You've just bought a set of chisels you're not sure how to get them ready for work we call it initializing or preparing a chisel, you just bought a brand-new set like these are, never been out of the package and you look at the chisel and it looks sharp, feel sharp, is it sharp? we're not really sure, let's have a look these are, look, this is cutting but look at the surface of this wood and you see the torn surface so it does cut but this is only been ground to about 150 maybe 200 grit we want to take it to a much higher level so how do we do that we bought the chisel we look at this side we look at the bevel, can you see there are grinding marks in there, if you can see the grinding marks usually it's not going to be refined enough even though they will say on the packet sharp, danger and things like that. So we just got these chisels, what we want to do is somehow check this back for near flatness, now I don't want you too obsessed about flatness you can really obsessed about flatness and it's not necessary because generally we don't use the flat face but very much we generally lift up to dig down into the wood ,we chop with it, we do things like that ,so it's not necessary always but we do have to have something to shoot for so we might as well say flatness so I'm going on this face here this has never been offered to a stone before my stones are flat if you don't have flat stones use some paper on some plate-glass, that will get you somewhere where you need to be, now this chisel has a hollow back so what would I do that, can you see is hitting here and it goes all the way across the edge, it was very narrow on this side, inaccurate grinding, yes fairly inaccurate, but what we do have is we have an edge we can go a little bit more like this you can see is widening, do we need to get this hollow out of here absolutely unnecessary, you do not need to do that, go to the next grit here polish that face, keep it dead flat, do not lift up, like that, then go to this face here and polish that up face out, this is 1200 grit superfine we polished all the striations left by the course, by the medium and by the superfine stone and now we've got a flatness there which is what we need we're going to turn over, this is a piece of wood just a block of wood and I'm going to charge this with buffing compound for steel, stainless steel and I flip over onto this face and I just rub this back-and-forth, see how it's going black there, so I'm polishing out this back face and now it's starting to shine if I clean off this, this is already got to the edge here, it's polished out, I can actually see my face in that edge and that's plenty good enough for this chisel so I'm not worried about any more now I have to focus on the bevel so I've initialised the back face of my chisel I go back to my sharpening plate stones wet stones, ceramic stones whatever kind of stone you are using I'm staying with diamonds so now I'm going to work on the bevel here I feel for the angle, there's the angle that the original ground angle put on there by the manufacturer and I push it that angle back and forth what that creates is a camber on here, I like that camber I can feel a burr on this underside, I go to the next level, do exactly the same no difference I'm still feeling for this burr 'cause I want to feel it is even it feels nice and even I go to the super fine and I spend a little bit more time on this one because I'm taking all the scratch marks the striations out from that very coarse stone medium stone anything that was left by those two grips and I flip over and I pull and look what happened there there is a burr, that's the burr just remove the burr from the length of the chisel so that means I got the full width of my chisel onto the leather side of the strop this time not the wood inside, make sure it's charged enough with some buffing compound and then place the bevel on here, the heel of your hand on here good firm grip and pull so I've gone 30 times, this side is buffed out here just to make sure there is no burr left on pull that side and I'm going to take the chisel, this was the side that we had before, I'm going to go to this side and see what the difference is here and there we have it, that's the polished side this is ultra smooth on this side if I flip over to this side I've got this coarse grain so that's what we achieved that was super fast and that's how we prepare our chisels for daily use and from here on we just sharpen it periodically once twice a day three times a day we do exactly the same as the last part of that, never needing to touch this face apart from just to break the burr.
