How to Get a Hand Plane Blade Scary Sharp in 90 Seconds - Essential Woodworking Skills

[Music] alright guys welcome back today I want to talk about sharpening hand planes and sharpening them better than will Walker if you want to see our feud head over to instagram and check it out it's been pretty awesome so far this is a process that is way easier than sharpening a chisel I get my done in about a minute and a half to three minutes every time it's really quick painless and gets razor sharp results so let's come on into the bench and I'll show you how I get this done so most people don't have two types of planes they're gonna have a low angle or a standard angled plane the low angles aren't they have a 12 degree bed angle that's where the plane iron sits and then the standard hand planes have a 45 degree bed angle and why is this important to know because you want to sharpen these at different angles and a low angle get sharpened at about 25 degrees and a standard one will get a 30 degree micro bevel one of the great things about sharpening hand planes is you don't need to do the back you just need to do the very edge of the back and I'll show you how I do that let me draw you a picture here you can so you can see a little bit more about what I mean here okay so let's talk about standard angle blades for example so it sits at a 45 degree angle but your bevel is down so you're still cutting at a 45 degree angle because what actually interacts with the wood here is at this same 45 degree angle so when you sharpen that to 30 degrees let's say with a micro bevel it doesn't really matter the angle as much because you're always going to be cutting at a 45 degree angle typically in my opinion 30 degrees is the sharpest angle you can get for a hand plane that has the most durable edge but when you get to a low angle block plane which we have here this plane blade is sitting at 12 degrees but while it sits at 12 degrees the bevel is up so while you're at 12 degrees and your bevel is up you're actually going to add those two together so 12 plus 25 and try to write this upside down oh gosh I'm terrible at that 12 plus 25 is going to equal 37 so if you were to put a micro bevel on this of 30 degrees suddenly you are cutting at 42 degrees which is almost the same as forty-five here so it defeats the purpose of having a low-angle block plane so when you're getting into sharpening hand plane blades make sure you know whether you're working with a bevel up low angle plane or a standard angle bevel down playing the only time that that would be different and most people don't have them is a standard angle bevel up block plane that's gonna be at a 20 degree bed angle plus your 25 degree blade and you get 45 degrees again so that would be the only time that you sharpen a bevel up plane to put a 30 degree Michael bevel on it if you wanted to do a little bit of a higher angle for some crazy figure or something like that but typically your longueuil stuff is going to be better for endgrain and straighter grained woods now let's talk about what you need for sharpening now when it comes to sharpening a hand plane blade you have some options I like diamond stones I also like water stones when I'm doing my hand planes I tend to lean more towards the water stones because they cut a little bit faster and so when I'm trying to go quick it just seems to get the job done quickly you're gonna want a guide if you like to use that or you can do it freehand I like to use a marker just to see where I'm making progress a square and then a very thin piece of metal like an old saw blade or a ruler and that's for when you do the back I'm going to show you a great trick for that and then a strop as well so if you have those you can get this done very very quickly okay so when you're sharpening hand plane blade and the reason why it's so easy to do quickly is you're just sharpening the tip of it I very rarely sharpened back my whole bevel which is 25 degrees from the factory unless I get a significant chip or defect in it that needs to be reground out but usually I just very quickly sharpen the tip and you're gonna put a slight camber on it so basically what this means is this is very exaggerated version of it it's going to be you know in real life it'll be like 1 or 2 degrees but it keeps your corners from digging into the wood when you're making overlapping passes because you want basically almost all the hand planning blade to be cutting except for the very corners and so if you were doing that freehand the way you would do that is you would rock it back and forth until you find your bevel and then lock your wrist and tilt it up just a little bit and then you would make your passes like that if you're using a jig like I'm going to here it usually has either a marking like this Veritas one that shows you where 30 degrees is or Matt s Lea has a great video where he uses a setup block to set the degrees for his sharpening but with this Veritas jig it's very handy it just gives you the exact angle and you can lock it in and then take this little jig off but as you can see at 30 degrees you can just see a little bit of light under the plain blade right here where the back of it's not touching so you know you're doing just the tip of that and that's something you want to verify if you do use a jig that you're just doing the tip and when you look at a micro bevel you just want just a tiny bit of that heel up off of the stone because getting the tip is important but you don't want to overdo it because then you end up getting some pretty funky angles in your hand plane so I'm gonna use water stones obviously you've seen me use diamond stones for my chisel videos these are great especially when you're really trying to keep a super square edge but again with hand plane blades you get that slight camber and you're just doing the tips and you can adjust in the hand plane the angle at which your blade is sitting so if you get a little bit off square you can fix it later when you're setting up your hand plane in fact I have a great video on setting up a hand plane I'll link that right here in the corner that you can check out so the first thing when you're using water stones you want to make sure they're flat now I flatten all of these except for my first stone here we are going to do I have six hundred thousand and eight thousand now I'm not going to use the six hundred but I'll show you how I flatten them so what I do is I take my pencil and I just draw a grid here you don't need straight lines and make sure it's nice and wet and then I take a flattening stone or I take my course diamond plate stone and I simply rub it over the top until that pencil line is gone there you go now you know that's a flat surface like I said water stones will cut steel faster but they do wear quickly so if you're sharpening in the same place you're going to create a hollow in your stone the lower the grit I the number like 600 it gets that hollow a lot slower but when you get up into the really fine grits that hollow can happen pretty quickly so if you're doing a lot of sharpening you want to check that regularly and make sure that you are flat so then I'm gonna get started on my thousand and the way we're gonna work this and the camber is we're gonna keep even pressure on both sides and just do 30 strokes then I'm gonna just check my surface and make sure we're getting an even cut the whole way through and this is why I use my marker you can use your marker to just put a little bit of ink on the front there and that'll help you see where you're cutting just do 30 strokes and check see our markers all gone we're getting a nice micro bevel okay now when I've done my 30 I'm gonna press down with just pressure on my right finger and do 5 backward stress 1 2 3 4 5 and then the other side on the left your right 1 2 3 4 5 now I'm gonna go to my next stone which is my 3,000 same thing 30 strokes and then 5 on each side 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 I'm gonna go to my 8000 here making sure we got a lot of water just checking to make sure and this is why I have a square and I like to use a cheap one because it's all this water making sure that I'm square and I just have a little teeny bit of light peeking through on each corner and I'm talking you'll barely be able to see it then we're gonna do 30 strokes on the highest Grint one sometimes I'll do 45 just to kind of finish polishing it you can see this slurry that's a good thing that's the metal cutting and that's the stone sort of breaking apart and that helps cut and then we will do our 5 strokes 1 ok then I'm going to just take a paper towel and wipe that off and look you can see we're getting a nice polish there and I'm to feel on the back for a burr like I talked about in my chisel video there's just a little piece that you can feel back there with your fingernail that you should be getting I can feel that just it's just a little piece of metal now I'm going to take it out of my jig because our front bevel is done I'm gonna be very careful with this now and then this is where our very thin piece of metal comes I use an old Japanese saw blade and what we're aiming to do is just sharpen right back here where the burn is and the reason is again because this is a bevel down plane which means you're cutting like this the this part of the plane is never gonna come into contact with anything so all you need to do is sharpen that very edge so what I like to do and this is not a technique I've created but I've seen several other people do and they that sharpen very successful is I take something like this ruler or something very thin like this saw blade this is just an old dovetail saw blade and you just put it on the very edge of your sharpening stone and you put your plane blade and you want to use the outer eighth quarter of an inch and you just take it back and forth same thing about thirty times making sure you're staying on that edge so you're not creating a round over just like that you're gonna look back there and yep we're just getting that edge we're gonna move up a stone here and go to our three-thousand same thing just putting that old saw blade right on the edge make sure you don't cut your hand on the back of the saw blade if you are using one I'm just gonna do that thirty times making sure I have even pressure from both fingers you don't want to be pressing too much on one side flip that stone over same thing okay perfect and then if you're doing rough work your your blades probably sharpen it enough but pretty much you always want to strop so we're gonna go ahead and start strapping now when I strop the trick is you really want to put a lot of pressure you don't want to I mean it would probably be impossible to bend one of these new a1 steel blades but some of the old Stanley's are a lot thinner and you probably could bend it so I wouldn't put everything into it but you want to put enough pressure that you're getting into your strop and for your strop this is probably the end of this drops lifetime you don't want it so built up that it's just caked I add metal polishing compound to this once every five times I sharpen and I just go one two three and the reason being is that when this cakes up you lose kind of the grit of the the strop as well and it loses its effectiveness so what I do is I put my hand in it and this would be kind of the same technique as when you were hey if you were hand sharpening and I just rock it until I feel the bevel and I just come up a little bit and I'm gonna do 30 strokes and I'm putting the same amount of pressure that I would put to try and close a paint lid like if I was you know punch it down on a paint lid about that amount of pressure so I'm just gonna find the bevel and rock it up just a little bit lock my wrist and do it thirty times all right great and yeah I can see we're really starting to get a polish there and then same thing with the back I'm just gonna take it and you can even use your saw blade again if you wanted to but this time you don't want to go sideways you could you want to kind of tilt it but again because the strop is sort of microscopically folding around your blade it doesn't matter as much what I'll do is just take it and pull it towards me thirty times on the side and then I just do it one or two more times on the top to make sure there's no microbrewery left and now let's test this and then when you want to test it to see how sharp it is you just take a piece of paper whoo doggy that is sharp look at that that's how you sharpen a hand playing with filming this took about five six minutes when I do this by hand by myself usually takes me about a minute minute and a half to do to get a razor-sharp edge it's super easy because you can adjust a hand pointing like I was saying in with the lateral adjustment it doesn't matter if you get it you know if you're a couple degrees off square just make sure you're getting the micro bevel and then as you can see on the back here we just have that slight Polish right on the end there and that's all you need and that makes using a hand playing so much more enjoyable in fact that video right here up here in the corner that little eye go check that out I'm going to show you how to get super super super thin shavings really get the best performance out of a hand playing guys thank you for watching if you're new here please subscribe like this video share it with your friends thank you so much for watching stay safe in the shop and have a wonderful day guys you

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 303,928

Rating: 4.8614831 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, scary sharp, hand plane, how to sharpen a chisel, how to sharpen, sharp, how to get a scary sharp blade, hand tools, how to sharpen a plane, scary sharp system, how to, plane blade, plane, hand plane setup, hand plane basics, hand tool, how to set up a plane, how to set up a bench plane, how to use a plane, hand planes, sharpen, planer, how to sharpen a plane blade, plane iron, budget scary sharp kit

Id: JBFfFhQzkhY

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2019