How To Sharpen a Chisel | Matt Estlea's Free Online Woodworking School

chisel solid block of cast iron Oh Deary me [Music] hello everybody my name is Matt Lee and I'm a furniture maker woodworking tutor and the creator of the free online woodworking school for which this video is a part of where we aim to take your woodworking skills to the next level in today's video you're going to learn all the techniques when it comes to grinding honing and polishing a chisel from a state having just been hit on a piece of cast iron despite the video length this should only take you 30 seconds it's a very quick process do not be put off by the length of the video we're just going to be going through each step in minut detail so you'll know the entire process like the back of your hand by the end of the video now before we get stuck into anything a quick disclaimer if I may the techniques tips and final result I'm going to be showing you in this video is going to be overkill for the vast majority of you the things I'm going to be showing you are in the context of fine woodworking and furniture making if you're wanting to open paint cans with one of these things if you just want it to smash out some hinges at home and you're not really care about the state year Cheers all because the mallet will do all the work for you you're probably going to end up getting bored five minutes into this video and clicking off of it however if you're wanting to work on fine joinery such as dovetails or you're wanting to make nice handcrafted furniture your chisel needs to be proper proper sharp which is exactly what we'll be doing in this video so firstly let's have a look at the angles of a chisel now this is the finished result this is what we're looking for at the end of this process and you can see on the end of this chisel that we have two angles and these angles are often referred to as bevels we've got this large bevel at the back here and then we've got a smaller bevel at the very tip just that little dark line you can see there now the sizes of these change over time and we'll explain that later on in the process but all you need to know for now is that this larger one is called the primary bevel this one on the end is called the secondary bevel so what's the purpose of the primary and the secondary bevel very simply / is to make the process more efficient quicker and easier which I'll explain to you now so this is a side view of the chisel and you can see we've got the bevel and we've got the bottom of the chisel here both of these surfaces need to be polished in order to create a sharp point the definition of a sharp point is the intersection between two polished faces so for example if you have one face that's nice and polished and the other side is as coarse as Nickelback's vocals then that point is only going to be as sharp as Nickelback vocals on the bottom there so you need to make sure that both of these surfaces are as polished as one another in order to make that edge sharp now when grinding metal the more material you have to remove the longer it's going to take which is where the primary and the secondary bevel come into play with this you can see on this example that we have just a single bevel and let's say that's 30 degrees every time we set this up on the sharpening stone we're gonna have to grind away that entire face in order to just sharpen in that very point likewise with the bottom of the chisel we're gonna have to flatten that entire face just to get to the point so making this process efficient is about removing as little material as you can in order to create a sharp edge this not only speeds up the process but also increases the life of your chisels because you've purchased all that metal you don't be turning it into slurry just to be washed away down the sink later on so now let's take a look at another example of the side section of the blade but with the primary and the secondary bevel in place so here's the blade as it was before here is the blade with a primary and a secondary bevel so what you might be able to see here is we have one large bevel and then the very tip of it you can see here it's sharpened at a slightly steeper angle this means next time we're sharpen a chisel we've only got to remove a very small amount of metal in order to create that polished point the bottom will speak for later but right now we're looking at the primary in the secondary bevel now normally I say normally because there are exceptions to this the primary bevel being this larger one is ground to 25 degrees the secondary bevel is usually ground to 30 degrees now the exceptions to this would be if you're working with harder chisels some people will sharpen them to up to 35 degrees on the secondary bevel that's smaller one on the end and sometimes for paring chisels they will sharpen the entire thing 220 degrees is the lowest I've heard but for today's purposes we're going to be focusing on a 25 degree primary bevel and a 30 degree secondary bevel I would advise you start off with this and then choose which way you want to go after that and if you employ the primary bevel and secondary bevel technique this is what will happen to your chisel overtime so already said you got a primary bevel and then a small secondary bevel on the end once that point gets blunt you're going to need to resharpen it so all you do is yuri sharpen the secondary bevel then it becomes a little bit bigger oops you're gonna see what's happening here so the secondary bevel is now a little bit larger than it was before but not too bad you sharpen it again it gets slightly larger you sharpen it again oh well so you can see the secondary bevel is gradually getting bigger until it gets to the point where your sharpen it the final time and it's started it's actually bigger than the initial primary bevel once it gets to that point it is no longer efficient to sharpen a secondary bevel and what you'll need to do is regrind it back down to a 25 degrees and restart the process of creating a 30-degree secondary bevel on the very tip there you go there it is right there now you might have been shocked about how much metal was ground away when we did the regrinding and it is quite a lot of metal you're right to think that but when you do the regrinding that metal that you grind away on the heel of the chisel is not going to be used to whatsoever the only part of the chisel you will be using is the absolute point so when you've regrind it the point in which you stop regrinding is as soon as you hit the very point of the chisel if you stop there then you haven't wasted any more metal than you need to now for this sharpening demonstration I'm gonna be using a water stone and I'm also going to be using a honing guide I often get questions on what water stone is best and if you're looking at this on my free online school there'll be a link in the supporting resources that'll take you to a guide where you can decipher which sharpening stone is going to be best for you if you're not looking at this on the free online school there'll be a link in the top corner popping up now which will take you directly to the page and you can continue watching this video there what I will say in this video however is how you achieve the chisel geometry of 25° and 30° doesn't matter whether you do it on a water stone a diamond stone and oil stone if you do it on the soles of your grandma's calloused V I really do not care how you achieve that profile don't get sucked into people telling you that your method is wrong because the only person that's wrong is them it's what works for you that matters and on the subject of people telling you that your method is wrong there is no better tool in the sharpening process that does this more than a honing guide these cause many arguments should use a honing guide should you not use a honing guide is it cheating if you do or you're not a real woodworker until you don't need to use one of these like seriously people look it as if you're using stabilizers in the Tour de France or something like that it's a honing guide the choice is completely up to you but I will talk you through the differences between using a honing guide and not using honing guide now a honing guide is nothing more than a tool to hold your chisel at the correct angle you can see you clamp the chisel in there and then when that goes on the Waterstone it will be holding it at the correct angle and you can just work like that without worry about any chisel wobbling or digging into the stone or whatnot and people who endorse using a honing guide off the top of my head are people like David Charles worth Jonathan Katz Moses Vick Teslin from Veritas Deneb pachowski from Li Nilson other youtubers that you might know Mac Cremona and I'm pretty sure mark spagnolo the Wood Whisperer also uses a honing guide and we quite often see those as real woodworkers yet they still use a honing guide so we can kind of see the flaws in that argument people who choose not to use one of these are people like Paul Sellars or Rob Cosmin and James Wright from the channel would buy right they prefer to just go at it freehand and both of these methods are absolutely fine it doesn't matter which one you choose but as a beginner if you're watching this video I would strongly recommend you use a honing guide this is why people who sharpen freehand have had a fair few years practicing their muscle memory they know exactly what angle to lock their hands and their arms in while preventing it from digging in as a beginner however you do not have this muscle memory and it's gonna take a while for you to adjust to that learning curve and get everything locked in and I've seen the results of this I work to Axminster for five years where we sold woodworking tools and there was also a sharpening service available as well where people could bring their chisels in and we would sharpen it for them sure enough when we received the chisels pretty much all of them on the end of them instead of seeing to clean bevels that we see here at twenty-five and a thirty degree they had like no word from exaggeration I'm pretty sure some of them had about 50 different bevels on them and when you sharpened it when you set it up in the honing guide you were never really sure which one you were grinding and this is simply because they got it on the stone they just scrubbed away hoping that that time they were hitting the edge and this here was the most common sight I saw and this was only with three bevels some of these it was completely rounded and what would quite often be the case is because they've done it freehand they didn't achieve a 30-degree edge on the end here and instead it was I mean it could have been as steep as 50 degrees or something like that this means that next time they sharpen the chisel at 30 degrees because this angle here is actually 50 degrees they would only end up hitting this part here they wouldn't actually get to the very tip therefore it would never get sharp in fact what you'd have to do is keep sharpening that 30 degrees until it hit the very tip but then because they were so many bevels it was quite hard to see like which bevel you're actually hitting when it was on the stone and also that can be quite a big job depending on the width of the chisel now some people would realize this and think okay well all I need to do then in order to hit that edge is increase the angle a little bit more but this is actually how they got to 50 degrees in the first place because one time they might have accidentally sharpened to 32 degrees when doing it freehand the next time they might have accidentally sharpened it to 35 and so on and so forth until they got to this 50 degrees and then when they try and hit the edge they sharpen it to 52 degrees and they make the process even worse because now they try and show up in the 30 degree there and they've got even more to get back to this is a problem I saw time and time again whether it was working at Axminster doing that sharpening service whether it is teaching evening classes with students or whether it was teaching day classes in woodworking classes people who do this freehand as beginners will really struggle to get that consistent angle and therefore will continuously produce that rounded edge whereas if you use a honing guide yes it might take you five seconds to set up but what it will give you is consistency and that is the key to sharpening efficiently consistency and removing a minimal amount of material at a time and this is our honing guide achieves this consistency and by the way this is a Lee Neilson honing guide it costs over a hundred quid but the principles still apply to this which is a five to ten pound honing guidance what I used for years when starting off it did the job but it had a few limitations down the line but that's out the scope of this video the principles work exactly the same for the two honing guides you don't need to get anything fancy see something cheap will do the job for you so the consistency of angles is achieved by lightly locking it in the honing guide so that it stays in there but it can still slide about a little bit and you use it in conjunction with this which is called a protrusion stop so you can see on here that I've got a variety of angles ranging from 40 25 50 of 30 degrees and when using a honing guide we're going to be using the 30 degrees later on in the video but a honing guide achieves this consistency by being butts up against the edge and then slides up to hit the relevant stop and then you lock that in place and that will achieve the 30 degree angle I've done the video on how to produce one of these and if you're looking it on the free online school there'll be a link in the supporting resources below if you look at it on youtube there will also be a link in the description so you can see how a honing guide is able to produce these consistent angles whether that's a 25 degree or whether that's a 30 degree and it will prevent you from getting something like this as a beginner however if you would prefer not to use a honing guide and go freehand be aware that this may happen at the start but it is perfectly possible to train your muscles in order to achieve that 25 degree and 30 degree bevel it's just going to take a little bit of time and it will be a much larger learning curve at the start but please do not be put off by people saying that using a honing guide is cheating it's a load of rubbish it annoys me so much anyway this chisel that I'm Mullard at the start the video let's get fixing this and assessing the damage so here is the result and it's been a while since I've reground this chisel you can see that you might be able to see the remnants of a secondary bevel on the very end we can see the large primary bevel this corners kind of a bit dented the corners have chipped off as a result of smacking it on that cast iron and it looks like I've tried to unblock a toilet with it not actually sure what that is I think it might be glue but I think you'll very much agree that the state of this chisel looks a lot like this at the moment there's bevels all over the place and there's a little bit of gunk round here so what we're aiming to do at this step it's grind it back down to a 25 degrees and in order to grind this chisel down to a 25 degree primary bevel I use a tormek do not be put off by this machine this is not the only method of doing it it's just a quick way for me to demonstrate it there are so many other methods of regrinding at don't know where I put it which I will talk you through this is not a sales pitch and I am NOT saying that you need one of these machines in order to get the job done another alternative to the tall mech is something like the ultimate edge which you can see in the background here that's kind of like a belt Lanisha kind of thing which will grind the chisel very quickly an alternative version of that is the Roberts or B Pro edge which is obviously very similar to that machine and the final method is to regrind it by hand and I strongly recommend using a honing guide in order to do this because you're gonna be raising a lot of metal when we grinding and anything that aids you in this process will be extremely welcomed and a honing guide that holds it at the right angle is just the job for this and this is exactly why I use a tormek when I'm sharpening my chisels and why I'm going to be using one in this video it's because it's quicker and it saves on a lot of elbow grease however if you're working on a budget and you do need to do this by hand a water stone or an oil stone or whatever is good for this but I have found the quickest way to do it is to get some float glass or just another perfectly flat surface and stick some wet and dry sandpaper about 180 to 240 grit onto it get a honing guide and just scrub away on that be careful on the push strokes because you can sometimes tear into the paper but using a coarse grit of sandpaper on a flat surface like that with a honing guide will get the job done pretty quickly at the expense of your heart rate now the regrinding will be the part of the sharpening process that takes the most amount of time but remember a cert Ords the start of the video where I was showing you how the blade will develop after a few sharpening you only need to regrind every now and then you should get at least ten sharpening sessions between each time you have to regrind it again and those sharpening sessions in-between where you can get it down to about 30 seconds a chisel whereas when you read grind that's where it can go up to a couple of minutes in order to regrind the chisel and then get the secondary bevel on and all that it's the ones in between that we're focusing on now I'm not going to make this a full-on demo or a sales pitch for a tall mech or anything like that but the advantage of this machine is that it does the job quickly and it does it extremely accurately because the longer you spend switching between grinding with different angles and trying to guess slash remember what angle you did last time the longer the sharpening process is going to take or is if you get it consistent every time it'll be really quick now the tormek is a slow speed grinder which means they're in those when the chisel contacts the stone and there's no metal particles flying off of it either I say this because I'm quite often questioned as to why I don't use eye protection when using this machine because you don't really need to but for insurance sake wear eye protection when using this machine okay so you made a good start as to carry on and I'll show you where we're at so you can see that we've made a very good start on the primary bevel all of that nice shiny area you can see there is what we've just ground away and that's taken no longer than 15 seconds in contact of that coarse diamond stone I've got mounted on the tool make at the moment but because we've still got a chipped edge on here as a result of smacking into the cast iron we got to keep going beyond this secondary bevel that you can see and we need to grind it down to a completely flat finish on that entire bevel just as it was when I first purchased it [Music] see that we're pretty much there I think I'm going to do a little bit more because I can see that we still have got a very very small chips corner on here you can probably still see some of the serrations that have been imprinted after whacking it on the cast-iron so we've got make sure we grind all of those out before we start working on the secondary bevel all right there we go so overall that process probably took about three minutes I reckon not too bad considering that chisels condition but I have known it to take a lot longer bear in mind but with wider chisels and once you start moving on to plane blades as well because of the width you've got extra material you need to remove so it's gonna take a lot a lot longer plane blades are a royal nightmare to regrind but we're not on that in this video we'll save that one for a later date and there you go there's the finished result after step one which is the grinding of the 25 degree primary beveled we've got one nice consistent bevel and there are no chips visible on the edge and this is perfect to start moving on to the next step but before I put this away this machine is obviously grinding on a rounded surface which means that this bevel has got a slight concave to it I often see disputes about having a concave there hole versus having a flat level that you would achieve off something like one of those belt grinders or off working with a flat stone or something however I am yet to see a valid argument for using a flat bevel versus using a concave bevel for me in the seven or eight years I've been woodworking and using one of these throughout that entire seven years I've never seen a problem with having a curved primary bevel but if one of these arguments does happen to strike a chord with you then after you've finished with your curved grinding surface you can then take that to a flat stone and then just flatten it off from there and wallah you have a flat bevel yeah I've never really seen a good argument for it but if you do have a good argument then be sure to drop it in the comments below and yeah we'll see we'll see what comes out of it so next we're going to move on to honing and honing is the stage where we start to produce the little 30 degree secondary bevel on the end of the 25 degree primary bevel now when talking about this 25° and 30° primary bevel what I'd like to say is it doesn't really matter if you're 25 degree primary bevel ends up at 24 degrees or at 26 degrees likewise it doesn't matter if your secondary bevel ends up at 31 degrees or 29 or 28 degrees the chisel or plain blade or whatever you happen to be sharpening won't know the difference between that slight angle change what does matter is if you do happen to sharpen in 31 degrees you have to make sure you get it back to 31 degrees when you set it up next time that way you'll keep your sharpening sessions efficient which is exactly why I use this protrusion stop I've made this to make a 30-degree edge on the chisel but to be honest I've never really bothered to check if it's ended up at 30 degrees or not it might end up at 31 or 29 but I don't really care what does matter however is that when I put the chisel into the honing guide and I slide it up to hit that stop it's protruding the exact same amount it was last time i sharpened the chisel that way I'm gonna match exactly what I made before and will not end up with something like that so because I'm working with a Waterstone here which is a natural stone this will have a tendency to wear over time which is much the same with oil stones as well it's quite common to sort of dig out your granddad's old oil stones or something like that and you've seen there's a huge dish in them and it is useless for sharpening tools on so when working with a natural stone like this you need to make sure it stays flat and I've got a nice flattening plate in order to do so which is dedicated for flattening abrasive surfaces such as oil stones or water stones if you don't want to buy one of these though you can also flatten one of these stones on your wet and dry sand paper on some float glass and that's a pretty cheap way of doing it however if you're working with a diamond stone or if you're working with scary sharp which by the way all of these are detailed in the supporting resources below on the free online wood work in school those will stay perfectly flat over their life there's no need to flatten them but as for this I've got the diamond plate I'm gonna flatten the finer side of this stone first and that way some of the fine particles are going to get embedded in the diamonds gonna go give it a quick wash and then I'll do exactly the same on the coarser side of this stone I like to give it a wash in between this because I don't like the idea of the coarser side contaminating the finer side of the stone although I've never really done any research into this it's just something that I've heard from wood work because I respect and just just taking their word for it to be honest I'm not entirely sure it makes a huge difference though so we're going to start with the coarser side of the stone which is 1,000 grit and we're gonna do a few drags back just to get that secondary bevel started three should do the job you can see on the end of this chisel we've started producing a secondary bevel and that's only taken three strokes on a 1,000 grit stone now the size of this secondary bevel has to be a balance between taking off enough material so that you actually sharpen it and not taking off so much material that you're going to be regrinding again sooner rather than later because this was a fresh 25 degree primary bevel that I was sharpening it only took those three strokes in order to establish that secondary bevel and that's because there was a very very small amount of material that I had to remove however once that secondary bevel starts getting bigger and begins working its way halfway up the primary bevel that three strokes I did just then will not be enough and they'll need to do a considerably larger amount in order to start establishing that secondary bevel to a sharp edge again get a little bit more water on it this is 6,000 grit and it's quite often as high as I go when it comes to honing chisels although it's quite common for people to go out to 8,000 or 10,000 grit I have also heard of thirty thousand grit stones being used before but yeah we won't bother with that now in the same way I didn't want the particles from the 1,000 grit contaminating the finest stone when it came to flattening it off I also don't want to transfer them when it comes to using the honing guide as well so I'm just gonna give the wheel a little wipe down make sure there's no particles on there and also the bevel and then we'll get to work [Music] now you may notice that I'm only using back strokes when sharpening this chisel and the reason for that is simply because it gives me a lot more control rather than scrubbing back and forth however once that secondary bevel starts getting bigger after I've sharpened it a few times I will start introducing back and forth movements in order to get the job done quicker but for now while I'm removing a very small amount of material back strokes are a really good way of preventing myself from taking off too much material and making sure that it's nice and square and that is looking pretty damn good at the moment so what I'm looking for here is checking that all of the scratch marks from the 1000 grit stone have been removed by the 6000 grit that I've just finished on now that is easier said than done and it takes some getting used to identifying the scratch marks in the stone that you're using but I can see from this that all of those scratch marks have been removed and we are indeed left with a six thousand grit finish on that secondary bevel in addition to that it's even across the entire width of the blade which because I use the tormek to grind the primary bevel indicates that the chisel is square and I'll kind of touch on that later because it doesn't always work that way so after establishing our secondary bevel the next step is to take it out of the honing guide and we'll begin flattening the back the reason we flatten the back of the chisel is not only to create a perfectly polished intersection between the bottom of the chisel and the secondary bevel because remember that is how you produce a sharp edge a sharp edge is the intersection between two polished faces but the other reason is because throughout sharpening that primary bevel what's happened is a little bit of metal is folded over onto this flat side and produced what's called a burr and you can quite often feel that if you rub your thumb off the edge of the chisel it's often very very small and can actually be difficult to feel now this is much the same process as before I'm going to start on the 1000 grit stone and in fact I'm gonna give it a little flattens before I do so just to make sure that we're working on a good surface and to prevent that burr from being crushed under the chisel when we drop it onto the stone what I like to do is start it just off the edge like that and then drag it on backwards that means that there's gonna be no mess or trap tons of the chisel and there's gonna be nothing like grinding underneath there after that with this work back and forth if you've got a lot to flatten a figure of a pattern is the quick a most efficient way of removing material on a flat surface it also prevents you from wearing down a sort of Canyon in your stone as it wears it down a lot more evenly so look at the back of the chisel and check that we're getting scratch patterns right to the top of it if you're finding it hard to see move it back and forth one way with the chisel angled off the stone to the bottom left for example check your progress and then if you can't see move it off to the other side of the stone and work it that way and you should be able to see the difference in scratch patterns that's looking pretty good I'm gonna do just a little bit more I'm actually gonna flip the stone round and wash off some of this slurry as well because that's kind of getting in the way we'll keep going with our figure of eights that's working well and then once we're finished on there we'll flip it over to the finer stone again give this a quick wipe down what I'd like to say here is that a chisel it is absolutely essential that the back of it is perfectly flat and there's no round over on it whatsoever because this will really interfere with the function of chiseling down straight or chiseling in perpendicular to the surface if you've got an angle on the back then it's going to start ramping up when you try and use it and it's just going to completely right off the chisel this the importance of working on flat stones the other unfortunate reason that I often see chisels with rounded backs is when people are working on stones that are very close to the surface below and when you put the chisel on it to flatten the back the handle can sometimes be elevating it up off the stone ever so slightly so you don't really see it and they're happily grinding away not realizing that this rounded base on it is elevating it up and causing a ramp on the back that's very unfortunate but it does happen quite often especially when you're working with various grits of sandpaper stuck to a sheet of float glass so do watch out for that make sure your chisel and your chisel only is contacting the stone and there's nothing underneath the handle elevating it off the stone and causing a rounded back so ivory flatten this finer grit your work back and forth in fact I'll do the old figure 8 on here as well because it does take a while for this one's flat in the back so there we go we've got the primary bevel the secondary bevel and we've got the polished back now here I could go a little bit further you can see that we've got that darker shine there which I know is the 6000 grit and then there's this here which is slightly dropping off a bit and that is the 1,000 grit finish I know that from experience so it means that I've got a little bit more work to do in terms of flattening in order to get to that corner if I want to achieve a true six thousand grit finish which of course I do so I'm going to quickly attack that and then we'll move on to the third and final stage which is polishing so I'm happy with the polish I've achieved on the back of the chisel now and it's time to move on to the polishing stage now for this I use a leather strop on this rather questionable looking object and I charge that leather strop with a very very fine cutting compound and it's important that that compound is finer than the finest stone that I just used this leather strop is currently charged with 0.1 micron grit which actually came with the strop itself is from green elephant kitchen I'll put a link to it below it's quite expensive for a strop it's primarily for things like Japanese kitchen ice that needs to be razor razor sharp but I really like it on the subject of strokes I was once doing a demonstration at Axminster on how to sharpen chisels and this know-it-all came out the crowd and said oh you don't need to get a leather strop yeah I just do it on my hand which is like it's what they used to do let's sharpen the chisels and you can actually strop a chisel on your skin because all the strop is doing is removing the very final amount of metal that may have folded back over onto the bevel side after flattening the back of it and so a fine abrasive such as your skin is all that you need in order to do it but this guy came out the crowd and he started going out here and it was all fun and games until we slashed his hand open which was great fun how she can imagine and was certainly a good reminder as to why I prefer using leather strop s' an alternative method is the denim on your jeans as well that's also very slightly abrasive and is able to remove that burn very gently that's the key to its removing the bird gently without ripping it off and creating another blunt edge and because there's a little bit of flex in leather I don't bother setting it up in the honing guide to do this I lift it up until I see the shadow on the end of the blade disappear and then I know that I'm on the correct angle then and with a leather strop you just drag it backwards what you'll find is if you hold the chisel too low it will make a kind of scraping feeling and if you hold it too high it will also make a bit of a scraping feeling whereas when you rest it directly on the bevel it should feel no and smooth so we'll do this a few times on the bevel side and then we'll also do it on the flap but bear in mind because this will slightly cushion around the back of the blade you can only do this once or twice anymore than that and it may start rounding over the back of the blade so I do this once or twice with very very light pressure and then go back to the bevel side and maybe just give it once more and that's all it needs [Music] now that's that's a sharp chisel and that will be suitable for your fine woodworking for your fine jewelry furniture making that's what you're looking for him before you go just to demonstrate that this will take less than 30 seconds to reproduce we'll have a go at it now so let's assume that this chisel isn't as broken town as it was before it's just got a little bit of a dull edge on it and we need to we need to get it back up to scratch right honing guide chisel goes in there up to the 30 degrees stop lock it in place 1000 grit stone I'll go forwards and back this on this because I've got time against me on the fine stone we've got to wash the wheel off [Music] on the lettuce truck [Music] so it so as you can see we're still left with just two bevels on there nice and consistent we know that one of them's there abouts 25° one of them is there abouts 30 degrees because as I said before it doesn't matter too much if the chisel doesn't end up her exactly the angle you want the key to this or the aim to this is consistency the only reason I was able to do that so quickly was because I wasn't having to second-guess the angle that I was grinding at because I used the honing guide and a protrusion stop I knew that it was at 30 degrees doing that freehand as a beginner you will struggle to do that however with experience and once you start developing that muscle memory you will be able to do that albeit 5 seconds 10 seconds quicker I don't know how long it took me to sell boning guide but there you go so as a summary on the entire process we've covered in this video because there's a lot of points and it's a lot to take in as for chisel geometry you've got two bevels primary bevel being 25 the secondary bevel being 30 degrees but feel free to experiment with those as time goes on if you find that your edge is breaking down quicker than you'd like you can increase the secondary bevel to 35 degrees which is something that quite a lot of woodworkers do in addition to that don't be too worried if it ends up being one degree off you know 29 or 31 degrees it doesn't matter the chisel won't know the difference what matters is that you get the angle consistent every single time and that's what a protrusion stop and a honing guide will do when it comes to grinding that primary bevel you've got two methods you can either do it by hand or you can do it via a powered machine like you see behind me differences between those is a powered machine costs more money but is quicker doing it by hand takes a little bit more elbow grease but is a lot cheaper and if you're going to do it by hand I would recommend mounting wet and dry sandpaper to a sheet of float glass about 180 or 240 grit should be fine when honing on a sharpening stone ie producing the 30 degrees secondary bevel and beginning to make that sharp edge you have two choices you can either go for the honing guide route or you can go freehand doesn't matter which just bear in mind if you do it freehand you're going to face a much steeper learning curve whereas if you do it with one of these it's gonna be instant results and in doing so it is not cheating people who tell you that or wrong and you can go as high of a grit as you want when it comes to honing I've we've got a 10,000 grit stone behind me that I've rarely used to be honest but it is there just in case but keep in mind that whatever grit you go to on the secondary bevel you're going to need to match on the back of the blade as well because a sharp point is the intersection between two polished faces and then after you've hones the secondary bevel and you've flattened off the bare on the back you can then take it to your leather strop and just remove the remnants of that birth very gently and you can either do that dry on the leather or you can do it with a paste on there completely up to you just make sure that the paste is finer than the last grit you used when honing and then once the blade breaks down remember that you don't need to regrind it every single time you've got a fair few sessions of sharpening the secondary bevel before you need to do that the time when ivory grind the chisel is once the secondary bevel takes up half of the primary bevel then it's no longer efficient to sharpen a secondary bevel and you might as well start from scratch oh that is a lot to get there in it so if you need any more guidance on this I've got a full written article on my website which is completely free to view it's part of my free online woodworking school go and have a look at that there's downloads that you can take to the workshop with you and there is also some recommendations for sharpening stones for honing guys how to make the protrusion stop everything is there to get you producing super sharp chisels so thank you very much for watching guys I hope you enjoyed the video if you found it useful please don't forget to press the like button below and subscribe if you haven't already we'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Matt Estlea

Views: 29,912

Rating: 4.9627099 out of 5

Keywords: how to sharpen a chisel, how to get a sharp edge on a chisel, how to fix an old chisel, sharpening chisels, How to regrding a chisel, regrinding chisels, difference between primary bevel and secondary bevel, how to grind a primary bevel, how to sharpen a secondary bevel, what angle should I sharpen my chisel to, sharpening chisels on waterstones, stropping chisels, Lie-Nielsen Honing Guide, sharpening, chisels, blade, hand tools, diamond stone, waterstone, stropping paste, estlea

Id: RBRrwDkwSsQ

Length: 35min 30sec (2130 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2020