How To Sharpen Plane Blades By Hand

hey everybody how's it going my name is Chris and in this video I'm gonna show you how I sharpen my hand plane blades now I'm in the middle of a restoration video right now and I decided to stop and make a separate video specifically on sharpening because it requires a little more detail I don't want to spread that other video out too far so if you're interested in seeing the full restoration of this number 5 hand plane make sure you click the card up here and it'll pause this video and go watch that video and come back to it or watch it at whatever time so without further ado I'm going to talk about a little bit on my sharpening equipment when I first started and what I recommend for other people when you're getting into sharpening hand tools whether it's chisels or your hand planes is to start with just some sandpaper it's much more affordable unfortunately getting good sharpening equipment kind of is a little bit pricey it's something that I would recommend you're gonna have to get eventually it's really really important if you want to do hand tool work keep your stuff sharp you use them almost daily but when you're just starting out and on a budget and you can't afford all this stuff you can still get your tools sharp and there's a way to do it so sandpaper really is the method and what I have here is a piece of float glass now that's different than plate glass the process in which float glass is made is they float melted glass on melted tin molten tin or sometimes molten lead and because it's floating on that molten metal it creates a perfectly flat surface and that's what you want so I'll start off we'll go and we'll look at some of the sandpaper stuff I'll show you how to use that later on but I'm going to talk about what I have here when I first bought my my sharpening equipment I started off with some double-sided stones I wanted to get as much bang for my buck I got this 220 in 1800 stone now this stone that the 220 side I determined right away that it wasn't very good as really soft and it doesn't really break very fastly the thousand grit is actually pretty good but would I use this stone for nowadays is just flattening these stones now they sell special lapping stones that are supposed to be used to flatten your regular water stones but I just use these two stones and I just rub them back and forth together and I do this pretty frequently in between sharpening so I don't let them dish too much and I just go back and forth and these stones have remained dead flat and I checked them with my straightedge and they're definitely flat so you don't need a special flattening stone just use your other stone that's flat and make sure you're moving it around to keep a nice consistent wear on there now when I bought these I also bought a coarse diamond stone now the reason I bought a coarse diamond stone was when I had like really heavy duty material to remove and then also shaping the outside edges of my plain blade you want to add either a full camber to the whole blade where it's kind of like this or that or flat across and then you and then you round the corners so that when you're planing you get this feathering effect on the edge of your plain blade the stroke so that you're not getting visible lines if it's a nice 90-degree edge so that's what I got the diamond plate for if you do if you tilt to your plane blade while you're sharpening on these softer wet stones it'll gouges so that's what the steel is nice for these diamond plates since I bought this I went and got a extra course because this course is not that coarse compared to the diamond stones a what it's more like a medium stone I would say this extra course does pretty good at removing that heavy material like if my blade has a nick or something like that then I also bought an extra fine because what I wanted to do was kind of convert to all diamond the water stones are a little more tedious and messy you have to kind of pre soak them I like to soak them for about 10 minutes before I use them if you leave them in the water the whole time they tend to kind of get a little too soft and if you don't soak them for at least 10 minutes then they you know they just work quite as well I'm being saturate so he kind of its kind of annoying having when you're ready to sharpen and you have to wait about ten minutes to start sharpening that's why I kind of wanted to go to the Diamond stones so I could just spray them with whatever I use whether if it's water or a lot of people use auto glass cleaner or simple green dimmer things like that there's a bunch of debate on what's a great a good lapping fluid typically I just use water and you can go right away and start so but I just really really really like this four thousand eight thousand stone I still use it like I said it's a little bit of a pain soaking it but it just works extremely well so that's why I continue to use this stone so let's get into sharp Ihnen what I'm gonna do is I have this plane blade and I haven't touched it at all yet I actually put it in some D rusting wd-40 rust remover and that worked incredibly well and looking at this blade it's actually in relatively good shape in the previous person actually put rounded corners on it so he knew what he was doing so I'm gonna take this apart and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna work on making sure the back of this plate this blade is dead flat so I'm gonna bring you in I'm gonna start with the diamond stones and do that process so I'm going to start with the coarse stone first and these know these whole holders are what the water stones came in and I actually really like them and that's pretty much just what I use you can make special jigs and this is my sharpening little block over here there's numbers you can see and when I start out with a fresh blade and I don't know who previously used it or or ever you like six months or so I'll pop it in this guide and I'll get my primary bevel established back to whether it's twenty five or thirty or whatever so what I'm gonna do first is starting with the coarse stone I'm gonna check and see how flat we are on the back here so I'll just put it on the side here you only really need to worry about this last inch or so half an inch to an inch so I'm flat kind of all the way across and there's some pitting that I want to get all the way down and remove that okay now you can see I pretty much have a flat spot all the way across that leading edge but I want to polish this so imma rinse this stone off I'm going to my fine diamond stone I'm going to polish the back and I'll polish the cutting edge too because it's important to have two polished edges coming meeting together the finer they're polished the sharper the blade will be now there's obviously debate on how sharp is good enough then you definitely can cut with stuff that's not nearly as sharp that I go to but it doesn't take me much longer to add a couple extra steps okay now I'm going to go to my water stones and you only have two flat in the back like once or maybe you might want to touch it up every check on it once a year or something like that but very very and Franklin Lee do you have to do anything to the back just this first time to make sure it's flat and it's usually gonna be pretty good all right now I'm gonna work on the cutting edge and I'm going to show you how to do that using the glass so a method I just showed you you can do you're gonna flatten the back using the glass and sandpaper - i'ma start I have this roll of stick back paper that I found at a woodworking show it was only five dollars for the big roll of it the paper wears pretty quick but it's really nice that it stick back so it's it's pretty coarse like 120 grit I have 150 grit roll - and this is what I use if I have a deep nick or I'm flattening the bottom of a plane or something like that so this is a new blade to me so I'm not really sure what this angle is what I'm gonna do is put it in this guide these are super cheap use these for like $7 and over on my sharpening table here I have you can see these numbers this side over here is for plane blades set my bevel to 25 degrees so I wanted to bring you over here and kind of show you why I'm sharpening at 25 degrees before we go any farther give you an explanation and my experience as to why I do a 25 degree bright primary bevel and not something else so 25 degrees is just a good you know there's no set in stone number you have to do but the reason I do 25 degrees is because after I establish my primary bevel you know this is when I get a new blade I don't know what it was before or this is like maybe every six months or every year I'll go and after I've used a blade for a really long time I kind of want to get back to square one again so I'll do 25 degrees but then as sharpened by hand what happens is it creates a little bit of a concave in the blade and out here at the tip is will end up around 30 degrees and 30 degrees is kind of like that sweet spot number it doesn't have to be 30 degrees it doesn't need to be 25 degrees you know as long as you're not at like 45 degrees or 15 degrees as long as you're kind of in between 25 and 35 it's gonna be like a great angle for your blades so that it retains this edge it doesn't it's not too narrow where it deforms and it's not too blunt where it's hard to maintain a sharp edge so 30 degrees is a nice sweet spot so that's why I do I start with 25 and when I hand sharpen I end up with 30 and it'll stay like that every time I hand sharpened kind of get right there in that sweet spot and as I'm sharpening it'll stay right around 30 degrees when I gone through a couple different versions of how I like to sharpen at first I did a straight 30 degree angle and I tried to maintain that and I would use like the the honing guide to make sure I was there but that's hard to maintain it's a lot of extra work you have to use your honing guide or your yeah your honing guide every time you do it then I went I was like there's all this talk about secondary bevels and micro bevel so I did that for a while I did 25 degrees and then I would add the little tiny 30 degree micro bevel at the end and then you just sharpen it again after that gets dull moves up a little bit then you sharpen it again then you sharpen it again and after you do about five or six times then you might want to redo your primary bevel again again just I don't think it's as good or as fast you know or any more effective than just sharpening by hand and letting there be a small concave I've noticed zero difference in performance but I've gained speed and doing it's a lot quicker don't have to worry about it I'm telling you I used to be really caught up in making like thinking this edge was super super important to be you know flat or exactly thirty degrees and it's now so don't get caught up in that yourself I would recommend learning how to hand shop in and you know just use that and be happy with that it's gonna cut just fine all right back to sharpening since this guy down and I'm just gonna use this dry first couple passes here if you don't have a float glass I can't find any you can also go check your if you have a table saw with a nice cast iron top the table saw will often have a flat enough surface that you can use that you can see right in the middle there a little bit so I got some work to do on here [Laughter] can see pretty much reached all the way to the edge now I'm starting to feel Eber which is what you want to feel cuz then you know you've totally reached the edge now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start rocking the plane the blade a little bit bolts in this jig to feather those corners a little bit and I'll be like 10 on this side 10 on that side now I'm gonna switch to use wet/dry sandpaper and get these at pretty much any of your big box stores the stick back paper is harder to find I can't find it I haven't found anywhere except for that one woodworking shop meat thing but I'm sure you can very easily find it online it's just hard to find in stores so let's start with the 600 first if you can't find stickback sandpaper you can always use regular sandpaper and some spray adhesive to get it to stick put some water down my paper on that or water on top okay now I'm going to work on the corners I'm just gonna tilt it again and just pull back this side just barely lift it up maybe like an eighth of an inch see it's getting a really nice edge already just with six hundred you definitely could probably stop right there and have a good blade but we're gonna go up a little bit higher I have 15 and mm that's getting a really nice polished edge okay I'm going to feather the edges again now I'm just pressing on this corner not lifting it at all it has a really nice polished edge just with sandpaper now the final step for this blade would be to strap it which I do on all my tools some people might not think it's necessary but I always do it you can make the strop I bought this thing it was really cheap and a leather strop is incredibly easy to buy to make so just some polishing compound and kind of just you don't need this guide anymore and I'm gonna show you here in a second how to sharpen freehand it's find where your bevel is and just start pulling backwards on it and every so often pressure on those corners maybe 20 30 40 strokes go to the backside because you'll have a little burr there you stop working that burr off and one last trick you can do it on your sandpaper but since the camera set up right here same thing is I'll use my it's called the ruler trick essentially what you do is you put a very thin ruler on one edge of your sandpaper or sharpening stone you bring the blade to the other side and essentially you'll be putting polishing a little tiny micro back bevel on the flat side doesn't take much you want to be at the very very far edge and it just really brings both those planes together and gives a really really nice polished cutting edge getting out and strop a couple times do a couple back and forth to break any wire edge and then this blade is pretty darn sharp let's see you always got a test right hopefully this goes well come on amen and that's pretty sharp you can see it's shaving very easily so just with sandpaper probably 1520 dollars worth of sandpaper you can definitely get your plane's absolutely flat and sharp enough to use so now I want to show you real quick what my normal sharpening process is on the day to day so that was the kind of initializing doing the first sharpening process that takes a little bit more work but when you're working on a day to day with these tools you want to sharpen them before they get too dull and if you do that it only takes a little bit of time to tune them right back up so typically when I'm sharpening on my day to day again I'm always just quickly flattening kind of turn the stones around go all over on them to kind of make sure they both remain flat that's where this you can use the diamond stones too to keep this flat but normally I don't even need to use anything except for my four thousand and six thousand and then reefs trap so pretend I've used this blade a little bit I don't need the jig I already kind of have my twenty five degree angle so I come over to my stone and you can kind of feel where it's flat the back of it once you feel right there then essentially you just I kind of lock my body into place leaning over the work get everything locked into place and then I just do circular motions I like the circular motions you can also do figure eights there seem they're a little bit harder to control the circular motion for me is a really nice controlled pattern and it's better than just going back and forth because here you're just you're just cutting straight grooves in the metal if you make a circular motion the grooves are kind of like getting there they cut like back and forth across each other I feel like it cuts a little bit faster that way so this is even more time than I'd usually need to spend so probably just up and down back and forth a couple times just like that that would probably be all I would spend on that side flip it over to 8,000 find that bevel kind of go up come back down and then I'll typically press on just the far corners I don't do circles on the corners because they'll tend to gouge the softer wet stones so that is why I'm only doing pull strokes to feather that out grab my little ruler for my ruler trick and this also removes any little bird that you've made and polishes that back bevel again and then I just a little bit on the strop backside and now that plane blade is good to go again and if I'm not talking explaining it's 30 seconds so now we're going to talk about the chip breaker or cap iron some people call it these are important to also sharpen and tuned to your blade if these aren't properly set up then your plane blades not going to work as well so we're gonna start off by put these together I'm going to bring this up to where I normally would be using it and then I'm gonna kind of look between the plane blade at some light in that cap island I'm looking for any gaps and then there's a big gap on this side I'm going to show it to you so you can see on this side there's no hey hoots and you can see on this side there is no gap and on this side there is a gap now when you put this in the plane and cinch down the lever cap that'll squeeze this and essentially eliminate that but we're going to flatten it anyway when these two come together you can see that they get pinched like that and so you want the very leading edge here to be making really good contact with it you don't want the heel in there the backside of this you don't want the inside touching and causing a gap you on the very front leading edge so when we essentially sharpen this what I'm going to do I'm not going to flatten it like this because then I'm gonna end up with the front edge of this going to be too high and he will be touching us so I'm gonna bring it back here lower it pass parallel and give some strokes back and forth flat take a look and I can see I'm getting polished here but not over here and this is the side that was showing that gap too so that's a good sign once we take that out we get that shine all the way across we're gonna know we're gonna have a really good contact so that shavings can get wedged between the blade and the chip breaker so got some to go again you can do this using the glass and the sandpaper over here you just need to make sure your a glass is next to the edge of the table so that you can have this below the surface see on this this side over here it's not quite there yet so now I'm gonna put a little bit of a bevel on the leading edge of this chip breaker I'm not gonna go into a great bit of detail here as to why I'm doing this I'm gonna actually make another video on setting up a hand plane properly and how to adjust it to make it do general purpose work and also find smoothing jobs the way these planes were designed is so that you can set them in different configurations to make them do different jobs such as smoothing or general work you know you can even put in a really heavy cambered blade for scrubbing and then you can put in a nice flat blade like this set the mouth properly set the chip break the shipbreaker properly and essentially turn the same plane into a nice fine smoothing plane so I'm going to put this 50 degree bevel on the front edge of this around 50 degrees and there's a specific reason that I'm doing that and I'm going to talk about that in that other video on setting up a plane blade properly but this edge or the chip will come and hit that and work and break that chip and roll that ship over is pretty important for this playing operating at its best so we'll get into that a little bit later now I'm just gonna polish this front edge a little bit to reduce friction now I'll put the set screw in now the best way to attach the chip breaker to the plain iron as you slide the screw through the little hole here then you're going to push your plane blade past where this will meet and slide these two together if if it's down here farther you're going to damage the blade as you slide them past each other so now this on there parallel I'm going to slide this forward to whatever depth I want now when I get in my other video where I talked about setting up a plane blade setting up a plane fine tuning a plane I'm going to go into some detail as to different settings of this chip breaker and why they're important for different applications so if you have a setting like this compared to a setting like that that you can barely even see they have a huge difference on what the plane will do so we'll talk about that in the next video but essentially that's how you sharpen a plane blade well I really hope you liked that video I hope you learn something I just want to say this isn't the only way to sharpen there's plenty of other people to do a plenty of other different ways that do just fine this is just kind of the way that I've stumbled across and the way that I've developed that I like to do so let me know down in the comments section what you like or some tips that you have for sharpening that you found very useful if you're new to the channel and like what you see please subscribe hit that little bell icon that'll make sure you're notified of all my other videos so keep an eye out for the setting up the hand plane that's gonna be coming out here in a little bit if you're watching this video and it's been a week or so or more the video is probably already up and I'll have a card for here also watch the video on refinishing and restoring this plane that I'm using for this project so all very good stuff thanks so much for stopping by and watching have a good one we'll see you next time

Channel: Third Coast Craftsman

Views: 137,993

Rating: 4.9223042 out of 5

Keywords: how to sharpen a plane blade, how to, howto, diy, woodworking, sharpening, sharpen, sharp, wood, wood work, tools, blade, hone, edge, bevel, hand tools, paul sellers, paul sellars, hand plane, plane blade, chisel, sharpen chisel, sharpen plane, craftsman, artisan, antique, old school, sharpening hand tools, diresta, rob cosman, stanley, norton, japanese, shapton, waterstone, diamond, stone, water

Id: Ktq5NEqJ-Tc

Length: 28min 45sec (1725 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 18 2018