Evaluating the scary sharpening system

[Music] hello this is a reaction video if you like to a video that went out from then crimson guitars last week he was with Matt from work shop heaven and they were looking at the scary sharp system of sharpening and and I was I was very impressed so much so that I went out and bought a whole load of goodies to try the system myself and I'm still impressed but having spent the whole of yesterday afternoon sharpening having bought this system to save me time I thought I'd I'd give some observations about this system I do think it's very good but you have to bear in mind how to use it in order to get them the best out of hits so what did I buy I bought the basic kit which is the glass plate the strips of well this sheets of finishing film micro finishing film a non-slip mat you can choose your level of honing guide more on that in a second you get some honing fluid it comes in a metal tin i-5 decant it some of it for ease of use and I added in a roller because I don't have a roller and this is a really useful item for getting the the the film to align perfectly flat on the perfectly flat glass plate actually contrary to what Matt says in the video this isn't a tangent to the earth surface this is the earth surface so technically this is a a six million metre radius surface but I wouldn't worry too much about that because the the difference between this and flat is is less than the size of a bacterium so yeah let's not worry about that to my mind the most important thing is the honing guide this is a Richard Cal number - there is a cheaper option there is a smaller version of this but I needed this to be able to deal with 2-inch plane blades it's a beautiful piece of kit and it is absolutely critical to the way this system works because this system relies on you taking the minimum of material away from the blade and in order to do that you've got to be able to hold it accurately it's a very precise angle against the the strips of abrasive and you can't do that with for instance my old faithful brand faithful brand not particularly faithful my up melt honing guide because it wobbles like crazy and a thing that makes this really bad for water stones is the the wheel runs over the slurry isn't even rotating properly probably needs oiling the wheel runs over the slurry that you're creating when you're when you're sharpening and it you can't really get an accurate edge not a lot of square edge using this whereas this the rollers City the side of the work as you're going along and as you'll see in van and maps video this also has the big advantage with plane blades is you can put a camber on the blade by just dropping a wheel off the side of the paper it's very very subtle but this system is about subtleties now crucial to the working of this system is a well-set-up chisel or plane blade to begin with and with that in mind anticipating the extra work I was going to have to do I also bought some 100 micron film which I've got on the back of the plane here this is not part of the basic kit but was essential for my preparatory work and this is pretty much what I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon doing was setting things up so let's look at some case studies to understand what's going on here first of all a tale of two planes these are essentially the same plane this is a Lee Neilson 100 it's level up the original plane that it's copying is was beveled down and this is a stanley 101 which I've sort of converted into a 100 by adding this handle and there's a video of me doing that and this is actually bevel down they've flipped the blade on this and it's now bevel up this is a beautifully engineered well ground plane blade to begin with it's lovely and square and even and it had a perfect 25 degree bevel on it and you can see that shining but I've managed to put a small little secondary bevel on the end and that took me a minute it's just one or two strokes of each grade of finishing film and then a little bit of finishing off on on the back just to make sure that we've got these two mirror surfaces joining and that is now super sharp and very very quick to do this however took me more like half an hour to do there was an awful bevel on it to begin with considering how steep this is bevel down I'm surprised that the he the bevel even worked on this it was I think about a forty degree bevel I'm not sure what the angle it on this is but I'm surprised this this ever worked with with a with such a steep bevel on it of course you can't put a 30-degree micro bevel on a 40 degree bevel because you'll be sharpening the rear of the bevel not not the cutting edge so the first thing I had to do was work this down to 25 degrees using the hundred micron and then once I had done that I was then able to put my thirty degree bevel on the end of it and get a nice sharp blade but the story doesn't end there because they is not a parallel sided blade it's it's just subtly rustic it's not even a consistent thickness and plus the fact the the Frog if you call it that in here it isn't really very even and the blade doesn't sit squarely in the plane so what I had to do in the end was to mount this a slightly different way in the honing guide usually you you mount it so that the underside of the blade bevel up is in the guide you mount it like that and you can just about get these blades in there is enough blade sticking out to be able to sharpen these properly but that is referencing the the bevel to the underside of the blade meanwhile the top of the blade is actually angled a little bit it's it's thinner I think it's thinner at this end and this is the side that is sitting in the plane itself so in the end what I had to do was I had to mount it on the underside which means it's trickier to get the right honing angle the the the guide that comes with this doesn't have measurements for a blade mounted like this but I was eventually able to get a blade with a slightly twisted bevel on it that would sit well within this plane and actually work but that was quite a lot of work mostly in getting the setup right I now know that in future I've got to mount it this way and I'm going to have a problem getting the angle right I need to make some notes I didn't make any notes at a time I should have done but in future this will be almost as quick to sharpen as this whether or not I use this plane as much as this and maybe not because obviously this is a beautiful well made modern plane and I suspect will take the place of this so those are the plane blades ultra fast to up to do an absolute pain using this system I could have done this a lot quicker by hand on on Waterstones a tip when using this honing guide don't rely on this being finger tight I think this is a 13 mil it's probably half an inch nuts but a 13 mil spanner fits it yeah it's probably half an inch but make sure that that's cinched up really tight so that this doesn't move despite the unevenness of this blade the fact that there are little nylon washers here with a little bit of giving them it grips it quite well also when when you're honing keep the pressure on the tip and just support the honing guide don't press on the blade and normally it will be this way up because I had to mount this upside down but normally it's this way up and if you're pressing here the tendency is for this to shift in the honing guide if you've got slightly uneven blade if you keep the pressure on the tip it means that there's less pressure here for the for the angle to change when it slips so it's more of that sort of action really and being careful here on the glass but this is show up and I want it to stay sharp but it's it's this sort of action just so keep pressure on the tip and don't press in in the middle of the blade and push it and shift it within within the honing guide okay study number two is this chisel which I have now got sharp all with the possible exception of the very tip of the the corner of the blade up here the problem with this is the the back of the chisel and had a nice concave here which which was a good thing but then it came up and then dipped at the tip the dip unless somebody used this to open a can of paint and I suspect the dip was was created by me on my water stones by doing this sort of rocking action and taking material away from the tip it's but each side if you carry on using water stones I guess that gets you a sharp chisel but for this system you want it flat and go watch a been in map's video and you'll see Matt talk about this this need for a concavity so that when you place it on your 40 micron film on the other side this case I was using a hundred micron to get it flat and then if you've got a concavity there then when you are drawing the chisel back you're you're only touching the tip so it's it's quick and easy and you're getting straight to the tip when I was doing that it wasn't touching the tip at all and I had no choice really but to just keep working this and working this and working this to try and remove all of this material here in order to get a flat surface that extends to the tip I did put a concavity on it using the method that Matt shows in the video I've got a thin strip of 40 micron here and I was working it up and down this strip just to try and get this removed this area here but ultimately it was just hard work it took me nearly an hour of just pulling this back never go forwards and I'm just pulling this back off the hundred micron sheet until I'd got this this area flat I'd have to take so much material away you can see that I've actually removed part of the original concavity in in the area here I then put it in a very subtle concavity using Matt's method but it took me nearly an hour just to achieve that the other side was a small problem in that the bevel was more than 25 degrees it was nearly a 30 degree bevel but I was able I worked through a series of pebbles to be honest I think this is still slightly curved it starts out at 25 and then probably moves to two 2728 near the tip and then the final sharpening I put a 30-degree secondary bevel on the very end but I got there in the end I'd like this ultimately to be completely 25 degrees before it gets to the the secondary bevel but I can work towards that over time you you have no choice but to just keep working it on on the hundred micron until you've got that so that nice 25 degree bevel but you can then put a secondary bevel on but you can't start out with a 30 degree bevel and a 30 degree secondary bevel or nothing that that that that just doesn't work unless you're prepared to sharpen the hole at the end of the chisel in which case this is going to take as long as it does with water stones so that was a small problem but not nearly as much as our next case study which is this chisel here this is my safe edge chisholm the edges have been rounded and polished so I can use this for guitar braces and if I do touch the front of the guitar it's not going to dig in and Mar the surface now this is sharp up to a point pun intended but the the tip of this chisel because it's only ever been sharpened by hand I've ended up with a forty one degree forty one point three degrees bevel at the very tip now the underside was quite well behaved that this has a little bit of a concavity in it and so trying to flatten the underside III it was it was fairly straightforward I'm getting to the tip and all is good but on this side I started trying to put the twenty-five degree bevel in this and in the end I just gave up I'd been working for over half an hour and hopefully you can see you can see that that's about as far as I got so I gave up on this I could spend another hour on the hundred micron film in order to get my initial twenty-five degrees and then go back and do the sharp thing which is quick I promise you once you've got the chisel set up properly but I gave up on this now I do have a little bench grinder which I which I can use and that's obviously going to put a concavity yeah concavity on this bevel which may be good enough but I think even with the bench grinder I'd still have to come back here to at least get some of the grinding marks out of it and get something approximating twenty-five degrees before I proceeded I might try this on my little little disc sander to see whether I can get 25 degrees that way because at least then I'll know it's flat and and accurate another issue with my bench grinder is I'm not sure how accurately I'd be able to put 25 degrees on the end there so finally I'm gonna do a bit of sharpening this is not a tutorial video but hopefully I can just demonstrate how quick this is on this chisel this is a Christmas present it's never been sharpened this is out of the factory there's a quite a bit of burr on the end of the blade but it it is a reasonably accurate grind this is a more like 24 degrees than 25 but but that's that's fine there's not there aren't too many grind marks so I think we'll just go straight for a 30 degree bevel on the end of this there is a little bit of setup work to do the back is iced assume completely flat so we'll just work a very slight concavity into that using the method that Matt showed and then we'll flip it over having done the setup work and see how quick we can put a good sharp edge on it it looks like there is a very slight concave ET on the back of this chisel which is a good thing you can see that this looks like there's been a little bit of finishing work on the tip but the method that Matt shows in the video is a little bit of lapping fluid honing gut honing fluid on a 40 micron strip on the back of your glass plate and right on the edge of the bench we just work the blade backwards and forwards and that just rubs a little bit of material away from the middle of the blade and ensures that we have basically concave surface on the back of the chisel but I think it's already concave anyway so I think I'm reasonably happy with that we'll just go to the front and see how we get on with the actual sharpening itself a little bit of honing fluid and I'm just gonna work blade on the 40 micron film and just make sure that we are hitting the tip which we are that's good so just quickly a little bit on each so that's got a nice basic polish on the rear of the blade so now we get our honing guide out and we put a secondary bevel on the front and get rid of this spur thirty degree bevel I need 27 millimeters that's close enough got plenty to play with on this because I've got such a low angle primary bevel on this so that's now set that for 30 degrees this could be interesting I don't know whether you can see but the chisels at a very slight angle that way which which set some challenges try as I may I can't get this to sit squarely in the honing guide the the two sides of the chisel even though they're parallel this one tips in that way and this one moves out that way so when you cinch it up tightly the whole chisel twists I'll carry on anyway and see what happens but it does illustrate that this system works best with well behaved chisels and plane blades let's see what happens we're going to put a slight twist on the front of the chisel but it's a it's a small angle hopefully it isn't going to be a major nono let's try it anyway I'll work just the 50 micron to begin with and see what happens to the tip of the chisel yeah it feels like just this corners touching oh and I'm yeah that's actually I think I might have we might be there I'm just going to work that another couple of times we are getting the bevel we want I think I may have mopped the film yeah I think that may have been the corner digging in but I think we have got the bevel we want even though it's slightly uneven you can see it's slightly uneven bevel as expected but it does extend the full width of the chisel so I think we're okay so let's carry on across the grits and I think we're there as expected the bevel is a little bit skew if but that is a sharp chisel very sharp there's no better there so there we go I am hope you found this useful it is an astonishingly quick system to use it is literally just a couple of strokes on each grit maybe a few extra strokes on the finer grits to make sure you got the scratches out from the previous level but once you've got a well-set-up blade that's the caveat it needs to be well set up it helps if there were perpendicular sides to your chisel so it sits in the honing guide properly but with modern precision tools it is a very quick system to use and maybe not so great with lumpy vintage chisels make your own mind up I hope you found that useful I'll see you in the next video you [Music]

Channel: Susan Gardener

Views: 12,341

Rating: 4.8195491 out of 5

Keywords: 3M microfinishing, Scary sharp, scary sharpening, Richard Kell, Workshop Heaven, float glass, how to sharpen, plane blade, Stanley, chisel, Lie Nielsen, honing guide, sharpening a chisel, sharpening a plane blade, Crimson Guitars

Id: D0gWf99i-nA

Length: 23min 24sec (1404 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2019