How To Sharpen a Chisel

[Music] [Applause] in a disposable World essential items of lasting Beauty are increasing in worth experience the Fulfillment of creating heirlooms for succeeding generations with your own hands hi my name is Frank straza I'm with the Heritage School of Woodworking and in this video I'm going to show you how to sharpen a chisel the same techniques that I show you in sharpening a chisel are the same techniques that you'll use in sharpening a plane a Spoke shave and other tools and in upcoming videos you will see more in depth some of the different things to encounter the first thing I'd like to talk about is what defines sharp and the way I usually Define sharp is having two highly polished surfaces coming and meeting to Infinity if we take one of those aspects out of the equation then we won't have a sharp tool in other words if we take um one surface and we polish only one surface and we don't polish the other surface then we won't have a sharp tool you have to have both surfaces meeting to Infinity both have to be highly polished I'm going to show you the technique that I use I use a diamond stones and again we'll talk about some of the other stones and their pros and cons in some of the other videos but I use Diamond Stones here I have a coarse medium and fine I then go onto a hard translucent oil stone and a leather strap so the coar stone is about a 300 grit uh we've got a medium also referred to as a fine Stone that's 600 grit and then a extra fine uh which is 12200 grit the hard translucent uh they don't uh give that a grit size because it's a quar Stone it's a natural stone so let's begin here um one of the things to be concerned about here is the angle but um 25 to 35° is is fairly standard I use um I just do it by by ey um I'm going to start by putting a little bit of water on the stone so the water what the water does is it helps float away the particles I added a couple drops of soap there to help break the surface tension of the water the first thing that I'm going to do here is I'm going to start by working on the bevel that's this part of the of the tool right here and I'm going to start on the coarse Stone what we're going to do is bring my hand down close to the bevel and feel the bevel you can rock the Chisel back and forth you can even see the the water coming out right at the edge there and we you know that you've you've got the angle okay so now I've got this and I'm just going to work it back and forth now there's several ways to do this we can work in a circle we can go straight back and forth like this uh you can do it in a figure eight if you want to get fancy the main thing is you want to maintain a consistent bevel okay so how do I know that I've maintained the bevel well let's check our progress you you can see a scratch pattern right there see that scratch pattern there's some of the old polish right there from the um previous sharpening I'm doing the whole entire bevel so I can see the scratch pattern and I can see that I'm maintaining the same bevel that's there on the Chisel so again back like this what I'm not doing I'm not holding it up here if I was holding it up here the Chisel would move back and forth like this and it would tend to put a round in the Chisel which I don't want to do so I'm going to hold it as close as I can my left hand comes in here for stability and we work it back and forth working a circular [Music] motion just like this again maintaining a consistent bevel here so let's look at it again seems like we're making some progress so let's work on a little bit more now how do I know that I've gone enough on one particular Stone that's the question how do we know that we've gone enough well as I mentioned earlier what defines sharp is having two surfaces meeting so you have one surface meeting the other surface now what we're doing here on this bevel is we're removing metal so we're taking metal away from the bevel to the back so when that happens when we when the bevel has met the back we're going to feel a burr now this is the secret to sharpening you've got to get the Burr so you can feel sometimes even see but unfortunately you can't feel the bur in the video but you can you can feel it here now I'm feeling it right here right there and right there I feel a little bit heavier right there but I want to make sure that I feel a bur all the way across that edge because what we have here is we've got this bevel meeting the back I want to get a little heavier Burr so if I'm not getting a burr that means that I either one haven't gone enough on this bevel I haven't sharpened this bevel enough or two I'm not at the right angle I could be a little bit too low that would be one reason I'm not getting a burr simply turn it over look at that scratch pattern if your scratch pattern is back here but not up towards the bevel well you need to increase the bevel so now I've got a burr all the way across feeling it there there and there we've got the Burr that means that the bevel has met the back now that Burr for me is a tactile indicator that I've gone enough on this Stone I'm ready to move on to the next Stone but what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that Burr off okay so I'm going to come over to the Fine Stone the ultra fine Stone here and I've got the stone flush with the edge here in this little holder and I'm going to take the Chisel like this it's very important that the Chisel is held perfectly flat so you'll see we're just going to take the Burr off on the back of the Chisel now I've I sharpen these chisels every day so the back of this is already Polished in subsequent videos I'm going to show you some of the problems that you can encounter by using uh by sharpening a used tool or even a new tool and what you will have to do to get this type of polish on the back of your tool so now the Burr is gone in fact the Burr is on the bevel side so now we'll go to the medium Stone and same way I felt the angle and we're going to work it back and forth I like to work in a circular motion because it helps maintain that bevel so here we are we're just going to work this back and forth like this again feel the Burr I want to feel right there right there and I'm just going to go a little bit more until I get a nice consistent nice consistent Burr then we'll move on again I'm going to take the Burr off on the back now you'll notice what I'm doing here I've got pressure right here and loose pressure with my right hand right here guiding the Chisel what I don't want to do is I don't want to put my fingertip underneath here lifting the Chisel up if you lift the Chisel up you'll round the back another thing I'm not doing is I'm not coming in like this to where the Chisel could ride up on this beveled part right there again lifting the Chisel up so I've got it like this pressure here loose grip here work it back and forth until that Burr is is gone then we're going to come over here we're going to maintain that bevel and just work it again you can hear the difference from the coar to the fine it's a finer grit it's taking off less material but it's also polishing that edge again work it until I feel that Burr let's take that Burr off okay so next now I'm going to go to the oil Stone as I mentioned this is a hard translucent oil Stone uh these are quarried in Arkansas it's a natural stone and I've chosen to use an oil Stone because it's finer than this than this diamond Stone on this oil Stone I'm going to use just a little threein one oil and that helps keep the Stone from getting clogged up with metal shavings metal particles again feel that bevel use the whole Stone the advantage here of doing this freehand without the use of a guide is that I can use the whole Stone so I don't have to worry about the stone wearing unevenly you'll notice here I'm using this corner over here over here use the whole entire Stone and feel the Burr every time you'll notice I feel that Burr I've got a burr there there and there okay we're going to flip this over work the back again you can't even hear it cutting but it it is it's polishing it now sometimes I'll work this again on the bevel maybe applying a little lighter pressure less pressure here so the burs is much finer it's there very subtle okay last last but not least I am going to stop this chisel and what I've got here is I've got a leather strap a leather piece of leather adhered to a block of wood with some buffing Rouge chromium oxide and I'll just rub that on here you don't have to rub it on every time you sharpen this will last me a couple weeks and we'll just set this right over here now with this we're going to pull the Chisel if I push the Chisel will cut into the leather so I'm going to maintain the bevel and just go a couple times one of the things I don't want to do here is I don't want to round this over of course it's going to round it slightly but if I polish it too much here we could round that edge which there's nothing really wrong with it other than it makes it harder when you go back to resharpen cuz you've got to take that round off but you'll notice look at that polish that chromium oxide is actually about .5 Micron is the smallest particle size which is very fine it's actually a braiding The Edge polishing the edge making a super sharp tool there we have it there's the Polish tool there's a couple ways to test our sharpening job here one way is to test it on your fingernail if I if I hold the chisel up like this as close as I can and then test it right on my thumbnail just touch it to my thumbnail like this I can if it catches it I know it's sharp now I'm not testing it up like this I'm not carving away my thumbnail I'm just touching it to my thumbnail and if it catches like that I know it's sharp of course you can do the paper test as well or we'll take it and it cuts through that concludes this video for sharpening please check back for more indepth sharpening techniques in our next video [Music] [Applause] [Music] series

Channel: Homestead Heritage School of Woodworking

Views: 129,855

Keywords: Sharpening, Chisel, Wood (Visual Art Medium), Hand Tool (Product Category), Craftsman, Master craftsman, True craftsman, Classic craftsman, Vintage craftsman, Traditional craftsman, Old fashioned craftsman, Hand tool craftsman, Wood tool craftsman, Wood craftsman, Woodworking craftsman, Woodworker, Master woodworker, Woodworking, Blade

Id: 5JHc37GC_jo

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 28 2014