Lie-Nielsen Honing Guide

[Music] we spend a lot of time teaching people how to use their tools well and in order to get a plane to function really well you have to have it very sharp so sharpening is an important gateway skill to learn and I think that the easiest way to teach a beginner to learn how to sharpen is with a honing guide there are a lot of different hunting guides on the market and people have been playing with designs for devices to hold blades for forever this is from a hundred or more years ago it's a shop made jig it's very beautiful it doesn't work very well all of them have some drawbacks but we've come up with a version that we think is superior there are basically two types of honing guides honing guides that hold a blade from the side which we called side clamping honing guides or guys that hold it from the top and I prefer the side clamping type because I find that gives me more control over squareness and there are a few unique aspects to this honing guide the first is that it's very well machined that means it works well it's accurate it'll clamp the blade tightly with finger pressure and it's easy to set an accurate angle with it the second is that it's all made out of stainless steel or brass it won't rust third is that the blade registers against these lips it's up against the lips with a little dovetail way there that forces the blade up and holds it very very well and another unique aspect of this honing guide is that the jaws are removable and you can replace them with other jaws specifically designed for sharpening blades like skew blades or small chisels or mortise chisels which makes it very unique and powerful we set the projection of the blade which gives you the angle that you want with a little stop block this one's set for 30 degrees I have 25 30 35 and 40 here and it's easy to reset the blade is exactly the same angle with this setup it's more important that it's the same angle each time you go to sharpen then that is it is a specific angle what keeps squareness is finger pressure you can also arrange to curve the blade slightly by using more finger pressure on one side and then on another side giving you a little bit of a curve which is useful in some situations the width of the roller really isn't that important a wide roller does not guarantee a square blade what guarantees a square blade is even finger pressure these are the standard honing guide jaws the dovetail goes down to the bottom here this will hold most plane blades so there's a rabbet blade set at 30 degrees will hold the shoulder plane blades by the tang so we'll even do the 3 inch scraper blade that we make now I don't promise this honing guide will work for every blade that you might have we've designed it for the blades that we make the other types of jaws are made for holding specific tools this is a 3/16 inch chisel which is too small to work in the standard jaws but these smaller dovetail jaws will hold it very nicely and then there's some other kinds of blades that are really very difficult to sharpen freehand it just takes a minute to change out the jaws these captive screws I'm not gonna fall out get lost on your bench now those jaws are at 18 degrees to hold this blade for a skew block plane there is a left and a right hand so we have left and right hand jaws available well there are a lot of other blades that are hard to hold this real small blade it's difficult to sharpen freehand or in a honing guide we've come up with a long jaw here that will hold short plates so that's set in there at 30 degrees you can hold it well good finger pressure sharpen it easily I keep talking about 30 degrees the bevel that our blades come with is 25 degrees so I'm using a 5 degree secondary bevel which makes it faster to sharpen because you're focusing all of your sharpening energy on the very edge and not trying to polish the entire bevel the entire bevel does not cut wood this blade has been sharpened a number of times so the secondary bevel is getting a little big but you can see it there chisels can be hard to hang on to as well we have a pair of jaws set up for mortise chisels they're taller so they'll also do thicker blades and chisels like our 1 inch chisel which is a little too thick to fit in a regular jaws this mortise chisel that's nicely in there so the versatility of our side clamping honing guide is that is available with a variety of jaws for specialized blades and those will be available separately the main unit will be sold with a standard jaws that will handle most plane blades and most chisels but not all [Music]

Channel: Lie-Nielsen Toolworks

Views: 144,671

Rating: 4.8714285 out of 5

Keywords: Honing, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks (Business Operation), Sharpening

Id: TqQKpUcZ0F4

Length: 6min 59sec (419 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2015