Modifying an inexpensive honing guide

the key to efficient sharpening is to be able to do it quickly and easily sharpening is not something that you're supposed to plan on doing next Tuesday night you do it as soon as you need to be doing it okay so to do this I use a honing guide and I use a side clamping honing guide because it holds it all the time it'll hold it square and securely so the eclipsed style honing guides I find to be the best and the original Eclipse guide which is this one here has been out of production for years the newer Eclipse type have been widely available and they're very inexpensive and then the Lee Nielson honing guide is an excellent tool machine very well and that's also another choice the problem with the newer Eclipse type guides is as you put pressure on the screw here the middle of the guide humps up a little bit so it doesn't hold the plain iron as flat as it should so I had this small straightedge that I made and I'll put it into the new guide tighten it up a little bit and then you can see what's got what's going to happen here so I put this in here and tighten that up and I should be able to see that the center of this in the middle here has raised up it has humped up a little bit and I have a gap at the ends so if I put a plain iron in here it's only going to sit on the center here and it could rock or it could be inconsistent so if you put a take a look at it there as you look at this you can see there's a little bit of light showing through the straightedge on the ends where in the middle it's not it's sitting on there so you want the tool to be secure on the ends and hollow out the center a little bit so to remove the material quickly and efficiently I use a file that's specifically designed for aluminum and this is available from mcmaster-carr or some of the other machinist supply houses you could use a regular mill bastard file but it would clog up quickly and you would just spend a lot of time cleaning out the the teeth not a big deal this one just works a little bit better and it was not expensive so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to take a marker and I'll mark mark there and I'm going to take all of the material here away and I'm not going to touch here or here put that in a machinist vise to do that and when you do this you want to open it up wide so that the file you have plenty of room to work so when I'm filing the middle out of here what I'm looking to make sure that I'm doing I'm keeping it flat doing one side at a time and I'm making sure that I don't let the file hit into the edge there because that's where the plain iron has to seat so what I'm actually trying to do is remove material out of the middle so that the plain iron only seats along the edge and the middle cat lifts it up when it's tightened okay so let's see how that works so I still see a gap on this side here which means I have to take a little bit more off of here but the other side looks pretty good okay let's see what that did okay that's a lot better so this one looks good I could even go a little bit farther and make a little bit of a hollow take a little bit more out of the middle there and hollow that out a little bit and I might do that later on but this is certainly a lot better than as it came out of the package okay the second modification that you can make to improve this a little bit is on the lower level of the guide which is designed for holding chisels and if you look at the original one as it comes from the package this V is very tight and it makes it so that it only holds narrow chisels well but a thicker or tapered chisel like this it has a hard time so this is a little narrow here so I can make that a little bit wider and you can see on this one I've done that and I've filed this so that the V is longer and it'll hold this vicar chisel a little bit more securely and a little bit more easily okay so the modification that I'm going to make to the lower level here is to make this V longer and so I'm going to file that and one of the things to remember on these style jigs is that one side is straight the other side is curved and that's by design it's supposed to be straight here curved here and that means that it's a single point contact in the middle there pushing against the straight edge so you need to maintain that as you are filing this so I'm going to take it back to the vise and we're going to use the same file and I want to point out that I want to make sure that I'm not hitting the underside of this lip okay the chisel registers against that lip and if I mess it up then it won't work as well so I'm going to file here and what I've done is I've put blue tape on one face of the file so I'm going to be using the edge here and I want to make this safe so it doesn't cut that so that's what I got there and I'm ready to go so double check make sure that you're keeping it straight now get some ridges here from the file because it's so coarse that doesn't bother me a whole lot though okay so I'm going to go a little bit more here it's almost done on this side I'm just bringing the V down a little bit closer to the bars there okay so I'm going to just double-check this and see that it looks it looks straight and I can always come back to it again if I feel that I need to so now I'm going to do the other side and the other side has the curve so this is the same as I did before just realizing that I have to keep that curve going and so you start out the same way but curve the thing keep checking your work so let's see how that looks and I have the curve there and it looks like it should do a decent job so let's see how it holds this chisel and that's definitely holding that chisel well holding it securely so I'm going to I'm going to go with that

Channel: FineWoodworking

Views: 252,235

Rating: 4.880908 out of 5

Keywords: 5115902923001, honing guide, free, Bob Van Dyke, TIV731, youtube, sharpening

Id: QBHd7x6ySSQ

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2016