New radical camber grinding jig - from Tormek

hello welcome to my workshop in North Devon now I am particularly pleased about this new Tomek jig which is the SE 77 and you may wonder why the reason is that it gives me an accurate and repeatable method of grinding the sort of cambers that I need on my bench planes I have never really had this before now in the early days when I had the very simple blade jig and it got worn I used to find that by pushing down really hard on one side and lifting the other and then reversing the process I could produce something in the direction that I wanted later on I came across this improbable looking beast which is the jet camber jig and it does work and I have used it for many years but it is rather cumbersome and it's not very easy to change I think you can see that the blade goes in the center which is where the pivot is and then the two sides move up and down to give you a little bit of camber so rather cumbersome this jig however seems almost perfect we have here at the right-hand end two little screws and if we knobs if I undo them you'll see that the bearing at this end can move from side to side now as that bearing moves from side to side the blade moves from side to side on the tour next time I'll be showing you a bit later on and we can grind a camber now what's more what I've discovered is that if I release these knobs by half a turn each I could get a small camber which suits my bench plane by five and a half which is tuned up as a super smoother if I undo them both by one turn it suits my block plane blade and finally perhaps most useful of all is if I release them by two turns I can create a suitable camber for this bevel up Jack plane now this really is quite remarkable I expect you may well know but if you put that kind of bevel onto a bench plane blade the wood will only see that much of it because the blade is pitched at 45 degrees but if you put this much on a low angle Jack plane the wood will only see that much much much less so in order to have the same effect for this bevel up Jack plane you need to grind a considerable curve into your blade now I have got here my little bit of flat plastic and I checked last night and I found that I had created a camber with more or less twenty thousandths of an inch under each side that's five tenths of a mil half a millimeter and that's a great deal more than I put on my bench plane so in a moment I think we should go to the Machine and have a look see what it does I'd like to show you the grinding of my low angle Jack blade as an example of exactly how you set about using the Jake now I find it very useful these days to mark my projection on the plane blade it's one less thing to think about when you're trying to clamp it into the jig and get it square I find that very useful tip I'm also going to black the beveled side so that I can show you what's happened when I've done it good I love this technique of putting black on two bevels for grinding and to some degree for honing because it shows you exactly what's happening now when you start off this jig is now in the square position I know it's in the square position because these two little marks are lined up here on the moving and bearing and they're held there by the two knobs so if I were to put in a blade that I wanted to be square I would put it in and slide it up to the little lip here and it would produce a square result now I want to curve so I'm going to be releasing each knob to full turns just to the same position 1/2 1/2 2 and now you see this this end plate here can actually pivot quite a lot quite a long way and that's what's going to allow our blade to move over the stone now when cambering a blade it's very important that we keep on center and center you notice is directly above this bearing i've put in these extra marks here these are just to show the width of other sizes of plane blade which I have so I go into the jig like this I set my projection and also I have to check the time on Center now that's remarkable I'm pretty pleased with that I need to mention yet another thing this knob has been allowed to slide so I can move it closer to the blade and it gives you more positive clamping and it reduces the chance of bending the clamping plate which is underneath an interesting modification now I've gone on tight I haven't had this long I've gone and tightened up before I checked the squareness well I've been lucky this time that's virtually perfectly square if it wasn't I'd slack off one of the knobs and use my little hammer here to just tap the end I think so over to the Machine projection of course for a particular angle is defined by how far above the stone you have your support bar so it's no good my telling you what mine is you have to work that out for yourself here we go now you see that the blade can wander nicely from side to side so starting there I'm pushing on the right finger starting on the right finger and transferring to the left a little bit of a knack I expect you all know that you don't grind right to the edge of a blade very often that is unless you're in the habit of hitting stones and nails but when forming a new shape I think it's a good idea and we go and there is my result I'll just explain what's going on here as I said I've only had this jig for a very short time this plane blade had a straight grind or eight and when I did this grinding I haven't gone all the way to the heel I've left a bit of the straight grinding for you to see a curve that's happening with the jig now I'm absolutely delighted with this thing for the first time in about 40 years I've got a controlled repeatable way of creating camber now just one other thing to mention tormek seemed rather keen on this and I don't really understand they point out that if you grind all your chisels out of square you could make a small adjustment on the wheels the knobs here and you can square them up again now if you've dressed your wheel recently and if you haven't moved your bar you should get square automatically however I thought I'd have a bit of fun I undid one of the knobs as much as possible and saw what I could get and what I have here is a sort of micro skew I can't quite decide what its best name is actually but that demonstrates the capability for correcting squareness or producing out of squareness so a remarkable thing which I'm very happy to recommend to you you

Channel: David Charlesworth

Views: 57,617

Rating: 4.8571429 out of 5

Keywords: Woodwork, learn woodworking, woodwork education, Tormek, Honing guides, sharpening, SE-77

Id: Bfd-xzOF5sc

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 21 2016