How To Sharpen a Chisel (The Correct Method)

oh yes look at that slicing through oak end grain like butter and if you for one moment think that i'm going to share with you how i sharpened to this level then you have got another thing no no no not the milling fine i'll show you how to sharpen it hello and thank you for joining me it's been a while in this video you're going to learn the three stages of sharpening be it grinding honing and polishing because this chisel is going to be needing all three of those because you can be damn sure that i did literally just throw this thing around the workshop for the past half hour damn i need to remember to breathe in between sentences i am so out of practice anyway despite the video length do not be put off by this this process will take you about 45 seconds from start to finish once you learn everything in this video we're going to cover absolutely everything from the ground up so that not only do you end up with a sharp edge but you can also do it quickly easily and without the fuss so let's get started now at a bare minimum this is what you need to sharpen something you need a thing to sharpen and you need a thing to sharpen it on that is it however throughout this video i'm going to be using various jigs accessories and other things to help me with this process which is what i do in the workshop anyway but keep in mind that this process does not have to be complicated it doesn't have to be expensive the core principle behind this is to polish an intersection between two faces that's all sharpening [Music] is now before we get stuck into making sharp pointy things we need to talk a little bit about the geometry going on at the end of this chisel so what we have here is a side view of a chisel you can see we got the bevel we got the base of the chisel and this angle here is 25 degrees when you buy a chisel from a shop whether it's a cheap site chisel like this a premium cabinet making chisel like this or even a honking great vampire slayer like this this is a mortise chisel they will pretty much always be sold with a 25 degree bevel as standard now 25 degrees is fine and all that however what most people will find is that this edge is slightly too acute to hold its edge if you're working on harder materials or you're absolutely battering the chisel that's going to break down pretty quickly so most people will increase that angle to 30 degrees which is a good general purpose angle for all sorts of materials hardwoods soft woods paint cans not paint cans the trouble being if you want to increase this to a 30 degree angle that's a lot of material to remove to get down to the cutting edge so the way around this is to create something called a secondary bevel which is where you only grind a 30 degree angle on the very tip something like this there we go so we've got a 25 degree primary bevel now and then a 30 degree secondary bevel but before you go off and start trying to measure the angles and stuff on your chisel let me just quickly say this these angles do not need to be spot on it doesn't matter if that primary bevel ends up being 24 degrees or 26 degrees and likewise it doesn't matter if the secondary bevel ends up being 31 or 29 what matters is consistency every time you set this up for sharpening you want to make sure it's bang on what it was last time if one time you sharpen it and it's 31 degrees and then next time you sharpen it is 29 and the next time you sharpen it it's 27.275 then you're gonna have a bit of a nightmare and you're going to run into all sorts of problems consistency is key here that's how we make this quick that's how we make this accurate that's how we get back to the fun part of making chisels blunt rather than going through the fuss of sharpening them again so 25 degrees and 30 degrees we can actually see this on my chisel here 25 degree primary bevel that shiny silver one there and then the secondary bevel at 30 degrees which is that kind of darker shiny bit on the end the problem with this chisel however is that i've just been lobbing it around my workshop and so that edge is well and truly knackered what does that look like on here let's just hit it with a metal thing and dull it up a bit there we go we can see that edge is all rounded to sharpen this edge now all we've got to do is produce another secondary bevel like that you see it's slightly bigger than the first one we had but it's still a secondary bevel at 30 degrees nonetheless we don't need to go through the whole process of regrinding 25 and then putting another 30 on the end you just increase that 30. what happens if that gets blunt of course it rounds over and then you come back and you grind another 30 degree on it and then it gets blunt so then you sharpen and then it gets blunt and then you sharpen and then it gets blunt and then you sharpen and before you know it your secondary bevel is as big as your primary bevel it's at this point or maybe even slightly earlier that it's no longer efficient to sharpen that secondary bevel as it is because you've got as much material to remove there as you do here so what would you do in these situations you need to regrind it back to 25 degrees all that material gets hogged away and then start again with a little secondary bevel on the end like that now don't be put off by the amount of material i just cut away from that demonstration this is a very uh aggressive way of showing you what's happening in this sharpening process as the materials worn away and then grind it back in actual fact you'll be able to get a lot of sharpening sessions in that 30 degree secondary bevel before needing to regrind and even when you do re-grind it that material that you ground away you weren't using it for anything anyway it's the cutting edge we're interested in this stuff up here it's just rubbish so we've just covered chisel geometry in a nutshell 25 degree primary bevel 30 degree secondary bevel but keep in mind these are guidelines there might be opportunities where you can get away with a 25 degree bevel as standard if you're working on softer materials like soft woods or you might find that you actually need to increase that 30 degree angle to 35 degrees if you're asking a lot of the chisel in cases like mortising for example where you're absolutely whacking it 25 degrees 30 degrees these are guidelines they're standard try those to begin with and then see what else suits you in the long term so next let's assess this chisel you can see that it is absolutely knackered there's chips on the bottom there's chips on the top it's not looking good for this thing now there's two ways of dealing with this we could either regrind that secondary bevel back or we could regrind that primary bevel back there is no right or wrong answer to this it largely comes down to how damaged that edge is for example let's just give it a massive round over on the bottom like that if i wanted to sort that out using a secondary bevel i would sharpen it around about there and while this isn't a problem you can see that the secondary bevel's already as big as the primary bevel so the next sharp and i'll just end up having to regrind it anyway a better solution may actually be one where instead of regrinding the secondary bevel you end up just re-grinding the primary like that and then starting fresh again both of those methods would work but for me in the interest of showing you the process of grinding honing and then polishing in that order i'm going to grind this back to a 25 degree primary bevel all the way across and for that we are going to be using this oh no do not be put off by this yes this is an expensive piece of machinery but as i said at the start you most certainly do not need it let me explain this is a tormek it's fitted with a diamond wheel and effectively all it does is allow you to grind away material without the effort that's pretty much it which means the alternative to this is grinding away material with the effort which is doing it on the grinding stone what you produce on here where you just hold it in one spot and it does the grinding for you is exactly the same as doing it on a stone working back and forth for hours on end maybe not hours maybe days now i'm joking if like me you're in the workshop every day and you're sharpening almost every day you might be able to justify something like this there are of course other grinders available for example high speed grinders are quite popular however you've got to be pretty careful with those because much like linishes these are what's called dry grinders meaning they don't have any lubricant running around them while they're shaving away material the problem with this is it's very easy to overheat the steel which will damage it and it will prevent it from holding an edge properly however something like the tormek which is a water cooled system will keep the metal nice and cool as it's grinding away material likewise if you're doing it by hand not only will you struggle to build up enough friction to overheat the steel anyway but you'll also have some sort of lubricant on here be it water or oil anyway let's get on to grinding this primary bevel now i'm not going to make this a sales pitch for a tallmec or anything like that however that being said if you want to know a little bit more about it or any of the other equipment i'm using in that case i've got them all listed in the description below but this is one of the main features of the tormek and it is repeatability at the moment i'm bringing this up using a micro adjust feature to get this bang on where it was ground before which is 25 degrees because remember what i said before the key to sharpening consistency anyway let's get this ground back [Music] now in grinding primary bevels when using powered equipment you've got to be very careful not to take off more material than you need to otherwise it is just a complete waste you can see here that i have got rid of the secondary bevel we're down to a primary bevel all the way along now however there is still a few chips on the end and while i probably could get rid of those with the secondary bevel i'm going to give it a little bit more on the primary bevel just to make sure [Music] all right and after a little bit of work we are down to a fresh primary bevel all the way along with no chips on the end if you can see remnants of something on the tip there that's actually a burr that has formed from grinding away material here you can actually hear it very small bit of metal that's folded over and so we'll remove that in later stages [Music] now for those of you that need to do that regrinding process by hand stick with me i've just got to explain something else real quick what i've now got is a chisel that is in exactly the same state as one i would purchase from a store that is a chisel with a 25 degree bevel on it now i've already described what we do after this with producing a secondary bevel at 30 degrees however there's something you want to do before that if you've purchased this chisel fresh and there's also something you want to do periodically anyway to ensure that the chisel is in a good state to be sharpened so let's do that now this process is called lapping and it's the process of flattening the back of the blade to ensure that the scratches you're putting into it are reaching the very tip because if the back of the chisel is curved up like this and when you're flattening the back it's not actually reaching the tip then you're not actually sharpening it you're just making the back nice and pretty and so if you want the back of the chisel to be perfectly flat you want to make sure that the stone is also perfectly flat as well so for this i'm going to be using a water stone which for argument's sake is pretty much the same as an oil stone an oil stone you put oil on water stone you put water on would you believe they do have slightly different properties but for argument's sake those are two natural stones that you could use the third type of stone is a diamond stone the advantage to this is that it doesn't dip over time much like water stones and the invisible oil stone i've got here do and if you get a good brand it still cuts pretty quickly as well but for me water stones is what i prefer you just need a good way of keeping them flat now this diamond stone here isn't actually used for grinding away chisels it's actually used for flattening water stones and so all i do is flatten it back and forth like that and then we've got a nice flat surface to flatten this chisel on when lowering the chisel onto this stone be very careful not to hit it down nose first then lower it like this because you will damage the tip make sure to lower it on like that and then push on like this even better i was once taught to hang off the edge like that and then bring it on like this so we're going to work that back and forth making sure to use all the stone in fact you can actually teach yourself to do a figure of eight pattern which is the most efficient way of removing metal on the back of the chisel and then we'll take a look at what we've got and so taking a look at the back of this it's looking pretty good we can see the scratches going off this way towards the camera and they are going right to the tip of the chisel this is what you want scratch is going right to the end with no gray or faded area you just want a consistent shine all the way across the back with one exception so i've just polished the back of one of my carpentry chisels and we can see something weird going on here there is a polished area on the end here and then there's like a well nothing nothing's happened here this is exactly the same as it was out the shop what's happened here is the manufacturers have intentionally ground a hollow in this area so when it comes to flattening the back all the pressure is put on the cutting tip which is exactly where you want it this is a good thing what you don't want is the opposite of this where there's actually a bump in the middle here which as you're flattening the back the chisel is rocking on and it's not actually stable on the stone by having a point here and a point back here to contact with the stone this stays nice and stable you polish the very tip without polishing and wasting unnecessary time and material trying to get down to this and although the hollow on this is so subtle you can't even feel it that's not always the case in some japanese chisels there is actually a very feelable that's not a word a visible and you can feel it there is a dip in the middle of the chisel that kind of is spoon-shaped and that's there for the exact same reason as this it's so that when you're flattening the back all the pressure is on that very tip and you're not having to faff around flattening unnecessary material and so to summarize this a concave dip or a hollow in the bottom of the chisel is very useful a flat grind is also very useful a convex curve however you're going to have problems with that and if you've just bought a chisel and you've found there is a convex lump on it somewhere send it back that it shouldn't be sold like that that's a manufacturing fault that's not your fault it's not your responsibility to deal with that that's the manufacturers so we've lapped the back of the chisel on the course side of this waterstone which is 1000 grit i'm actually going to do it on the 6000 grit as well it's often worth lapping your chisel up to the finest grit you've got so that later on in the sharpening process as you'll see it just becomes far easier so let's just give this a quick flatten bit of water and again start doing figure of eights or whatever you can manage on this there's two things you want to be aware of when you're doing this the first one making sure you're not grabbing the handle so when you're flattening it you're elevating it and therefore rounding off the back try and keep all your pressure on top like that maybe lightly hold the side of the handle so that you can move it back and forward but certainly don't go grabbing it like that because it's very easy to lift up and round the back of the chisel secondly make sure you're not doing that unintentionally by putting it on a surface that is elevating the chisel like this make sure that you've got plenty of clearance for that handle and that nothing is pushing it from underneath there for elevating it and make sure every time you lay onto it you're doing it like this you're not going boom and then in like that and there we go that's what it looks like after lapping it on the finer grip interestingly you can see there is actually a very subtle hollow in this i imagine that's because the grit and the coarser stone was still able to reach up and scratch into this area whereas the much smaller grit in the finer stone wasn't able to quite reach this area and so just hit the two low points which is fine because this is effectively a hollow grind and is exactly what we want and funnily enough even though the primary bevel is only roughly ground at this point it will still take hairs off your arm it still works we're not even done with the primary bevel yet and so with that that is the grinding stage or should we say the preparation stage complete we've got a primary bevel established and we've got a perfectly flat and polished back having both of these faces in this condition is essential to moving on so whether you've purchased a new chisel or if you're reconditioning an old one make sure to get it to this point 25 degree primary bevel perfectly flat back one more thing before we move on however the tormek behind me produces what's called a hollow grind on the primary bevel that is because it's a round wheel cutting that surface and so there is a slight radius on it whereas something like the linear or doing it by hand on a flat stone will produce a flat primary bevel now there are people out there who will try and tell you there is a difference between the two and will try and argue the benefits of one over the other however that's about as far as they get they just say this is better than that and you ask them why and they're like well it just is there's no difference between the two i'm just going to interrupt myself real quick here if you're enjoying what i'm talking about over there and you want to support more of this kind of free content in the future please consider grabbing some merchandise or at the very least pressing the like button below really helps me out back to it next we are going to move on to honing and for this i've got a new accessory to introduce to you it's this it's called a honing guide that's what it says on the tin it guides you while honing this honing guide is made by lee nielsen and what a honing guide allows you to do is simply clamp a blade at a desired angle so when you're working on it you haven't got to worry about holding it at a consistent angle while working there's a little roller on the bottom and in the case of this one made by leigh nielsen it comes with various jaws and stuff so you can fit angled things and mortise chisels and such in now this honing guide is pretty expensive well worth the money but pretty expensive so i'm going to put a link to this as well as some cheaper alternatives in the description below but one thing's for certain if you haven't used the honing guide and you're struggling to get decent results with a chisel try it i promise you it will make a difference there are people out there who will tell you that using a honing guide is cheating or it's not the proper way of doing woodworking all you've got to do with those people is asking the last time they cut down a tree with an axe and then re-sawed that timber entirely by hand into boards and then flatten it by hand in order to make a piece of furniture chances are they relied on a guy with a chainsaw to do it are they doing proper woodworking no tell them to stuff it now the alternative to honing guides is doing it by hand like this where you rest it on a primary bevel lift it up slightly and then work it in a figure of eight pattern or work it back and forth like that while being careful not to do sweeping motions like this now while i can't argue the fact that freehand sharpening is inevitably quicker because you know at the end of the day you don't have to go through the path of setting up a honey guide and all that you just go for it what i can argue against is the learning curve required to achieve that that's what is not often talked about with these people who promote freehand sharpening sure it's quicker but you're going to write off a lot of chisels and plain blades in the process and in fact i've actually seen this in person when i used to work at axminster tools machinery we offered a re-grinding service for our customers plain blades and chisels and the amount of blades that would come in that people had attempted to freehand sharpen after watching a video or tutorial or saying some guy promote the fact that it is the only way to sharpen not worth it in my opinion not worth it these things cost 10 pounds they take about 15 seconds to set up as you'll see in a minute is it worth it i'll leave that up to you anyway i'll step down off my pedestal now this is called a protrusion stop and it's what you use in conjunction with the honing guide to get the angles accurate you can see on here i've got 40 degrees 25 50 and 30. now we're producing a secondary bevel at 30 degrees and so all we need to do is put the chisel in the honing guide lock it down to the point in which it holds it but it's still able to slide and then we put the honing guide against the edge of the protrusion stop like that and simply slide the chisel forward to hit the fence you then lock that down and when that is placed on the stone that is now magically at 30 degrees and for those of you who've been patiently waiting to find out how to regrind by hand you now have your answer you purchase a honing guide and you make it with a 25 degree stop so the chisel goes out hits the 25 degree stop and then you grind away on your stone at 25 degrees as you can see this is going to take a lot of elbow grease it's going to take a while but providing you've got of course enough stone it is something that's possible but is also the reason why expensive alternatives like the tormek or the lineager here exist so let's start creating this secondary bevel we're going to lock the chisel at 30 degrees using a honing guide and protrusion stop give it a little tweak with this just to tighten it up by the way i get asked about this screwdriver all the time yes it is awesome yes i would recommend it and yes i've linked it below for you go grab it now remember in this stone i have got a 1000 grit and i've got a 6 000 grit so this is the coarser side we're going to begin by doing a couple of strokes on this just to get the secondary bevels started and then we're obviously going to flip to this to get it all polished up to a finer grit but before doing that we're going to give it a quick flatten so we're going to do the finer side to begin with give it another rinse down and then flatten off the coarser side it's generally good practice to do it this way around so that you don't end up with coarse grit stuck in the finer side i don't know if it's backed by any evidence but it takes no extra effort to do it that way round so who cares okay so let's start producing this secondary bevel when you do this make sure to drop it on the wheel first and then the blade don't go blade and then wheel for obvious reasons drop it on the wheel even pressure either side and just drag back make sure to use all the stone three strokes should be all we need on this and so if we flip it over you can see the secondary bevel has started to be created on the end very very small which is exactly what we need and in fact if you run your finger underneath you might feel a little bump of metal there like before that is another burr that's formed and will be removed later for now we're going to flip this over and get polishing so much the same thing wheel then chisel drag back a few times and once you've dragged back a few times you can start going back and forth [Music] you just want to make sure a large enough secondary bevel has been established because if it's just the primary bevel and you push forward it just digs into water stones looking good essentially all we're doing here is trying to remove the scratch marks from the 1000 grit stone using this 6000 grit and i would say we are pretty much there now what i will say being able to decipher between the 1000 grit and the 6000 grit scratches takes a little bit of practice but you can definitely see the stark difference between the primary bevel which is about 240 grit from the secondary bevel which is now 6000 grit the primary bevel's got a dull gray diffused shine to it whereas the secondary bevel almost black mirror-like shine on it now if you have a stone that goes higher than six thousand grit by all means jump up to that but for me i'm going to stop at six thousand we're going to take the chisel out because we need to flatten this burr off the back and because we've already gone through the process of flattening the back in the previous step this shouldn't take very long at all so again same practice as before start the chisel off the edge of the stone drag it back on like that back and forth a few times maybe a few figure of eight and then that should be all we need now as it is this is already insanely sharp we can just go into the edge of a piece of paper like that and separate off the edge it's pretty good but we can take this a step further so next we're going to move on to stropping using this rather questionable looking device this is nothing more than leather mounted to a hard piece of material and is traditionally used to get rid of the remnants of a burr left over from the sharpening process however in this instance we're not only going to use it for that but we're also going to be putting a paste on it which i've misplaced here we're going to be putting a very fine paste on it that acts as a polishing compound for the metal so i'll put links to this drop as well as other alternatives in the description firstly you want to put a little bit of oil on it this is three in one but you could use camila oil or jojoba oil you know something like that can basically help lubricate the surface slightly and then we put a few dabs of the polishing paste over it rub that in and then very carefully begin polishing the bevel of the chisel so we're going to do both the bevel and the flat of the chisel but we've got to be really careful with polishing the flat because there is a slight bit of give on leather and so if we flatten the back on it there's a chance of rounding it so we've got to make sure we do this with very light pressure so with the bevel lift it up until you see the shadow on the end disappear and then you know you're on the right angle and then just drag it back do that a couple of times and then with the flats very light pressure on this barely pushing down at all we'll just do one stroke on that and then i tend to flip between the two so a couple of strokes on the bevel round to the flat again very lightly that should be it and that is now going to be a whole nother level compared to what it was off the stone what i love about strops is it tends to even out your good and bad days with sharpening like sometimes i'll have an off day sharpening on stones and it won't turn out as good as it did the day before whereas if i use a strop it just kind of equalizes that out and i get a consistent result every time oh just effortless lovely now we've covered a lot in this video from chisel geometry to the equipment that you can use to the actual techniques involved in sharpening itself but there is one question that remains unanswered how quick can you actually do it so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to give you a live demonstration on how long it actually takes you to go through this process assuming that this chisel needed a little bit of a touch-up if it needed a complete regrind it's obviously going to take slightly longer but ninety percent of the time you're just giving this a quick touch up on the secondary bevel and then you're back to work so we'll get the stone out the water and we'll get going with it so flattening the fine side flattening the coarse side and then getting the old honing guide wherever i put that there it is over here that goes in lock it down slides up to the 30 degree stop and like that and we get the locky thing give it a little tweak because we've already got a secondary bevel that only needs a little bit of sharpening we can jump straight to the 6000 grit things like that check it looks pretty good take it out like that flattening the back and we're not fully flattening it because it is already pretty flat we're just getting rid of the burr and then we go on to the strop very careful light pressure on the flat going back to the bevel and just alternating between them give it a wipe down and that is going to be a razor sharp chisel should have had some paper ready but here we go so it's all very well testing it on paper and all that but how does it slice through oak end grain let's try it look at that beautiful absolutely oh no follow me on youtube by scrolling down a little bit and pressing that subscribe button and while you're there don't forget to press the like button as well really helps me out now if you enjoyed watching this video and you found you learned a lot from it be sure to take a look at my follow-up video which is how to chisel correctly that's linked just below me here i'll see you there

Channel: Matt Estlea

Views: 1,144,635

Keywords: woodworking, woodworking tools, woodwork, woodworking projects, woodworking craftsman, woodturning, cool woodworking project., woodworking carpenters, wood, sawing, diy, build, woodwork project, easy woodworking projects, beginner woodworking, learn woodworking, starting woodworking, woodworking tool reviews, best woodworking tools, tools for woodworkers, how to start woodworking, learning woodworking, furniture making, craft, sharpening, chisel sharpen, sharp, blade sharpening, estlea

Id: ip_MHACrqKs

Length: 26min 37sec (1597 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 27 2021