Sharpening Chisels & Plane Blades - Easy & Inexpensive - My Method

it's not very often that I make tips videos mainly because I'm not an expert woodworker but I found a method for sharpening chisels and plane blades that works really well for me and is inexpensive so I thought I would share my methods with you and hopefully this helped some of you there are already lots of excellent videos about sharpening on YouTube some of which taught me what I know now and I'm going to be linked in to my favorite ones in the description box below this video but this video is going to be focusing on how you can get really good results inexpensively I will also include some links in the description box below for the products that I use so first I'm going to talk about the equipment that I use to sharpen and the first thing and most important thing for me is a honing guide previously I found sharpening to be quite difficult without one of these it's the cheap device that's only $4.99 in screw fix which is where i bought mine and for me it's worth every penny secondly I use this double-sided diamond plate it's 360 grit on one side 600 grit on the other and these are available currently on Amazon for 14 pounds or 99 made by T dia now I've found that 600 grit isn't enough to achieve a really sharp edge so the next product I use is this 1200 grit wet and dry paper I tend to buy this in tool station here in the UK as it's only 2 pounds 64 a pack of 10 sheets you can also buy in screw fix but currently it's 3 pounds 79 for the same quantity of sheets the final product I use is this green polishing compound and this is available on Amazon at five pounds thirty-nine the only other thing I use is a scrap of either MDF or plywood to show you the method that I use I'm going to be sharpening this 18 millimeter or 3/4 inch stanley chisel so the first thing I want to check is that the bottom of the chisel at the very tip is perfectly flat doesn't have to be perfectly flat for the full length of the chisel just at the tip I use some water with some washing-up liquid in it to lubricate the plate you could also use an oil but I find that water does the job just fine so I'm going to place the back of the chisel down onto the diamond plate push down with three fingers and move it back and forth now I can see from the abrasive marks on the back of the chisel that I've already got a perfectly flat edge of the front which is perfect so now I'm going to rotate the plate to the 600 grit side lubricate that - I do the same again next I'm going to tear off a piece of this 1200 grit paper pop that on the stone and add some water there and then polish that back edge to 1200 grit I only use this 1200 grit wet and dry paper because I don't have a stone that's of equivalent grit so you could use a stone if you've got one or if you want to buy one but this stuff works fine for me I've got this piece of MDF that's screwed on to a block of wood I'm going to stick that in the vise and with the buffing compound just going to rub that on there and now I can buff the back of this chisel and you can see now on the back of the chisel at the very tip we've got a mirror finish and so with the back of the chisel flattened off I can go back to the diamond plate now to actually sharpen the front edge of the chisel I'm going to put the chisel in the vise and slide on the honing guide as straight as I can and tighten it with this thumb screw and to get the right bevel angle on this chisel I tend to do is to set the distance between the tip of the chisel and the front of the honing guide to somewhere between three and a half and four centimeters and then you can tighten the honing guide with a screwdriver just to make sure that the chisel is not going to come out so now I'm going to put the diamond place back into the vise and start with the 360 grip side now you place this wheel on the honing guide onto the plate hold down the front of the chisel shopping away now just need to make sure I'm cutting the very tip of the chisel and looks good so now I'm going to go up to 600 grit next I'm going to get back to the 1200 grit wet dry paper finally back to the MDF again and then to remove the bear from the back let's give it one stroke and there we have a nice shiny edge so the bevel that's now on this chisel is 24 degrees and now it's nice and sharp so using this method you can get everything that you need for around 25 pounds to sharpen your chisels and your hand plate blades for many many years so hopefully that was useful to some of you please let me know in the comments if it was because I'm key to understand whether it's worth me doing any more of these type of videos also let me know if you've got any suggestions as to how I can improve my methods thanks for watching you

Channel: Rag 'n' Bone Brown

Views: 184,441

Rating: 4.8368039 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, rag, 'n', bone, brown, keith, wood, chisel, sharpening, plane, blade, easy, simple, quick, method, buffing, compound, diamond, plate, stone, grit, wet, dry, sand, paper, honing, guide

Id: -jLcA5z99r8

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 05 2016