Getting a Chisel Scary Sharp - Essential Woodworking Skills

[Music] this week in our essential skills for woodworking series we're going to talk about how I get a chisel scary sharp last week I released a how-to video filled with tips and tricks for dovetails and one of the things I said in there was to do dovetails you have to have a really sharp chisel and it really is mandatory so in the interest of the holiday I G dovetail challenge and all the questions I got on that video I want to talk about how I get a chisel scary sharp so let me bring you into the bench and show you how I get this done before I get into the tools let me just say I know there's gonna be a few people who show up in the comments and say oh you should sharpen freehand I just want you to know you're the best so I like to use a jig there's plenty of different options this is a Veritas one it's very good and very helpful for repeatable results there's also lots of different inexpensive options that are out there but if you're new to sharpening a jig can be very very helpful for you there's a couple different types of stones and sharpening methods there's water stones which I really like when my chisel czar really sharp already or I just need to be touched up there's diamond stones which are great because they're always flat and they can remove a lot of material quickly also I use my rough diamond plate to flatten my water stones there's also flattening stones like this one here this was a inexpensive one from Amazon I hate this thing because it did not stay flat so of course it's not very good for flattening and then of course I have my strop which I just is a piece of rough leather with strapping compound on it this is fine strapping compound which I recommend it's great for touching up an edge when you're done you should be able to shave or cut a piece of paper very easily so let me show you how each of these work so when it comes to stones I have two types that I use for different reasons first thing I would recommend is getting one of these dish rags these going cupboards and their non-slip I just get these they're like 2 bucks on Amazon and cut them up and it's great for on your bench it keeps things from slipping around I have some rosin paper down below just to keep my nice Moxon bench from getting water on it but that's not necessarily important if you don't really care about the surface that you're sharpening on the great thing about Diamond stones is they're always flat they don't wear away and they're great for removing lots of material I also use water stones water stones are fabulous because they cut a lot faster because the slurry you develop will also cut and they really I think are better for getting a very very sharp edge so a lot of times what I'll do if I'm sharpening from the get-go is I'll start with my diamond stones and then go to my 8,000 grit stone to finish it up and then go to my strop so these take different types of lubricants with Diamond stones I just use Windex and then with water stones obviously you soak them in water the way that works with Diamond stones is you have like a bucket of water and you put them in and you'll see they're gonna start to bubble and you want to leave them in there until they stop bubbling so you can see they've they've stopped bubbling so they're ready to use I'm gonna go ahead and put those aside for now we'll use those in a minute I'm gonna let them soak as much water as they can and then for Diamond stones you just use Windex as a lubricant I just put a little spritz on there I'll do it every 30 strokes or so I'll put a little bit more and then when it comes to setting up your jig this Veritas one is very easy because you have this guide plate here that you can set to different degrees depending on where this is set the roller can be used there's a micro adjust thing so if you want to do a micro bevel you can so when I'm setting up my jig the most important thing is that your chisel is square so if you don't have the Veritas one you can use any square and just set it to you jig and make sure that your chisel lines up with it you want to be roughly in the middle but this guy it's very easy we have it set to 30 degrees here typically for a chisel you would start sharpening at 25 and then do your micro bevel at 30 so we're gonna start at 25 here and begin sharpening so for this one I'm just gonna take my chisel put it right against that reference and tighten it in there and then just take off the guide here and then I'm going to start with my coarse stone here and you want to make sure you use even pressure you just go down the middle of the stone using even pressure and then you can see where we're starting to get where marks so you can see that the stone itself you can see the scratch patterns one great technique you can use to see where you're sharpening and if you need to do more is just put some black sharpie on there and then you can see where it's removing sharpie and if you need to keep going but what's gonna really be the key piece to this is you want to go until you have a burr and you can just feel that in the back by slightly rubbing your finger just like that and you'll feel there'll be a piece of metal on the back that you can see so we're gonna go ahead and keep going till we remove everything there do a little bit more Windex and then we'll just do about 30 strokes I like to do about 30 strokes per stone and you can see I'm only getting the very top there I'm working my way down the bevel I'm sure you can see here there's a little burr forming and you can just see it's like little pieces of metal right there they're performing I may be able to even move them a little bit just you can see it and you'll be able to feel that with your fingers it's really hard to see with your eyes but you can feel it with your fingers and now that we've gone through every grit on our Diamond stones we're gonna move over to our 8,000 grit water stone okay so water stones they need to be flattened and so what I like to do is I just take a pencil and I'm going to draw a grid and these lines don't have to be straight by any means left-handed and getting these flat is really important because obviously you want your chisel to be flat so what I do then is I take my course diamond stone and I'll just rinse it off so the Windex isn't on there anymore and I'll just take it on top and we go back and forth and the reason you draw that grid you can see from the last time I sharpen there's a hollow in the middle so we just wanted it to here's a big tip for you don't put your water somewhere you're going to knock it off on all your tools and have to dry them off and oil all of them for 20 minutes so pro tip now let's get back to flattening our thing as I was saying there's a concave in our water stone and so we just basically need to get rid of that and that's how my water fell off so we just keep rubbing our stone we can add some more water there and you can see all of our pencils gone so we know our stones flat in a good way you can test that is just taking the back and see how it sticks to it then you know that it's completely flat so now this is again our 8,000 grit stone we've got our burr we've got our chisel completely done but we're going to switch it up a little bit here and we're going to do a micro bevel so what you could do is if you have this jig you can simply just turn the roller wheel and just it's got a cam on it that does like a two-degree micro bevel or you could move your chisel back just a little bit but you want to create a micro bevel which makes sharpening in the future easier so you don't have to go through that whole step or you grind down the whole bevel you can just do the tip and then about every 7 or 8 sharpening sessions I'll redo the bevel but we've got our water stone nice and flat we're gonna add some water because again on these won't use water for lubricant just a little bit fine we're going to do 30 strokes of our micro bevel and with a Waterstone you want to vary where you go so I kind of do 10 in the middle and 10 on the side if you look here now you can see we're starting to form our micro bevel and you can see I was probably pressing a little too hard on the right-hand side there so I'm gonna focus on the left just a little bit we're just gonna keep checking when you get to this stage you really want to check so there we go we've got a pretty good micro bevel there I got a little wonky on the side there but that absolutely does not matter because all that matters is just the tip but we've got a perfect micro bevel there we've got our burr on the back and now it's time to make sure your back is flat now the reason a chisel back needs to be flat is for a couple of reasons one is it's a reference so when you reference on your chisel you're referencing off the back and so you'd need that to be flat now for me I never really gonna go more than an inch inch and a half tops with a chisel this size so I don't know you don't have to flatten the whole back how far up you go is up to you but it is absolutely critical that the back is flat for your chisel to cut and the reason being is that this bevel has two sides the back and then this angle here which we've now changed to 30 degrees and so if the back is not flat and meets up perfectly with this 30 degree bevel it's not going to cut so what I do with my backs is I just with my 8,000 grit stone I just go back and forth and it's easier if you start with just a little bit of the chisel and then slowly work your way I like to work all sides of the stone and again we're starting to stick a little bit so I'm just going to throw a little water on there very carefully so put it all over my stuff again we're just gonna check the back it's awesome so good we're gonna go just the first third there and then the next third you can see this is good this slurry that's building up that's metal that has been cut and so now we can see that our back is almost looking to a mirror finish so we're just gonna polish it a little bit harder here now if we look at this yeah that's looking really good but whew so it's already pretty sharp but it is not scary sharp it's not razor sharp it's not shaving sharp yet and you can tell here let me show you why you don't test you chisel by shaving yourself that scar right there that was a silly mistake I made I went in a little too much of an angle and had to wear essentially a cast for four weeks but so I always use paper to test and you can see here it's sharp but it's not cutting like it should and so it's time to strop and now there's lots of different ways to strop I have two techniques I use one is this strop I made just out of leather and wood and an old piece of plywood and I just use strapping compound now here's a great little tip for strapping compound you don't want it to be caked in there like this strop is pretty much at the end of its life so when you have new leather what I like to do is I just do a few s's like this and that's plenty you don't want it caked on here like this like it should look like it does here on the edges you can clean these off but they're really so cheap to make that it's not something you need to try and worry about saving so with a strop don't be shy about it so what you want to do is basically you you find your bevel by going up and down you find where it's riding and you really get in there push I'd like to deal about 30 strokes one and you want it not angle it as you go cuz that's gonna round over so when you get your blade you want to lock your wrists in you can see what starts to happen is it starts to get to be a mirror and the more mirror like it is the better so I know people who will do you know 60 strokes on a strop but I'm a thirty guy I did lose count on this one though so now we've done the top but what that does is it creates a micro burn on the back so now you want to do the back and you can see that's really starting to get to a mirror finish there I can see myself in it both sides my micro bevel is looking really good but again with your the last thing you want to do is just do like three on each side and not just make sure there's no burr left whatsoever and then we'll grab our piece of paper and give this a test oh geez now that is scary sharp I like to even take it a step further let's get this even sharper we're gonna head over to the grinder and I'm gonna show you what I do over there okay then after I've dropped what I like to do is I have a polishing wheel on my slow speed grinder and I get this high-gloss metal polishing stuff here and you can see it's pretty mirror-like but I can still see some scratches now you don't want to do a lot of this I only do three strokes per side because it's spinning so fast that one it could heat up your blade two it can roll over the edge if you're not careful so I do very minimal strokes on this but it'll just put a final high-gloss finish on it and so what I do is I just take a little bit I let it get up to speed and then I just put a little bit of polish on there and then letting because the wheel is spinning this way I'm gonna hold my thing like this I'm gonna lock my hand to this plate here so that way I don't let it get caught into the grinder and I'm just gonna lightly touch it one two at roughly the same angle as a bevel three and now you can see that's an absolute mirror and then same thing with the back and they'll be very careful because you don't want to get caught in there so I just go one two three just like that you can see it's even more of a mirror finish there even more so than before I mean that is just slicing through paper and this is the reason you don't try and shave your arm because if we can do this to paper imagine what it can do to your skin I actually know just like that just razor thin little pieces so let's head over to the bench and wrap this thing up so there you have it that is a very scary sharp chisel and when it comes to dovetails especially and any sort of hand tool woodworking having sharp tools is important but don't be intimidated once I do my writing of my main bevel on my chisel it takes 30 seconds per chisel to touch that up just hit it with a quick 30-degree micro bevel do a little strapping you're good to go in fact when I'm working I will you know what I'm doing dovetails I'll strop you know in between each corner just give it a couple strokes just to really sharpen it Matt s Leah who's a friend of mine had a great piece of advice which is use cheap chisels for clearing out a majority of the waste and then use your really good sharp chisels when you get down to the line you know I don't know that not everybody has the luxury of having a beater branded chisels and a nice but it was a great tip so guys go check out that holiday dovetail challenge it's down in the description over on Instagram you could win a four hundred dollar prize pack thanks for watching stay safe in the shop and have a wonderful day

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 1,381,557

Rating: 4.8044605 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, scary sharp, how to sharpen a chisel, chisel, chisel sharpening, sharpening a chisel, sharp, chisels, how to sharpen chisels, how to sharpen a chisel with sandpaper, sharpen, sharpening chisels, sharp chisel, sharpen chisel, razor sharp, sharpening, scary sharp system, chisel razor sharp, chisel sharpening with sandpaper, scary sharp vs waterstones, make chisels sharp, scary sharp vs diamond stones, sharp chisel sharpening

Id: Qh2IXdkEIfY

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 09 2018