grit is getting to the very tip.Ĭontrast that tricky operation with the simplicity of a honing guide. Unless you have a good feel for this and practice frequently, you eventually will rock the bevel off its high points, rounding the tip slightly. Now picture what happens as you hold that blade by hand, rock it onto its bevel, and try to lock your arms and hold it at precisely the same angle while sliding it back and forth along the stone. Like sanding a wood surface, you need to work your way up through the abrasive grits (grinding at a coarse grit, then usually going to a series of stones: 1,000-grit, then 4,000, then 8,000) to end up with a polished secondary bevel at the tip of the tool. (It’s easier on chisels, which have a longer bevel, than on plane blades, which are thinner.) But if you rock the blade at all as you move it, the system breaks down. Then you rock the tool on the sharpening stone, feeling for the little bumps that tell you the bevel is resting flat, and then try to keep at that same angle, riding those two tiny points evenly as you move the blade up and down the stone. For starters, it works much better with a “hollow grind,” the scooped-out bevel formed by a wheel of some kind. To understand why handheld honing is tricky, you need to understand the process. Then you’ll know what all the hand-tool fuss is about. You might experience true sharpness for the first time. And if you rock that edge on the stone, even a little bit, you might not be sharpening the very tip. I admit, with zero setup time the method is faster than a honing guide, but most hobbyists don’t sharpen their chisels and plane blades every day, or even every week, so they never develop and maintain the finely tuned muscle memory that handheld honing requires. Those who advocate handheld honing are mostly professional furniture makers, who sharpen their tools every day and don’t want to waste time. That’s not the best advice for hobbyists, if you ask me. Roughly half the teachers I know tell their students to hone by hand, balancing the tool on its bevel by feel. I hear from a lot of readers who struggle with sharpening, and I always pass along my two personal breakthroughs: Use a honing guide and go up to 8,000 grit. ![]()
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