Sharpening a Dull Chisel - Ask Matt #8

hey everyone my name is net welcome to my shop and welcome to episode 8 of my ask Matt series where I answer questions suggested by you the viewer today we've been talking about sharpening again on Episode two I talked about my sharpening process in my shop which is more just maintaining the edge and not actually getting to adult rizal first before sharpening it now Travis asked me how would go about sharpening a totally dull chisel and in fact one that so dull that I have to go to the grinder first before actually hitting it with the stones so today I'm going to show you how I would go about doing that but before we do that I need a dull chisel and the dull chisel is something that's pretty hard to come by here in my shop so let's make this dull and actually it's not too dull right now not that dull so let's make this dull should be fun don't try this at home let's see if we can shop through this eight penny nail that's Elijah yeah there's the edge this should be interesting and of course you're supposed to do this this way I think it will do this I don't think this is the effective way to open a paint can what's this chisels too big for this I give up that's good enough that's a pretty messed up edge all right so that was pretty interesting so let's get going on restoring this thing back to its once sharp state and the first thing I'm going to do is remove all that material on the edge that is extremely damaged and broken off so I have a nice straight edge again you see right now it's really bumpy its jagged it's all over the place so we'll use the grinder to remove all that material now theoretically you could remove this just with your stones or some other method the grinder is gonna be really fast and it'll allow us to get to the stones faster and kind of get to the process pretty quick I'm gonna be using my slow speed grinder for this you can use a high speed grinder as well with the high speed grinder you seem to be a lot more careful that you don't overheat the tool as you're sharpening it I'm gonna keep my little bath of water here right by the grinder as I'm grinding that way as I go I can dip the tool in the water to cool it off okay so I'm gonna adjust my tool rest so that the chisel is approaching the wheel at the same angle it's already ground to I'm just going to do that by eye here it's actually pretty easy to do now one of the things to be concerned about when grinding a chisel is that you want to keep the chisel nice and square to the wheel now one way to do that would be to clamp a guide block to the side that's nice and square root to that wheel and all I have to worry about is riding that chisel along the block the other thing you can do is if you have a longer one you can clamp a block along the back here and that'll keep it nice and square what I'm going to do is freehand it and I'm gonna use my finger as a little clamping block on the bottom to help keep that square the nice thing here is I don't have a chisel it wider than my wheel so I don't have to really worry about moving it back and forth too much I can really just apply pressure straight in and be good so so I'm gonna do next let's get these safety glasses and plug this thing in and start grinding one tip is to keep a bead of water on the edge of the chisel when you see the water start to boil it's time to cool the chisel again all right so we got our chisel oh that's the ground and right to start our honing or I guess a little more actual sharpening you can see that that grind is on there it's really really rough so I want to do is I'm gonna put a marker on here so you can see a lot better where the material is going to being removed now when I set this up hopefully I'm only going to be removing material towards the tip because I don't really want to polish this whole this whole area here so I'm using my honing guide for this and I'm gonna set my my protrusion using my little setup gauge here so that's pretty easy I'm just gonna set this in the jig and just kind of tighten it up a little bit and then using my little guide block here I can just rest this just a line here and push it forward until it meets the stop there and I can lock it in place so the first storm in use here is my combination stone and I'm gonna use my 800 grit side so I'm doing here is I'm resting it down on the stone and I'm using my my middle finger and my index fingers to apply even pressure downward so I'm not rocking it left or right it's gonna be flat down on the stone and then notice I'm moving back and forth I'll take a look looks like I set it up right you can see that the the market line is being removed from the tip which is what we want we want to be we only want to be concerned with the area down there it's actually doing the cutting so I'll keep running this on the stone until I get a nice straight edge across there I can tell that my grinding wasn't perfect so I'm a little off square here and this jig will help me square it back up again anyway so always keep going as you go here you can see I'm moving the chisel around trying to use as much of the stone as possible turn the stone around so I can use a little bit this side water so now if I take a look at the chisel itself I can see the stone has been working along the edge here in the front the cutting edge and a little bit up in here there's a little bit right there on the corner there that needs to be worked back towards this is still back further so I'll keep going on the stone a little bit until I have this front edge totally smooth and shiny matching the silver here no it looks good now it's polished all the way along the whole edge and while I'm at the stone I'll also just knock off the burr that's on the back of the chisel right now and I can feel it to do that's pretty easy too I'm just gonna take it with the jig hanging up back here and it's gonna run it back and forth a few times just to knock off that burr clean up the back time to wipe the stone off a little bit and I'll flip it over and we'll go to our 4000 grits same thing all over again I can see here that the stone is working you can kind of see it on here around the camera for real you see the stone is working this area through here and through here which means that my when I was doing my grinding I put a little bit of a a kind of a convex shape to the chisel that's probably because they use this for sharpen my gouges and I didn't rip the stone before I did this so there is a little bit of a convex shape to the chisel which is fine working it out here but you can see I'm not quite down to the cutting edge yet science keep working these stone here and what I'll do is well I just flatten this before I put it away but also mention that the flatten it's really easy just take my key I'm using a diamond plate let's get that wet flip the stone over now let's rub the stone on the diamond plate to flatten it you can see my stone here I still have this kind of stereo here which looks to be a low spot so I seem to keep on rubbing the stones here isn't this fun there we go that's a little better all right back to sharpening see I'm getting closer I'm almost to the line here but I still have to keep going on over here on the edge or on a corner here and then along the edge right here let's keep going all right so now I'm getting closer here I'm touching over here and over here and I have a little bit to go on this side and we're here in the corner still so just keep on keeping on okay so now the edge is the whole face is really just pretty much totally polish that just happened to work out that way doesn't need to be totally polished up here but now when I start working on the micro bevel which is the most important part of the tool that's going to be the cutting edge and to get that I'm just going to loosen the tool in the jig and just slide it back just a little bit and then lock it back down now I also want to flatten the stone here before I do this because this is going to be the most critical part of the entire chisel that cutting edge and you want that to be nice and straight so I'm gonna make sure this is nice and flat we're not gonna be doing a whole lot of polishing here anyway so it's just really just to clean it up make sure to have any imperfection the stone and then I can start pouring again okay now with that four thousand grit stone all the way I'll move on to my eight thousand grit same thing now you can see I do have a nice polished edge right along the cutting edge there and you can see I still have that I have back on that convexity to the chisel because of how I ground it which is fine doesn't matter so with that I can just take this burn off the back so this thing is back to our workable state again hooray sorry shizzle that was kind of a rough day for you huh boom nice and sharp again so that's how I would bring back a totally adult chisel into something as sharp and usable again now it was really fun to actually take a chisel and beat it up and bring it back to this state which is a nice usable sharp state nice and sharp cuts paper no problem it passes that test now before I actually use it I probably go ahead and I still use my strop and give it a few strappings just to really polish that edge up a little more and get it totally ready but as it is now it's totally usable which is really awesome because it's about ten minutes fifteen minutes ago it was totally screwed up and not usable at all so if you'd like to learn more about any of the products I used today I'll leave links to all these things in the description down below those links are affiliate links so if you head over there and you buy anything that helps out the channel and I greatly appreciate that if you have any ideas for any feature ask Matt's please leave those in the comments as well I greatly appreciate any any suggestions you might have even if it's not something I typically do or you don't think it's something I typically do like sharpening adult chisel that's something I really never do and in fact I've never sharpened a totally dull just like this except for when I sharpened my beater chisels a couple of years ago which I had previously used as ice chippers and they were pretty far gone so thank you as always for watching I greatly appreciate it if you have any questions or comments about anything I talked about today or anything here in my shop please feel free to leave me a comment as always I appreciate those and I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have until next time happy woodworking

Channel: Matthew Cremona

Views: 1,458,097

Rating: 4.7077351 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, woodshop, furniture making, matt cremona, matthew cremona, Sharpening, Chisel, Wood, water stone, diamond plate, shapton, shapton stone, whetstone, grinder, shapening

Id: 3QZtNnI7bA0

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 21 2015