Comparing the Veritas MK II Honing Guide vs the Richard Kell Honing Guide

today we're going to compare two of the best honing jigs on the market the Richard Cal jig that's from England and the Veritas mk2 system Ola woodworkers Paul Carlson here small workshop guy let me make a couple of quick announcements before I get into the review of these two honing guides I signed up for a patreon account and so you'll see a patreon link in the description of my videos and that's to hope that maybe a handful of you will volunteer will generously donate you know a dollar two dollars five dollars a month you know and you know how to do that forever to help support the expense the overhead expense of my producing videos in addition I have set up a group on Facebook called small workshop woodworking community small workshop woodworking community just go to Facebook to put that in the primary search bar small workshop woodworking community and then become a member it's a public group it is gonna have content that deals with surviving in a small workshop it's how we might organize things how what tools we might use being hobbyist woodworkers you know if you're a weekend warrior then you wanna you want to have a bandsaw you want to have a drill press you want to have a thickness planer you want to have a jointer but which one is reasonable if you're just a hobbyist and you don't have tons of money that you inherited to burn to encourage some patreon links I'm gonna do a drawing on September 30th of only the people who are a patreon and give this away now you realize this folks I will probably only have two or three patrons so if you'd become a patron for a dollar a month you have an extremely high chance of being the winner of this 50 or 60 or $70 richard cal honing guide that you might really really like when I first started out woodworking I bought this little my tech guide and this is traditional design it's got a single roll around the bottom you widen it for plane blades and the top chisels in the bottom unfortunately it has some limitations a lot of times when I would squeeze it down my blade would get ask you and then I'd straighten it out and squeeze it down again and that would be ask you again so I was constantly getting weird angles on my sharpening and also this little thing for chisels won't accommodate chisels of a certain thickness in addition this guide would not accommodate my mortising chisels which of course I'd like to keep those sharp as as well as my others that is a no-go in my shop I upgraded or I bought the Richard Cal system primarily because of a really good write-up that I read in this book called the perfect edge by Ron Hawke Ron is a is a blade maker out of Fort Bragg Northern California and he really wrote a phenomenal book his research must have been incredible this will tell you how to sharpen just about anything you can imagine knives scissors chisels plane blades card scrapers all of your various tools for your lathe so forth and so on very very good book I'll put a link to it in the description down below I do not own so I'm not going to include a review of the Lee Neilson it's I of the traditional type the Lee Nelson is very well machine I saw a couple reviews on it you can buy optional jaws and so it can be customizable to different things and a lot of people really like it but at 125 dollars and this is not the lead Neilson this is like a $20 my tech at $125 starting price and then $25 for each set of separate jaws for different applications it gets pretty expensive pretty quick now this richard cal guide is somewhere I think around I and I forgot exactly what my paid for it I sort of remember maybe 50 60 $70 somewhere in that range it let's talk about it first it's got some really nice smooth rollers on it it'll accommodate very narrow up to relatively wide meaning maybe two and a half inch wide blades it is extremely simple there's only one knob to fool whether to turn to get it set up you just put the blade in against these bars and then tighten it down and then you would set the distance from the bar to the edge depending on what angle that you want and Richard Cal gives you a little handwritten set of notes saying what distance for which angles or you could create yourself a block with the little stops on it for the different angles very nice I like it I've used it for quite a while here's my one complaint with it that if I get wider than this then it won't my the rollers won't fit on my stone so I find myself running off the edge of my stone even with my number seven Wood River number seven blade in there and I solved that by building a cradle for the stones and then that levels it out then I can run the rollers on this I don't like that because then I can't put my my chisel sideways to do things I have to stop and take my stones out of the cradle and then do my additional sharpening so that's a disadvantage for this one everything has its advantages and disadvantages now this is a complete system from Veritas in the hundred and twenty five dollar deluxe package you get a holder that will accommodate wide blades I think up to two and a half inches you get a holder that will accommodate narrow blades such as chisels you get with that package a cambered roller so that you can camber the edges of your blade and you get a straight roller if you if you don't want to do the cambering so you get four different things there in addition it comes with this little guide that is used to set your angle it will accommodate both the high angle devices standard angle devices such as chisels and so forth and even you know back bevel work so it's got nice positive stops in it you know the majority of time we're gonna kind of redo a chisel by at 25 degrees and then we're gonna put a micro bevel on it at 30 but everybody's got their own preferences so it's got 25 and 30 and 35 and 40 so whatever your preference the way that works is you put it in a positive stop in this case I've got it at 30 to set this up this has got kind of a dovetail a little slot here and you put that over that slide it on you kind of set it to a difference as a gauge here of what size of a chisel or a plane blade you're working with in this case this is the narrow one and so if I'm going to do a half an inch then I put it there then to insert the chisel you put it in to the narrow guide here let me widen it a little bit you put it into the narrow guide move it up to the stop block and then tighten down the beauty of this system here is it's self centering and it's going to hold things very flat and very solidly so I like that so I guess what you say here is there's a lot of little factors involved you are you know setting this to a certain level for standard chisels you are tightening down here you are sliding this on you're setting this but realistically you're probably going to have this set maybe at 30 degrees there's a great majority of time you get very good at sliding this song you like it to be able to self Center and hold hold the chisels and there's one more setting here which is on the roller you make sure you have a dial indicator here at high noon and then you do like maybe your 25 or your 30-degree angle and then without putting this back on so once I've got that set up I I remove this now I can do my sharpening at that angle with this at high noon and then you pull this out and turn it and that basically changes shortens up the distance here and therefore increases the angle ever so slightly and there's about three or four positions so you can decide how much you want that micro bevel to be different from your base bevel got a lot of fiddle factor to it but I personally this is what I'm going to use because I like the confidence of once I set it up of everything being locked in really really solidly so that I can start to get some consistent results I'm actually having to take here a couple of days here and go through all of my plane blades and all of my chisels and fix all of my prior problems that's my review I hope you found it educational and helpful stay safe in your workshop small workshop guy signing off

Channel: Small Workshop Guy

Views: 9,476

Keywords: woodworking, woodworking tools, small workshop guy, woodworking jigs, small workshop, one car garage workshop, workshop layout, 3 Minute Overviews, small workshop layout ideas, veritas, veritas mk II, veritas mk ii honing guide, richard kell, richard kell no.2 honing guide, richard kell honing guide, How to, honing guide comparison, honing guide

Id: KkO6JjeSDs8

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 09 2019