How to Sharpen a Chisel using Waterstones and a DMT Dia-Flat Lapping Plate

let's talk about setting up a brand new chisel or honing and sharpening an existing [Music] chisel now I'm lucky enough to have a brand new set of chisels that I need to get ready to use in my shop the basic concept for tuning up a brand new chisel or sharpening an existing chisel is to get the back or flat of the Chisel to exactly meet the front or the bevel uh it zero radius and a highly polished Edge so to get the two planes to exactly intersect and get it highly polished that will give you a razor sharp edge now there variety of methods for doing this and they're all equally valid and they're all trying to get that exact same result the method that I like to use in my shop is called Hollow grinding uh the bevel and then I'll freehand hone that on water stones and the reason I like this is because it's very fast to tune up that edge while I'm working now the downside of this method is that I do need to grind the front it takes a bit of extra time especially on a new chisel and every now and then I need to go back to the grinder and reestablish that Hollow Grind but what I like about it is while I'm working when The Edge gets a little bit dull I can take it to my highest grit Stone just a few passes freehand without having to set up a jig and I am back up and running 10 or 15 seconds later I'm back at my work that's what I love about this method so let me go ahead and show you my my whole process on a brand new chisel which in includes flattening the back uh and take you step by step how I accomplish a razor sharp edge on a chisel now here's a close-up view of a brand new chisel and again what I want to do is get a perfect intersection between the back of the Chisel the flat and the front or the bevel and have those meet perfectly along the whole Edge now I'm using uh Norton water stones uh for doing my flattening here and my sharpening and I'm going to start with a thousand G uh here and start working on the back of this again this is a brand new chisel so I'm going to work on the back with that thousand grit put it on the stone and um back and forth holding it down you know all the way I keep about a 45 degree angle it's easier to uh hold it down nicely and just back and forth creating a scratch pattern on the back stop before lifting it off and wipe it off and and you can notice a scratch pattern beginning to develop so I also like this 45° um you can do you can notice a scratch pattern more easily where it's flattening and I want to make sure that I get that consistent scratch pattern all the way across the back so I can see my 45 scratches here and right here and I need to get it here in the middle all the way to the tip uh so I need to make sure I'm getting in these areas all the way across if I need to step down to a 220 uh to quickly get rid of some material I can do that as well uh and then back to the th and then work my way up to 8,000 again brand new chisel so I've got to work the back a little bit more uh if it had an existing chisel I would have done this you only need to do this process once now I'm obviously dealing with water and water stones so I put um this is just a um jelly roll pan to contain the water mess and uh splashing water uh constantly on these Stones keeping them clear of the um grit that builds up on them and I also have a nonskid uh pad here so the stone uh isn't moving [Music] around now I'm just about there with this chisel uh you can see that this is about 2 or 3 minutes of work uh you can see a consistent scratch pattern especially all the way across the front edge uh there's a little bit of a Hollow here and I haven't worked really this far back which doesn't matter and the hollow there doesn't matter as long as I'm good along my edges and especially all the way consistent scratch pattern along the front now one thing to be aware of is that your Stones need to be flat uh whenever you're working on uh chisels or irons whatever you're working on needs to be perfectly flat uh and so we have to go through and make sure that this is constantly flat these Norton water stones especially wear very quickly which is why they cut quickly but the stones will go out of flat very quickly uh every 30 seconds or 1 minute that I'm working on this chisel uh this stone is getting out of flat so to flatten it I've got a DMT Dia flat plate here uh and I will make a cross-hatch pattern uh on my stone and run that back and forth uh diagonally one two three four five other way diagonally and then kind of back and forth using the whole plate and you can see uh my crosshatch is almost gone um there's still a little bit on one corner here let's take a look right here you can still see uh a couple of pencil marks I can still make out a couple pencil marks there so I want to go ahead and flatten it one more time and now uh we're looking good perfectly flat again and I'll go ahead and finish up um this chisel now that I've got the back flat I want to go ahead and start polishing it and I've got Norton combination Stone here of 4,000 and 8,000 so I'll work on the 4,000 then the 8,000 and if I'm having a hard time seeing the new scratch pattern or the Polish I can switch to the other side and run the 45 on the other side and uh see the difference you know watch the scratches start going the other direction uh until I've removed all the previous scratches uh to before I move on to the next Stone [Music] [Music] and finally I'll re flatten my 8,000 one last time and use light pressure uh in and out just on the very tip to get a final polish right there on the tip and we can see that here with the 8000 grit little bit hollowed there just uh back as we saw earlier but nicely polished all the way to the tip and it's fine for a hollow to be in the center there and we only need to work the last few inches so we're all set now with the back of this time to move over to the front uh I use a Hollow Grind method uh so I'm here at the grinder uh this chisel uh has not been ground yet uh it's got a flat uh grind right from the manufacturer so I'm going to holog grind that out and I'm using a 25° angle that's actually what this one came from the manufacturer that's a pretty good standard uh angle for a bench chisel uh my pairing chisels all go down to about 20° uh my bench chisel is usually about 30° maybe but 25 is a good all round uh degree for chisel so I'm going to go ahead and grind that here at the grinder to Hollow Grind out uh this bevel which gives it a slight curve which is going to make it really easy to freehand [Music] hone I've now finished grinding on this chisel and honestly that only took about a minute uh the grinder starts because I had it set at the correct angle uh the grinder starts here kind of in the Center and then Works uh backwards and forwards so the Leading Edge and back uh as it Hollow grinds that out obviously had to be careful of the temperature making sure that uh I didn't get too hot as I was grinding it and the only thing I had to keep track of was making sure that I was Square to the side so every now and then I'd hold up my chisel uh to the light and make sure that was being perfectly Square um to the side making sure that front Leading Edge is perfectly Square to the side other than that um you can make out the the marks uh left from the grinder there on the front edge and also the fact that now uh there's a little bit of a concave uh shape it's no longer exactly flat and that'll help us with our freehand honing now that I've got the Hollow Grind on the bevel I'm going to go ahead and do some freehand honing sharpening and polishing the front uh I'm going to start with uh thousand grit um Norton Stone and what I want to do is um rock the Chisel back back and forth a little bit to find the very front and back when you rock it you'll see exactly you'll feel exactly uh when you're touching the very tip and when you're touching um the very tip and when you're touching uh this part back here because the rest is hollowed out um and then I want to support the Chisel the weight of the Chisel with one hand uh pressing down with one or more fingers on the front supporting the weight of the Chisel with my other hand and I like to just pull it backwards um and as I'm going backwards I try to use um lock my wrists my hands my elbows uh shoulders and just rock my upper body back uh and therefore I'll keep uh the Chisel at the correct angle the whole way now I want to use the whole Stone so I'll move around I'm using the right hand side left hand side in the middle and I'll just do about four or five strokes and then turn it over and take a look and you can see I'm starting to polish uh the corners um and a a little bit along the back and I want to keep going until I've got it very consistent uh all the way along the front can see a little bit of polish at the corners both at the Leading Edge and just back uh at the thick part of the steel and I want to keep going a few more Strokes until I get a Polish all the way across that front Leading Edge [Music] I've now done uh four or five more Strokes so total of 8 to 10 strokes and you can see I've almost got it all the way across uh the front I think just a couple more Strokes I'm going to flatten the stone first and do a couple more Strokes uh and then uh be able to move up to the next Stones here you can see the Polish all the way across from that thousand grit across the front Leading Edge and I can feel a bur um all the way across if I run my finger I can feel bur all the way across that Leading Edge so I'm now ready to go up to the 4,000 and the [Music] 8,000 after moving up to the 8,000 grit now you can see a really nice polish all the way across the front and and just a tiny Burr along the backside that I now need to remove I'll go ahead and remove the Burr on the back uh by just giving it a couple of Strokes on and off the stone now sometimes that Burr when I remove it from the back actually flips over to the front of the Chisel so if you can feel a burr moved over to the front um just go ahead and work back to the bevel side do about one stroke down the stone and then check again and see if it's moved over and you could do sometimes I'll do just a couple of hones on the bevel side and then back to the back one or two strokes um and that should go ahead and polish up the edge really nicely well now that we've uh tuned up our chisel let's check it out in action this is the engrain on some white pine and just going to take some shavings right here from the end and check it out nice curl of end grain popping up there pretty smooth finish being left behind by this chisel on this end grain not bad now let's compare that to um a factory chisel which I've done nothing to this is straight from the factory and I'll go ahead and try to push that right through this end grain you can see a lot more tear out and a little bit more cloudy finish it's not curling up more tearing um and you can see the gaps opening up in that ingrain you know compared to our sharp chisel so that's straight from the factory and let me go ahead and uh back to the one that we've tuned up again a nice curl and much smoother finish to the end grain so that is my method for tuning up a new chisel or sharpening an existing chisel and I like this method because now it is really fast for me to hone this chisel as I'm working when it dulls a little bit I simply go back to my 8,000 Stone few Strokes on the bevel remove the Burr and I'm back up and run literally takes 10 or 15 seconds um and that's why I really like this method but there's a lot of methods you can use for tuning up a chisel sharpening a chisel a lot of different ways to go about it all of them are equally valid they're all trying to achieve the same result which is having the back and the front of the Chisel meet at a perfect Point uh highly polished to get a razor sharp edge well I've got one chisel done I've got quite a few more to go [Music] no

Channel: Highland Woodworking

Views: 174,786

Keywords: Sharpening, Chisels, Diaflat, Norton, Water, Stones, Narex

Id: CADqyYA_e-U

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2011