Hand tools for $100 #4: Sharpening for Cheapskates

my goodness there are so many ways to put an edge on a piece of steel I mean you've got water stones oil stones ceramic stones diamond plates abrasive paper and then there's all the machines there's high speed regular sized bench grinders there's slow speed water-cooled grinders there's those turntable things with the glass and you put sandpaper on them I don't even know what those are called it's crazy I mean sometimes I get to thinking maybe there are all these options just because people are trying to sell us stuff is that possible could it be the sharpening is actually simple and cheap well I don't mean to give it away but yeah it is sharpening is a skill that's easy to practice but very difficult to learn so if you're new to hand tool work and you're kind of struggling with it don't beat yourself up over it I spent a long time figuring it out myself and when I was first learning how to sharpen stuff I was really struggling with grinding a good level I kept messing it up and I was considering buying one of those really expensive slow speed water-cooled grinders and I was talking to my dad about it and he's a handy guy and he said to me Rex you can solve any problem if you throw enough money at it and I was like damn dad that was smart but he was on to something I think the reason that all these different products exist is that people try to sharpen it doesn't go very well right away and they think oh I just bought this expensive gizmo that would solve the problem and that's probably true those pricey motorized whatever sharpening things they probably do work really well but the point of this whole video series is that you don't need to spend that kind of money if you're willing to spend a little bit of time instead so before we sharpen anything let's get some terms figured out this is a chisel but everything that I'm going to say applies to a plane iron the same way you can see this big flat surface right here this is called the Bell Bebel slopes down to meet the back and where the two points intersect you get an edge now anytime you're sharpening anything there's two stages of sharpening the first stage is grinding and grinding establishes the angle of this bevel it gets the geometry figured out and then the second stage is honing and the purpose of honing is to refine the edge very often just the very tip of the edge to make it extremely sharp and also polished so it's got low resistance against the wood now this is a big chisel to make it easy to see what's going on you can see it's got a very large bevel that was properly ground when I bought it it just needed some honing what you can see here is the very edge of it that I'm being careful not to touch has kind of a silvery lime that's where I honed it against my oil stones in my strop to make it really razor sharp and smooth against the work anything that we're sharpening this is what we're going for I'll explain this next part as if you've never sharpened anything so if you're a beginner this should be pretty easy to follow the first thing you need is a flat surface you could get a granite tile from Home Depot those are usually cheap and they're flat enough for this the other thing that you can usually find pretty easily is glass I got this piece out of a dumpster so it's free but there are lots of other good sources of glass the surfaces on old bathroom scales are usually made of glass the doors on old entertainment centers those clear doors those are good flat glass you could also use that coffee table you had in the 80s when you were really into Duran Duran it's not your living room anymore so you might as well sharpen stuff with it you need a flat surface you need a piece of medium grit paper you're also going to need some grits of finer paper I like to use wet and dry paper from the auto body store and you really just need three or four different grits I've got 400 800 and 1500 here the numbers don't really matter so long as there's a progression from something relatively coarse like 220 or 4 up to something relatively fine like 1200 1500 2000 you're also going to need some sort of honing this is the traditional little cast metal honing guide that's been around for a million years you can buy them on Amazon for $78 there they're very simple I don't even think there's a brand name I think these are just generic but they work really well if you don't have the money for one of these that's completely fine you can also build one this is a little honing guide that I built from instructions on the Internet it's got two pieces of wood that are attached together with bulks and T nuts and you unscrew the top here from underneath and you slide your plain iron end like this and then it works as a honing guide I know it looks silly but it actually works fine and I made it for like a dollar what you want to do is start off by grinding your bevel and that's why we have a medium grit paper on a nice flat surface what I'm going to do is put my plain iron into this honing guide okay now we're all set now what you saw me doing right here with this little blue ruler thing is measuring the projection of the plane iron past the honing guide that's what gives us our geometry this one actually has printed right on the side that if you want 25 degree bevel it needs to be sticking out 50 millimeters this little Craig measuring stick is actually super handy for that because it's got metric units and it has a nice plastic surface that's not going to hurt the blade when you butt it up against there so now I have this set for 25 degrees which is a perfectly reasonable measurement I'm going to put it on the paper doesn't need any lubrication or anything and I'm just going to work it back and forth a bit okay so a couple of things that are worth mentioning when I first started doing this I had a tendency to put much too much pressure and I was bearing down way too hard and I was getting an uneven bevel because of that these irons aren't that thick and you can flex them so you don't want to do that the next thing is that you really want to see where you've made progress you probably can't tell on camera let me grab something else real quick Oh your best friend for a lot of sharpening tasks is just a good old black magic marker I guess they don't call it a Sharpie for nothing because if you color in the bevel then it's going to show you what you've sharpened and what you have give that a second to dry and then we'll work on the bevel a little bit more now we have a really perfect image of what's going on here you can see that I'm working the back of the bevel really well but I haven't gotten to that front edge yet that's still black and that tells me that I've still got a ways to go before I've established a nice consistent 25 degree bevel so no rush just keep working okay so that took me probably about a minute and a half and now you can see the entire bevel here is completely shiny all the magic markers gone that means this thing is completely ground the devil is totally established and I probably won't have to do this again for a long time theoretically I might never have to do it again if I'm good at honing now I've sprayed adhesive on my pieces four hundred eight hundred and sixteen hundred and I'm going to flip them over and stick them to the glass now I'm set up with my coarse medium and fine wet and dry paper on my piece of glass and off-camera I changed my honing guide to be 38 millimeters projection that gives me an angle of 30 degrees that's really common practice with chisels and plain irons people sharpen the primary bevel during the grinding process to 25 degrees and then they typically sharpen the final double the honing to 30 degrees the main reason for this is when you're sharpening by hand with a guide it's really helpful if you're just honing the very very edge of the seal and not the entire bevel it takes less time so I've got a little bit of water here and since this is wet or dry paper the water does help provide lubrication it also keeps the blade from digging into the paper and carrying it up that's a big problem you have with the wet and dry paper process is that the seal is an awful lot harder than sandpaper and it can chew it up pretty quickly works the same way as it did before I put it on I can leave the roller on the glass it doesn't matter and I'm just going to work it back and forth and move it around the paper a little bit so that I'm not focusing too much on one spot so now I've honed through the 800 grit I could put the marker on there again but I really don't need to I can see really clearly that I've only worked on the very very edge of this iron so it's fine the way it is now the one thing that I can't feel is a burr on the back and a bird is really important it tells you that you've sharpened the bevel far enough that it's actually reached the back and there's a little flap of metal that's sticking over that's the way you know you've honed something as far as it needs to go if you don't have the burr you're not done honing yet and you need to keep going so now I did a lot more honing on the 800 and when I feel the back of the iron I feel a very very slight burn that tells me I've gone as far as I need to now what I'm going to do is wipe off any leftover grit because I don't want to move one grit to the next paper and then moving across to the next paper which was the 800 I'm actually going to put the back of the iron against it and I'm going to rub it back and forth just a little bit and the point of that is to flip the bird back over to the front side so I can work the burr off with this new grit second verse same as the first now I'm done again and I can tell because I have that little burr on the back and the edge is starting to feel very sharp so now again I'm going to wipe it off move on to my finest paper the 1500 grit work the burr off the back and hone away okay this iron is now totally finished honing it's got an excellent bevel at a consistent 25 degrees and the very very tip of the bevel has been honed at 30 degrees it's sharp enough to shave a hair sharp enough to do excellent woodworking all it took me was a cheap honing guide a piece of free glass and some sandpaper materials anybody can get their hands on I'm a big fan of the sandpaper method for people who are just starting out it's how I started out it's relatively easy it gives predictable repeatable results and you get blades that you can do real woodworking with the only problem is that you end up with some false economy after you've been using it for a while these packages of wet and dry paper could be better if I had one hold on these packages of wet and dry paper they aren't cheap three to five dollars at the auto parts store you're not going to want to keep spending money on abrasive paper over and over and over again throughout years of woodworking eventually you're going to need something more durable and more affordable when you get tired of paying for abrasive paper I recommend you move on to a set of oil stones like these I'm not going to go into a long discussion of every different type of stone that's available the oil stones are my choice because they're durable they're widely available and they're much much more inexpensive they rarely go out of flat so they don't need much maintenance and they come in a pretty wide variety of sizes and grits even more importantly they're available used so you can usually get a good deal on them if you're willing to look here's my rig I've got coarse stone a medium fine and a superfine now this is more than you really need coarse medium and fine would be plenty just like we did with the abrasive papers using the stones is pretty straightforward you take the piece of steel and you rub it against the stone it's not complicated the only thing about most oil stones is that the ones that you can find and afford pretty much exactly two inches wide and if you've noticed most of the plain irons you have are exactly 2 inches wide that means that using them with your honing guide and balancing everything up on top of the stone well some people can do it but most people find it kind of cumbersome so if you're going to use a setup like this you're probably going to want to do your honing freehand okay remain calm you start talking about freehand honing to a bunch of woodworkers and people tend to get a little bit freaked out they think it's some sort of black art they think it's something that only masters can do but I'm here to tell you it's not complicated at all you're taking a piece of steel and you're grinding it against an abrasive medium there's no brain surgery here now the only thing is if you're really married to doing that 25 degree bevel 30 degree micro bevel thing you're going to find that difficult to maintain with freehand honing luckily you probably don't need to let's take a look inside the plane and I'll explain why most people get way too uptight about iron geometry over the past 20 or 30 years there's been a really common idea in woodworking that a 25 degree bevel and a 30 degree micro bevel is the only way to go I'm not really sure where this idea came from although I suspect it's woodworking magazines the reality is it doesn't matter nearly as much as people tell me here I've got an illustration the inside of a plane with one of the cheeks removed so you can see the Gulf's you can see where the blade and the chip break or lay against the Frog let's take that section and blow it up a little bit so we can get an even clearer idea of what's going on now this drawing here I borrowed from Paul sellers website now here in this illustration you can see how the plane iron interacts with the wood these planes are called bevel down planes and there's a good reason for that the bevel is flipped upside down what I want you to notice is that when you put this plane up to a piece of wood the bevel touch the wood the back of the irons and the edge are the two parts that actually do the cutting the main function of the bevel well is two functions really first it's got to be thick enough to provide support to the edge so that the edge won't be too fragile and then second it needs to provide what machinists call clearance it needs to be out of the way of the wood so that the wood moving past the iron doesn't get caught on the back of the belt this geometry means that actually a wide range of different angles are completely appropriate for wood work you could have a much more obtuse angle like 30 or even 35 degrees on your plain iron it wouldn't affect the cut at all all it would do is provide more support for the cutting edge I actually aim to grind my irons at a much thicker angle than 25 because I don't see any reason to make the edge that thin and fragile now we'll go over to the stones and I'll show you how you can get this without any jigs or fixtures in my last video I showed you how to set up the platform and use a grinder to get a good consistent bevel at 25 degrees I still think this is the easiest and most accurate way to go and I still recommend you buy a grinder if you don't have one yet that's fine go ahead and use the honing guide and the abrasive paper like I just showed you and use that to get your bevel straightened out after that you can use the oil stones to do the honing this iron has already been ground to 25 degrees at the grinder I'm coming over to the stones just to hone it and finish up the edge now as we've discussed I'm not really concerned about the exact geometry that I get I just want to make sure the bevel is within certain tolerances so when I'm honing what I want to do is have the bevel not at 25 degrees where I ground it but a tiny bit higher so that I get closer to that 30 degrees and in order to do that I'm going to put a bevel gauge right here near the stone and that's going to give me a visual reference to let me know what angle to be at I just match up my iron with the bevel itself lubricate the stone with a bit of three in one oil and I'm ready to start honing now I have to skew my iron a little bit to make sure that it's actually going to fit on this narrow oil stone but that's easy you get the hang of it really quickly and match up that thirty degree bevel and then the most important thing to learn is the motion that you're going to use what you want to do when you're freehand honing is get the edge home but also concentrate on constantly honing back that bevel and grinding it further and further away every time that you hone that's going to preserve your clearance here's how you do that you set your iron up on your stone match it up to that 30 degrees and you never want it to come any higher than that but as you push forward on the stone you're going to dip down with your hand until it's very close to actually touching the snow this way at the beginning of the stroke you're working that very edge and honing it to razor sharpness but as you continue through your stroke you're grinding back the remainder of the bevel and keeping it out of the way so you have clearance let me demonstrate you can see my hands dipping down with each stroke and I feel the difference as I'm moving through when I first start off I can tell that I'm on the edge it's hard to explain until you start doing it but the plane has a particular sort of grabby feel when it's really resting on the edge and that's grinding across the abrasive as I move forward into my stroke and drop my hands a little bit the iron feels smoother because now I'm resting on the flat of the bevel as I get to the end of my stroke and I'm all the way at the bottom I encounter resistance again because now I'm at the back of my bevel and I'm grinding that away let me do a few more strokes now this is just like using the abrasive paper I know that I'm done using a particular grit when I feel that nice burr on the back you can also call it a wire edge it's the same thing once I've got it I'm going to go over to my next stones I'm going to quickly move that birth back over to the front side and then do the exact same thing again start at 30 degrees and move forward dipping my hand down [Music] now the last stage in my sharpening process is the strop and that's worth discussing a little more careful I'm going to bring it closer to the camera the Strasse is nothing more than a piece of wood in this case two MDF with a regular scrap of leather glued onto it contact cement works really well you can use a strop dry if you want to and I've been told they're effective that way but a lot of woodworkers use a little bit of honing compound this is green honing compound it's meant for stainless steel it's a superfine abrasive in a wax medium it feels a little bit like chalk and you just rub it back and forth on the leather and it gives the leather more abrasive power more polishing power using that on the iron after it's been honed is going to help you to remove the wire edge and polish both sides so that you have an extremely smooth blade that won't braid the wood as you're working using the strop isn't like using the stones you never push because you would just tear it instead what you do is put the iron on the strop at roughly the angle you were honing at and just pull back and at the end of your stroke lift up don't let yourself go off the strop on the bottom because then you're going to mess up your edge and you're going to round things over so now I'm going to stroke down the strop about 20 times what I'm looking for here is a very polished bevel my bevel isn't straight anymore because the dipping motion that I used during the sharpening has actually given it a gentle curve from the front all the way to the back of the bevel that's fine because all we're looking for here is clearance now the strop with its stainless steel compound has given me a polished smooth surface the last thing I want to do is work the back part of the iron I lay it flat against the strop like this give it firm pressure and pull it towards me ten times is plenty now the blades done sharpened honed and polished on both sides I can drop this right in my plane and it's ready to work it'll keep its edge for a long time so now you know how to freehand sharpen and you know that it's not rocket science the only question left is how much money do you have to spend not very much I probably own eight or ten sharpening stones they just kind of accumulate once you start looking for them but you don't need all that in fact you can do really good sharpening with just one stone if you get the right thing this is called a combination stone it's got coarse side and a fine side and they're bonded together to make a single stone this is called a Norton India stone and this was the standard for years and years before what her stones were invented this is pretty much what every craftsmen use now this is a really similar stone that I got off of Amazon it's the same thing of course and a fine I was curious about it because while the Norton stone costs 20 bucks this one here was only seven and I bought it because I just had to know if a seven dollar stone was any good honestly it was pretty impressed by it it's not as good as the Norton stone but it's good enough that it's a stone I take with me to work so if you need to go really cheap just go ahead and get this one and get started by using the coarse stone for your grinding and your initial honing and the fine side to get your bevel refined you'll be able to have a really good edge combine that with a strap which you can just make yourself out of wood and leather and you'll get a really good edge to complete your strop you're just going to need some green chromium oxide compound I also bought this off of Amazon and this big block that I've had for more than six months now only cost me four dollars so if you buy the cheap stone and the honing compound that's going to be $11 now over the last couple of videos we spent $20 on planes $5.00 on spokeshave and now we're going to spend 11 more dollars on sharpening stuff that brings us up to $36 for our hand toolkit what are we going to do next week I honestly have no idea but I'll think of something good so stay tuned thanks for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 50,711

Rating: 4.9336872 out of 5

Keywords: wood, woodworking, tools, cheap, sharpening, edge, plane, chisel, oil stone, scary sharp, water stone, strop, grinder, grind, hone, bevel, make, maker, tool

Id: 20EZbxI7rrU

Length: 24min 56sec (1496 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2017