Fast and Easy Way to Sharpen Jointer and Planer Knives

so today I'll be sharpening my jointer and planer knives getting them ready for the new school year Assunta me just showing you how I sharpen I thought it would be nice if I can just take you guys through the process of how I come up with these chicks and fixtures now I'm not here to show you how smart I am but to show you how simple it is that anybody can do this if we just follow a few simple guidelines now I know some of you will say that well my planer uses disposable blades well so are mine they say that these blades cost me around two hundred and thirty dollars now that's a lot of money seeing how many place I go through here at our school here I have over two thousand dollars with the blades now I'm not gonna throw them away especially when I know that I can sharpen them to a much higher grade than when it was new with very little effort so the most important thing for me when it comes to making jig is the mindset now I learned this back in the days when I was taking engineering classes I remember the first day when I went to the class those four big letters written on the board ki SS which says work keep it simple stupid now we all heard that before but what does it really mean how do we keep it simple so for me it just boils down to look for the obvious don't overthink it now that we have our mind set we can proceed by using a process of elimination so I always start off with two questions the first one is what - what we're gonna use and the second one is or we can be building a jig or we're gonna be building a fixture so to find the best tool for the job again I'm gonna use the process of elimination now I've seen people use Bell Sanders to do their sharpening for me I think that's a little bit too aggressive for our purpose same with a dis sander and also an air sander so I'm going to eliminate all the power sanding tools so what do we have left we have sandpaper and also we have a water stone now I'm gonna lean toward more the water stone because it has a harder surface and also it's all flat which gives me a nice edge also I can sharpen it all the way up to 8,000 grit now even if I can get an 8000 grit sandpaper I think it's a little bit too soft for me because when the blade actually makes contact with the paper it has a little bit of give and that could roll over my edge so my obvious choice would be the water stone so the next thing we need to figure out is all we're gonna be making aged we're gonna be making a fixture now what is the difference well for my understanding is that a jig is when your workpiece is actually moving in your tool is stationary and a fixture is when your workpiece is actually fixed like fixture and then your tool is the one that's actually moving so what's easier for us is it easier for me to have my blade going across the stone or have my stone going across the blade now my planer blades or 20 inches in length and it's also very flexible I think it's more difficult for me to keep this flat and rigid while going across the stone with even pressure and also up with a consistent angle I think it's easier if I just lay it down flat on something solid and have my stone going across the blade so my obvious choice is I'm gonna be making a fixture so let's see if we can make this all work so before we rush out to the shop and start cutting and making our jigs I like to go through a few scenarios in my head to make sure that we eliminate any potential problems so to start I'm gonna lay my blade down on a nice flat surface like this and move the stone back and forth until I find the right angle now I'm going to figure out how to hold the blade in place later on once I find the angle I'm gonna put a stop here and I can move the stone back and forth well I'm sharpening now that might work but before I'm satisfied with it I want to make sure there's no other potential problems remember look for the obvious so the first thing I might see a problem is it's gonna be hard to keep the stone against my stop while moving I might rock it back and forth and potentially change the angle so what if I make a carriage to hold the stone in place and maybe mount it to a George line so it can move across lazily that would be kind of cool but what other things can go wrong well if I use it enough and being in one place I can put a groove right in my stone and that's gonna run over and ruin my edge so that's not gonna work I need the freedom of my stone being able to move in different places while sharpening so again looks like let's look at the obvious now I know that the angle is set by the distance between my blade and my stop so what happens if I remove the stop or better yet just cut it off right here as if it was like this now I have to freedom of actually using my whole stone and keeping my angle now I think we're getting somewhere but what else can go wrong well the stone will potentially we're on my edge and change the angle slightly how am I going to fix that I can reinforce the edge by maybe putting a tape on it or better yet maybe put it a stronger tape on it or maybe just I don't know put some aluminum foil on here that will keep keep it from ruining it well that might be a temporary fix because eventually the stone will grind it away so back to the drawing board the problem is the edge is weak and a cause is the stone so instead of fixing a problem let's concentrate on the cost the abrasiveness of the stone is the problem is so instead of protecting the edge with the aluminum foil how about we put the aluminum foil over the stone like this now we have a smooth edge on both sides and this will take a long time to wear down so I think this might work now how are we gonna hold the blade in place if we use clamps you'll get in the way even if I put a thin piece over the blade and clamp it further back it's still not gonna work because this is too thick this will get away and even if I cut a chamfer on this meaning cutting it down at an angle there's still the clamping and unclamping that's just too much trouble so I need to which somehow without clamping how about we just wait it this way bring the blade down here and finding the angle so that the edge is actually parallel to the surface and then we can put the stuff back here like this that will wedge it in better yet why don't we just cut a slot here and just drop it in at that angle I think this will work time to make a prototype so to make life a little easier for you guys I decided to look into some of the more popular planners and jointers out there and to see what angle these blades of ground - and I found some similarities the blades that look like these is actually round to 40 degrees this is for a jet for model 15 inch planer and this one here so my general 12 inch jointer and for the bench top model planers these are ground to 45 degrees this is from a delta I'm sure that the Wold is probably the same beam or maybe double check it and for the felder i found that these were ground to 50 now I'm going to start with the bench top planer blades I'm tilting the blade to 45 degrees use a piece of scrap wood to set the depth of cut so that the blade is sitting just proud of the service between 64th and 1/32 7m I make several passes increasing the blade height each time until I reach the desired height now take a slow and be patient with this once I'm happy with the result I then move the fence to around the four inch mark and cut the rear piece I want to mention that cutting the slots with these thin disposable blades you see a TV saw blade it leaves aw kind of shape at the bottom which is perfect for locking the blade in place so that it doesn't move due to the larger size of the saw kerf so the filter blade is ground to 50 degrees so that means I have to set my table saw to 40 degrees according to the table saw scale now that could be a little bit confusing but I need to clear that up because when we do the actual 40 degrees you just don't set it to 40 degrees and expect it to have the same angle it's not correct so think of it this way the scale on the table saw is actually a reference when it says 0 you're actually at 90 so when you raise it up 10 degrees what does that really mean you only 10 degrees off from 90 so you got 80 so if I want to set the play to actual 50 degrees you have to think about how many degrees am i off from 90 so you go 80 70 60 50 I'm 40 degrees off from 90 that will give me my 50 degree clap okay we have to understand that the scale on the table saw is not the actual angle it's just a reference of how much is how many angle is changing off of 90 okay [Music] so these type of plates were actually ground to 40 degrees in angle this is for my 12 inch jointer and this is for my 15 inch planer now to get a 40 degree cut I need to lower my blade or tilt my play to 50 degrees well my table saw or most table saw only goes down to 45 so what does that mean it means we're screwed so here's how I solved the problem because the play only goes down to 45 I cut the angle at 45 and I just want to make sure that the blade sticks up a thaw an inch this way I can change the angle of my stone by putting a block here to kind of compensate for the 5 degree I'm going to be using a flat top blade to cut the grooves for these one-sided thicker blade [Music] for those of you that have plates with a shallow angle like this one here I want to explain how to get the right height for the block it's very important first you have to find the highest point of the blade just put a square up against the blade and Mark a line from here I draw the angle at 4 degrees instead of 5 this gives me the one degree secondary bevel I then determine the width of the block I will be using for me it's 3/8 I put a square up to the block and strike my line I then take the line and bring it down I think this distance plus the height of the blade which is 1/8 so I'm going to lower my square 1/8 below the angle line and here is the correct height of the block so here are my fixtures ready to go to work it's very important that your angle is correct and that's partly due to how high the blade is sticking up the best way to test this is to use a sharpie mark the edge and then run your stone across it ideally you should remove about a quarter of your markings from the edge if it only hits the edge your angle might be a little bit too steep so you might have to lower the blade just a little bit take a look at the sample here so when I sharpen I don't have a very heavy hand so I never worry about protecting the edge I experimented using blue tape and it seemed to work just fine I was able to sharpen quite a number of blades before I saw any wear and tear so I feel that it was easier for me to just replace the tape when it wears down then to fuss with aluminum foil or any form of protection if you're gonna build some fancy gadgets to protect the grid of the stone just remember to take a count the thickness of the material because that changes the angle well I think it's time to sharpen some blades and see how they work I'm gonna start off with the planer blades it's a little bit more difficult with these disposable ones because you have to be real careful not to over sharpen and change the width of the blades as you know these baits are key then has locators to help you align the blades to a certain height so if you're heavy handed and using a coarse tone you might want to count your strokes but if your angle is set correctly you're probably gonna remove maybe a fraction of a thousandth of an inch it's so it's so small you're not even gonna notice so the way I sharpen is I use my water stone I don't want to have a too wet so I'm going to just dry it off with my sponge it and then real quick so it'd be so much drama dry I'm just going to go from here and I'm just going to forward like this if this is a 4,000 stone nice they itch on there then we go to 8,000 X okay so here's the 8,000 dry it off real quick nice and dry same thing so the next thing I want to do is I want to take the burr off that little edge here so I'm gonna take it to my water stuff and and that's it now let's go see how it cuts so I just changed the blade up I'm gonna lower this to another thirty thousand seven inch and I'm gonna turn on the vacuum and I'm gonna send this thing through so I hope you're ready for this because this is going to be so freakin awesome with these blades sharpened to eight thousand grit polish I mean [Music] [Music] you

Channel: William Ng

Views: 430,136

Rating: 4.9308977 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, how-to, building, tools, learning, sharpening, planer, jointer, sharpening jig, jigs and fixture, planer knife sharpening, jointer knife sharpening jig

Id: pUoEPgcqUFc

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Generic_Us3r]

That ending was fantastic, really great video overall. Can't say I have the finesse to replicate one of his rigs. Sure, its just a few angle cuts into a block, but When he was explaining the piece to cut to compensate for that lack of angle his table saw could cut. He lost me.

[u/dialmformostyn]

This guy cracks me up.

[u/chaplar]

Mmmm what a payoff

[u/mordello]

Clever and funny.

I worked in a production shop once and the machine mechanic would hone the knives on the jointer by clamping the head stationary and then putting an oilstone on a piece of plastic laminate and guiding on the outfeed table. Took him all of 10 minutes to do three knives.

[u/tinyOnion]

What a wonderful teacher.

[u/SoftwareMaven]

I don't own a planer not a jointer, but this video is worth watching multiple times. Getting a fixture to sharpen blades is nice; having a methodology for determining how to go about building fixtures or jigs is invaluable for those of us who are bumbling through learning woodworking in our own.