hi I'm Rob Koz and welcome to my shop the most important skill if you're going to work hand tools is knowing how to sharpen a hand plane blade now I prefer to do it freehand that's what I'm gonna show you I'm working on a nasty piece of maple it's full of knots and twists and yet with a sharp blade you can pull off a shaving that measures somewhere around a half a thousand thickness it's an incredible skill probably it's just fantastic you cannot beat this with any grit of sandpaper stay tuned I'm going to show you how to do this this will change the way you work wood I'm Rob gozman and welcome to my shop I'm gonna start by showing you how I would reach arpan a blade I'm gonna do it in shop time other words my blade edge started to break down what do I do to get back to sharpening like you saw just a second ago so first thing I need to do is separate my blade my chipbreaker from my blade now I always come in and spend just a couple of seconds keeping my 16 thousand grit Shepton nice and flat you do it every time that's all it takes I'll lubricate both with hone right which prevents water from rusting metal take my blade set it down on the primary bevel I've got four fingers distributing the pressure elevate two or three degrees above the primary with on a bit of an angle spend ten seconds five six seven eight nine ten now I should be able to detect a slight burr and I always verify that that burr runs corner-to-corner now I'm gonna come back and walk you through the process in the teaching style but I just want to show you how how it happens when I'm in the shop working I leave my sixteenth my one thousand I jump over to the sixteen thousand I'm going to do the same thing except I'm going to raise up a few degrees higher than I did on that previous stone and I'm going to actually create what we call a tertiary or a third bevel about ten seconds of work on this stone and you'll notice that I'm moving forward and back because they don't want to wear any one area more than and the other at the end of 10 seconds I'm gonna put downward pressure in one corner for 3 seconds followed by downward pressure in the opposite corner for 3 seconds final step take my steel rule lay it on the edge of the stone flush with this side lay the blade down on its back this is called the charlesworth ruler trick three fingers to distribute the pressure staying within a quarter of an inch of the opposite edge I'll spend one two three seconds getting rid of any burr that may be left over make sure you wipe these down well you don't want rust now all it is is a matter of putting a chip breaker back on get that to within about 1/32 of an inch an inch from the edge snug it up tightly back in your plane and away you go all right now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start the process with a brand new blade you bought a plane how do you get it to a point where you're able to do this type of sharpening that takes less than a minute so stay tuned alright so before we can sharpen we got to take a second to talk about equipment and get lots of questions from folks about can I use this kind of use that I can't tell you that all I can tell you is what I use if you follow my method with the stuff that I use and you should be able to get the exact same results and I teach this to thousands of folks every year I shouldn't say that every year hundreds every year but it's been thousands over the last ten years and they are able to do this in a relatively short period of time and by that I mean maybe a half a day and they've got it the simplest system is a trend diamond plate the advantage of this it's got two grits a thousand grit on one side and three hundred grit on the other I start my sharpening on the 1,000 grit I finish on a shopton sixteen thousand grit you can see it through the mud it's called a glass stone now this one essentially doesn't wear me there's no maintenance to it this one does so before every sharpening as you saw me do you have to go in and do a quick flattening that's right the three hundred grit side comes in however and this is critical when you first use your stone brand-new never been you you have got to take the three hundred grit side and do a little bit of breaking in I learned this the hard way so what I'm going to do is set that down lubricate the surface and using the back of the blade just set that on there and rub it forward and back covering the entire surface of that stone now I'm only guessing at what is happening but I imagine I set that over there that there are some grit particles that are maybe a little bit longer than others and they have a tendency to break off and I've had them contaminate like a 16,000 grit stone on me so I take about thirty Seconds cover the entire area with a piece of steel and once I do this rinse it off and it's good to go you never have to do it again and I don't ever bother doing it on the 1,000 grit side I use the 300 for maintaining flatness on the ceramic stone and that the ceramic is hard you do need diamond in order to work it effectively so I'll just rinse that off might even be better do you under sink but that's probably good enough okay so I come over to my 16,000 lubricate it and I try to keep the stone in this close contact as possible meaning I'm not way over here but I'm just over lapping by maybe an inch and all sides downward pressure I like to spread the pressure out as evenly as possible so I'm not just holding it like that I'm using two hands and as I said well you can see the worn spot right there so let's see if we can't get rid of that [Music] still a little bit there but I can avoid that rather than waste more stone okay so my blade is brand new I just took this out of the package so this is what you need to go through in the initial phase to get this ready I'm going to use my my steel rule and you always want to keep that on the side flush with the edge always in the same spot I hold this other hand down here and hold on to it I'm gonna stay within a quarter of an inch of the opposite edge if you come in like this you're altering the angle substantially stay within a quarter of an inch and it's not going to matter now I want the pressure to be distributed as evenly as possible along that cutting edge so I've got my index finger in the middle I grab that corner with my thumb I grab that corner with my opposite finger now I do this a lot and if you were to look over here you'd see my pinky laying along the side and the reason I do that is so that I can move forward and back without fishtailing all over the stone if you're new to this well you may have a little bit of difficulty you may have to go slow but I like to get this done rather quickly I'm gonna spend just a few seconds and then I'm gonna check it there are three different conditions that you can find a plane blade actually there's four two are acceptable two aren't unacceptable if the blade is nice and flat you end up with this a nice even polish strip that is parallel to the edge that's ideal second condition is the blade is slightly concave and what you'd end up with here is an arc well the good news about that is because it's concave you're resting on two points nice and stable and you simply work it until you join that contact area all across the edge of the blade and like I said it'll end up in an arc the third condition is unacceptable and that's where the blade is convex on the bottom you've got one resting point it's teetering like this and as you shift your weight you're moving side to side forget it return the blade it's not worth it you'll never fix it now the fourth way is a severe twist in the blade and you started doing this and you notice there's a big triangular shape you can get away with it if it's not too bad if it's severe way too much work not worth the effort get a new blade so since this one is great I mean this is luck of the draw I what I need to do and the object of this is to get rid of the grinding scratches that are on the back of the blade as a result of work done at the factory those scratches if allowed to go all the way to the end will result in a serrated edge no matter how much work you do on the bevel so we have to eliminate them so I'm gonna spend and in this condition I wouldn't expect to have to spend more than one or two minutes but I'll just keep working that light to moderate pressure how do I describe it well if you had a firm grape and you're pushing down on it you want enough pressure they just start to compress the grape you don't want to crush it and I find that my new students when they first start this that's the big mistake they make is they're putting so much pressure on there that they'll lose it lose the ability to feel through their fingers what exactly is happening the more effort you apply the less control you have so in almost all cases I have to remind people to back off I'm holding this steel rule in place so it doesn't move same amount of pressure on all three fingers let's check that again now I can tell from experience that I'm done if you want you can get a jeweler's loupe we have we have one that I usually carry in my pocket I haven't got it with me right now and you can see that the grinding scratches when they get into that polish strip they'll stop about 1/4 way into it at this stage they would anyway and that's when you know you're done now typically people sharpen they go multiple steps I'm going to jump from 1000 all the way to 16,000 and the reason I can do that is because the area that we're working on is relatively small if I were doing the back of a chisel well then you're going to have to go through at least one more step before before you finish off at the 16 same idea steel rule on the far side flush with the edge hold it in place with my opposite finger three fingers stay within a quarter of an inch pinkies over here running along the side you want to be careful because it's easy to cut yourself without knowing it try to use the entire surface area from one end to the other now I spend a little more time on this one just because you're dealing with a very fine stone 16 thousand grit is a lot higher than most people have ever sharpened to but the results are phenomenal however it's a it's a slow cutting stone just because of the grit size now after about a minute on that one stone to save my stone I'm gonna take it swing it around move my steel rule over to this side and now I can work on this edge that hasn't been touched before I stop and rieflin the entire surface keep it lubricated helps to suspend the particles so it doesn't clog the surface of the stone it's the 16,000 grit that will produce a surface on something like hard metal pardon me hard maple to where you cannot improve it with sandpaper it's it's just it's incredible alright let's take a look at that okay if you can see that it's nice and shiny but just for the sake of it I'm gonna go just a little bit longer I'd rather invest a little more time at this dais and have to come back using the three hundred grit side set that on there just a few seconds no I still see some dark area right there so I'll get rid of that if this whole process took me five minutes that's a far cry from what it used to take when we used to go in and policy and tie her back in fact let me stop and just promote this to you for a second I learned this technique from David Charles worth back in 2001 and didn't accept it right away but went home played around with it and I came to a realization that's probably the smartest thing that I've ever learned about sharpening David developed this technique way back in the mid 70s what we used to do and I used to teach this was we would go in and we would flatten and polish all of this in order to get a working edge out here you had to so you'd be back into here and all this surface area going through all the grits to get that whole area to look like that realizing that you're only ever going to use out here well on the bevel when we get to it most folks now know about what we call prime micro bevels and the whole idea behind micro bevels is to avoid having to polish unnecessary surface so we just do a little strip right out here at the cutting edge well this uses the same idea on the back of the blade because it's sitting on a steel rule it's elevated less than a degree so it's not going to change the geometry of the cut but you bypass all that prep work down in here by just doing that little strip so if this takes me a total of five minutes the old way of doing all that on a blade this size I would easily allow an hour and a half and it's not fun I'll spend another 10 15 seconds on this now once this is done I never touch the back of the blade with anything but the 16 thousand grit I never go back to the 1,000 on the back of the blade this is like polishing your chisels in a way you never touch the back of your blade and your chisel blade with anything but your final grit all right that should be good and wipe that off and just check it it's a nice polish okay so that's the back done never touch it again except on the sixteen for three seconds each time you sharpen so now I'm gonna come to my one thousand I'm doing the blade bevel for the first time a little bit of a little bit of information about this primary bevel is typically twenty five degrees on most blades that twenty five degree bevel is merely there as a compromise if it was too acute there wouldn't be enough metal out here and if it's too obtuse then when it sits in the blade if you go up beyond the 45 degree angle that the blade is supported by the Frog then the it wouldn't function because the heel will touch before the toe so you want to stay somewhere in that high twenty five low thirty range on all of these bevels so here's the first thing I'm going to do I'm gonna hold the blade in such a way that I can distribute the pressure uniformly across the cutting edge I use I hold it if I'm if you're right-handed opposite obviously if you're left I hold it like this my fingers are just kind of tucked in the grew in the slot on the back side I'm gonna take my left index finger and put it in this hole and that's kind of my indexing point home base you might call it pinky goes here ring finger here middle finger here bring the index finger over here I now have four fingers to distribute the pressure as uniformly as possible along the cutting edge now may sound easy but it's a little bit difficult because you're used far more custom to pushing hard with your index finger than you are with your ring finger but you've got to learn to put the same amount of pressure in all of them and again make it light to moderate I'm gonna set that down and I'm gonna say something right now about the advantage of these big thick blades on our modern planes if you take an old Stanley now all I have here for example is a little number one but if you look at the blade that came standard they were anywhere from 70 to 85 thousands of an inch in thickness the newer blades are anywhere from 125 to 140 thousands of an inch why is that better well for one thing it gives you a much wider primary bevel and the wider the primary bevel the easier it is to locate it when you're freehand sharpening here's what I mean there's my fingers in position the last note about the grip is I want my two hands to be tied together don't want them operating independently like this so I squeeze my left my part of my right thumb between my right thumb and my right index finger so they operate as one light to moderate grip set that down find that primary bevel and like I said because it's so wide it's easy to locate there's my 25 now I want to come up three maybe maybe four degrees I'm gonna just get off of that primary bevel and when I do that I then lock my wrist lock my elbow and all the pivoting is going to come from my shoulder so find my primary oh by the way you also notice that I'm not sharpening like this I'm on an angle if you sharpen like this and the process doing these little circles you're gonna be off your stone part of the time if you hold on an angle like this the same circles are gonna keep you on the stone so I'm holding it like this index finger there we go find the primary come up three or four degrees lock it and now just do little circles keep them tight if you go away big round ones and you're gonna be rocking your blade like that little tight circles it's much easier to maintain that angle and because all the pivoting is coming from your shoulder meaning as far away as you can get it's yet much easier to maintain these angles now I'm gonna count out ten seconds which would be right about now and I'm gonna feel in the back now if I can detect a burr that runs corner-to-corner here's my thinking the stone should come to you flat if the pressure I'm applying is uniform a burr running corner-to-corner tells me that this edge from here to here is straight also defined as the shortest distance between two points that's part of the reason that I'm gonna be able to jump from a 1000 grit all the way over to a 16,000 without having to do any in-between grits now I didn't work the middle of this stone so I'm gonna be okay here's what I'm going to do verifying with the Bur I'm done that stone I'm gonna hold it the same way I'm gonna come over here to my 16000 I'm gonna find that primary bevel now this is the part that takes a little bit getting used to if I went up three degrees on the previous stone on this one I've got to come up maybe five or six degrees at that point I locked my wrist I locked my elbows and I do that same little circle bit only this time I'm working on a stone that wears with use so while I'm doing these circles I'm slowly rocking heel and toe meaning my feet to cover more of the surface area of the stone so I can even out the wear and I'll do that for about 10 seconds now I'm in slow speed while I'm teaching this so my top speed would be typically like this and now at the end of 10 seconds without changing anything I'm gonna push down a little bit harder with my right index finger for about three seconds then I'm going to switch and I'm gonna push down with my left pinky for about three seconds what I just did was this and then this and it results in a very light feathering of the outside corners and the reason for doing that is when I plane a wide panel and I need to make overlapping passes I don't want to feel any overlap or what we would call plane tracks this will allow you to eliminate that providing you can get that blade sitting in the blade in the plane parallel to the sole those that little feathering on each corner will take care of those overlap marks and you can perfect this to a point where you'll run your hand over there and feel absolutely no marks just a beautiful surface final step is to take my steel rule lay it on the edge lay the blade down on its back staying within a quarter of an inch of the edge and this is the only time we ever touched the back of the blade again and as I said with the sixteen thousand grit spend one two three seconds removing any bird that might still be there at that point wipe it nice and dry and that should be ready to go all right let me change gears I'm gonna walk you through the process of setting up your chip breaker so we can put this in the plane and actually try it out the chip breaker is an integral part of the way the plane works there was a time when it was used to stabilize an otherwise thin blade now I went and dug this out of an old number four and you can see how thin it is he'll also know that the old-style chip breakers had a bump on the back I think the new style is a lot easier to deal with but I don't think you even need them anymore with the stick as these blades are however part of the function of the plane engages the chip breaker to move the blade so you have to have it but there's the comparison so I'm gonna take my chip breaker I'm gonna remove the screw now the first thing I want to do is make sure that when that lays on the back that it's touching all along the edge this lip has a negative angle on it so in order to work it properly and my method of doing it is from doing it on the road so I've always had limited equipment so you might find something better in your shop to do this with but I'll show you how I do it I'm gonna use the three hundred grit side I'm gonna use my blade because I find that if I set my blade down like this and put the back of the chip breaker on it it holds it at just the right angle I need to stay within a quarter of an inch of this edge if I go over here I'm gonna bump into this side this underside and I want to work just the edge set that like that again three fingers to distribute the pressure evenly move it side to side now give you a little tip if you're having a hard time seeing where you what you're working on you can go in and take a felt-tip marker paint this black go in and do that look it over and you want to see that you've removed all of the ink but if you look real closely you can see that I've made contact from here all the way over I'm just shy of making it to the other side that's only took me two or three seconds so this isn't going to take long at all I don't care about the surface quality meaning the 300 grit is fine it's always best to even out the where and even your diamond stone so I go into end check that again okay if you look real close we've actually made it all the way to the end now I don't it doesn't bother me that I've got more here than over there it's just as long as I'm touching all the way that's enough the reason why when that lays on the back of the blade yet if it doesn't make contact then when the shaving comes off it made Jam in there and then you have to stop and take it apart you want it to make contact with the shaving hits the back of the chip breaker and comes up over and out the mouth now that is create a bit of a burr on the backside so if you want you can turn this over using the 1000 grit side and just elevate that a little bit and just flip that back and forth until you break that off or you can simply take a piece of wood and just work it back and forth until that burr is gone that blade the steel in the chip raker is much softer than it is in the blade so you don't typically have this kind of problem getting rid of a burr on a blade whereas on the chip breaker it'll hang on a little bit longer all of this is one time prep you never have to do it again the only thing I'll ever have to do with this blade in this chip breaker in the future is usually get a bunch of pitch stucked on the back and you go clean it off for once in a while but other than that it should be good for good for life all right remember blade you'll also notice too that I invested in the heavy holder it's a lot easier than chasing that light stone all over the place and that ceramic stone made by Shapton it's actually called a glass stone they did this several years ago what they did I'll see if I can clean it off so you can see they took the 16000 grit abrasive and they mounted it to a piece of glass the best part of this not only does it keep it flat because of the glass but you'll you can get to use 100% of the abrasive you wear it down right until it gets to the glass I like the holder because it's heavy it probably weighs 5 pounds it's a bunch of glass encased in rubber these three surfaces are all in the same plane so when you set that on there it's well supported doesn't move around on you and keeps it nice and flat under the pressure of the lapping process ok clean this up typically there's no anti-rust in any of these blades so if you don't get all that moisture off you're gonna end up with some now on this style I'll put it on here like that pull it back slide it into place and then while I have to finger fingers and thumb like this I can move that forward and I'll slide that until it gets about 1/32 of an inch away I'm not a I'm not a believer of chipbreaker sitting right up on the edge doing anything that a lot of folks claim it does and the reason I say that is I've never experienced it and if you look at beveled down planes I pardon me bevel up planes they don't have chip breakers and they perform just as well I just happen to prefer the traditional bench plane so there's where we said it now there's there's a couple of ways that you can test for sharpness this one that I do is probably not one that everybody the faint of heart we're going to want to do I'm just kind of dropping that a bit on my thumb to make sure there's no burr there I take my fingernail this is one of those don't do this at home and I run my fingernail in this direction and I should be able to do that without feeling any Nicks now right there I feel a definite little neck I suspect that when I take when I plane this shaving fact I'm gonna switch this board over to a piece of yellow cedar I love working this stuff the bonus is it smells so good but I suspect based on what I just felt that when we planed we're going to get a cut shaving in that spot and I'll show you how how I'll prove that to you now see how that shaving is coming off serrated like that well that's bad news now I'll shall prove to you that it's next fine Nick's on the ends of the blade because as I advance the blade even more I can get rid of some of those ok but if I were to look at that closely I can see that there are little places where thinner shaving would actually rip up so this sometimes happens when you first sharpen your blade so it's alright we're going to go back and do it again take the blade off nothing to do with the chipbreaker what I'm going to do different this time is I'm gonna spend a little more time on my secondary bevel on the 1000 grit stone to get down below any necks that may be on there hold that like I showed you four fingers right out on the cutting edge not back here but write it on the cutting edge squeeze the right thumb between the left side and the left index finger find the primary once you locate it come up three or four degrees above it tight circles light to moderate pressure remember you want to just start to squeeze a firm grape I'm going a little more than 10 seconds because I want to purposely go below those Nick's we had verify it with a burr burr runs corner-to-corner come over to my 16000 repeat the process meaning locate the primary bevel by the way what we put on there just now is called a secondary bevel over here we're going to do a third or a tertiary bevel find the primary come up higher than you did in the previous stone on an angle like the moderate pressure slowly migrate forward so that you're using more of the stone now after 10 seconds of work downward pressure in one corner for 3 seconds followed by the opposite corner for 3 seconds try not to think about the transition so that you're not moving like this stay in that same angle and just simply push a little harder and then a little harder final step steel rule on the edge working the opposite side spend 3 seconds removing that burr now if you'll notice my sharpening station is quite a bit lower than my bench and I found and teaching folks that if they tried to do this sharpening at bench height the biggest problem was their pivoting from the wrist very difficult to maintain dropping your sharpening station down here allows you to lean over and move that pivot point all the way up to here it makes a huge difference try it if you're having trouble getting this down freehand sharpening I got something that may help several years ago I developed what's called the angle trainer real simple piece of composite that has two real powerful magnets on either side it's got a 29 degree slope and a 31 let me show you how that works make it even easier I add a little bit of dish soap to my hone right and it'll just make it so that the angle trainer will slide a little easier so put that on set it down 29 degrees is the angle you're gonna start with that's gonna be the one you do in the thousand grit so the advantage of this is you get to hold the blade the exact same way idea is when you eventually get it you just remove this and you've already got all the rest those habits developed hold your blade engage the magnets as you slide it forward it now supports your blade at 29 degrees it does not interfere with how you would do this if you're doing it free and same idea ten seconds light to moderate pressure along the cutting edge the angle trainer simply slides over the stone stop and check soon as you get your burr take your angle trainer off and switch to the 31 degree side this is where we create our tertiary bevel hold the blade the same way engage the magnets slide forward now it holds the blade two degrees higher so it allows you to do that tertiary same ten seconds of work and again a little bit of dish soap in with your home right helps it slide even easier now at the end of ten seconds downward pressure on one corner for three seconds by pushing down with my right index finger switching to my left pinky for three seconds take the angle trainer off put your steal rule down apply the charlesworth ruler trick three degrees on the back and there you go now the angle trainer will not last forever it's running over a coarse stone that will eventually wear it out but in the time that it will work you'll eventually get that angle down so that you have the confidence to be able to do this and you'll actually get a good sharp edge there you go now if you've tried this method and it's worked for you love to hear your comments you never know sometimes somebody will just say something that will connect with others and help them figure it out leave that in the comment section alright let's do that quick check before I put the chip breaker on all right that feels much better I didn't detect any burrs let's see if we got it if we got it we should be able to get a shaving that has no rips in it lock that down tight you'll notice my screwdriver has hockey stick tape on there so that you can get a really good grip because that has to be tight in order for the movement on the chip breaker to bring the blade with it and not allow it to slide leave her cap on nice thing about that it goes back to the same spot so once you've tightened up that screw you shouldn't have to do it again a little bit of Wax just a long s and that's a formula that we worked on for quite some time we wanted something that wouldn't leave a wooden cake on there but it would leave a film that would last a little bit as I planed I started spinning the adjuster knob and just do that until I determine whether or not the blade is truly parallel to the sole just a little bit heavy on the right [Music] now I'm gonna retract the blade a little bit and see if we can hold that full shaving as we get down now it starts to come apart when we get down to it I would say both the sub ones out level now it's really coming apart well I wouldn't give up I'll go and do this again now get it right sometimes you go through this with a brand new blade you can't be frustrated if it doesn't work just keep trying it sometimes and this we weren't planning to have it happen like this when we're shooting this video but sometimes you get a blade that for some reason it's lost its temper write it on the very edge I guess from the grinding process and you got to come back in a little bit in order to get into some good steel I'm gonna shut down I'm gonna redo this we'll go back over here and we'll try it a third time and hopefully that'll be the charm relax I often get asked does the wax bother a finish I wouldn't wax my plane prior to my final pass and I've never had an issue with it so I have to say no it doesn't but you need to be smart about it to get that blade moved over a little bit all right that's better so there you go the nice thing nice thing is once you learn to freehand sharpen its a minute from the time you break down your plane go over process it come back over and you're back to work doesn't take a ton of time to learn how to do it anybody can learn to do this if you have the interest just follow what I told you get the gear that you need so that you know what's going to work and work the process until you get it don't give up by the way it doesn't work the first a second or third time anyway I hope this helps enjoy your planing and we'll see you on our next video
