Sharpening Hand Plane Blades - (On a budget !)

hi i'm rob cos and welcome to my shop sharpening hand plane blades on a budget if you're looking at what i do and thinking it's too expensive or too complicated i'm going to introduce you to a stepping stone that will allow you to get a blade sharp enough to work particularly soft woods using one stone takes mere seconds watch this i'm rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help take your woodworking to the next level if you're new to our channel make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell which will alert you whenever we release a new video anytime we use a new tool or technique we'll leave a description down below so that make it easier for you to find all right let's get back to work in my 32 seconds to sharp video and we'll put the link below you'll see i use relatively expensive gear this is something i do every day and i've done for years i finished with a 16 000 grit stone and my opening stone is a thousand grit there are two different primer two different micro bevels used there's the famous charlesworth ruler trick on the back and for some people who have yet to be introduced to freehand sharpening it's a little bit intimidating i know people look at and they think how do i know those angles well hold that thought i'm going to show you a way to get started with just the one stone the trend diamond plate that's what it looks like when it comes in the box i'm going to walk you through a very short process involves one micro bevel now the nice thing about this system is it allows you to get your feet wet it's very easy to do and if you decide to go on instead of having to replace something you've already purchased you simply add to it that's the beauty of it but on softwoods pine even hardwoods like aspen or poplar you'll be able to get satisfactory results with one stone and a process that takes 13 seconds to do i'm not going to say it's going to give you great results in hardwood but you can at least get started on the softer woods so that turns your crank let me show you how it's done and i promise you by the end of this you'll be able to say to yourself i could do that all right to make this as realistic as possible i'm using a brand new stone brand new blade and chip breaker and i'll explain the whole process to you first the stone it's made by a company called trend found this about 10 years ago been thrilled with it made it part of my system it's indestructible it will eventually wear but you'll get a long life out of it and as long as you don't allow it to rust you can drop it you can do anything you want like i said it sounds indestructible there's a 300 grit side and a 1000 grit side we're only going to use the 1000 grit side for what we're doing today now i'm going to use a an original ib i pardon me wood river blade and chip breaker and i'll walk you through prepping both i'll take that screw off for what we're going to do right away i'm going to use my 1 000 stone with honing oil i typically use water or a mixture of water and something called hone right but for this and because we're not using an additional water stone with the process we can get away with just the oil so the first thing we want to do is make sure that the chip breaker is going to meet the back of the blade properly you don't want there to be a gap now just in case you don't know this when you put the two together you should be able to see light it only is designed to touch right up here at the very edge and somewhere back here you want to make sure that when it does meet there is no gap at the front there were chips or shavings will get jammed so what i like to do is set this down working on the edge of the stone i need something back here to elevate the back see this is a negative angle underneath here so the back part of the chip breaker has to be sitting lower than the stone it just so happens that the blade gets just about the right height now i'm just going to put a little bit of honing oil on there and you can use any any oil on this it's just a matter something to suspend the particles so they don't get clogged and to make it a little bit easier three fingers stay within a quarter of an inch of the edge if you go over too far you're going to bump back in here somewhere you don't want to do that now only a few seconds i'm going to flip it over i always like to see what i'm dealing with and i'm looking to see where i'm making contact so i'm making contact from about here over to here this is relatively soft steel this portion of the equipment so it doesn't take very long to fix if it's out any amount now if yours is really out of whack and you're going to need a lot of work you can always flip it over and use the 300 grit side this is a lot more aggressive typically what i use the 300 grit side for is dressing my finishing or my ceramic stone you don't have to go fast and you don't have to apply a lot of pressure the diamond will do the cutting nice thing about this is once you've got it done you never have to redo it it's a one-time process okay so i'm from i'm all the way over to this end but i'm short about a little less than an eighth of an inch on this end remember not to go in more than a quarter of an inch now what you're going to notice is you're going to create a burr on the back side and i'm going to show you how to take care of that we're still still not quite there try to distribute your pressure as evenly as possible so i'm pushing down with both my thumb and my middle finger as well as my index finger in the middle occasionally you'll fall off watch your fingers you do need to be careful because that edge with that diamond on there although it doesn't feel really sharp to the touch if you rub against it repeatedly you'll cut through your skin rather quickly without even noticing it okay now i'm going to do the rest of it on the 1000 grit side i've created a burr on the back side i don't want that so that's fairly easy to get rid of since it's a fairly long bevel i can set it right down on there and just rock it a little bit until you feel it and then i'll just elevate it just a little bit off of that bevel and just move that few seconds set it back on here back to the bevel and it won't take very long before that little burr will break off and if it doesn't you can always take a piece of wood or your palm of your hand depending on how tough your skin is and just flip that back and forth until that breaks off now wipe off the oil you don't want that end up on your wood once you've done this you don't ever have to come back and repeat it about the only maintenance you have to do with a chip breaker is occasionally you're going to want to wipe off or get rid of all of the pitch that ends up builds up on the back side i typically do this to the 300 grit side before i use it to flatten my finishing stone and what i do is run a piece of steel over there just in case there's any diamond that will break readily i don't want it getting embedded in my stone so take a the back of a blade back of a chisel and just run it over that stone for 30 seconds or so i'm going to suggest you do it on the 1000 grit side as well if you're going to use this as your single or your one and only sharpening stone all you're doing is just trying to break free any loose or near loose diamond i'm not doing that as part of the preparation on the back of the blade i'll show you how we do that before i go any further i'm going to go ahead and do the back so what we're doing traditionally you would flatten and polish the entire back of a blade or i should say the entire about from there forward and the only part you would actually use would be right up at the very end so a friend of mine in the uk david charlesworth developed this technique back in the 70s called the ruler trick little thin steel rule on the side keep it in the same place every time elevates the blade less than a degree and working on the opposite side of the stone and i'm going to stay within a quarter of an inch if you come in too far you're really altering the bevel we want to keep it very very shallow so i'm going to use three fingers to distribute downward pressure and i'm going to stay within that quarter of an inch now i do this a lot so i've got into a habit of dragging my pinky on the underside against the edge the smooth edge so that when i'm moving forward and back i'm not fishtailing all over the stone it may take a while to get the hang of that do this just for a couple of seconds i just want to check and see what condition the blade is in and it's not bad now you can see if you look real closely the blade is slightly concave and we see we're making contact here and over here so when we're done we'll have a complete arc and as long as it makes contact through the entire width of the blade we're good to go this prevents us from having to go in and flatten all of this first all we have to do is just worry about that little strip right out at the edge and this is a one time procedure so do it once and from then on it's just a three second process of removing any bur all right let's look again okay so i can see that i've made contact all the way over and this is where i'm gonna go back and i'm gonna spend just a few more seconds and like that i mean probably another 25 30 and then i can stop and i'll be done with it okay check that out all right so we're done never have to do that again so now we're going to go through the actual sharpening process this is easy first to help you understand why we do it the way we do it if you look at your primary bevel that's this it's 25 degrees the frog which is the part of the plane that supports the blade holds and presents the blade to the wood at 45 degrees so the only part of this that ever touches the wood is right up here so rather than go through and polish all of that surface and there's quite a bit what we're going to do is we're going to set it on the stone referencing off that primary bevel and then we're going to elevate three or four degrees you can go up four or five degrees just as long as you don't go beyond 45 we'll spend what makes about 10 seconds until we can detect a slight bur at that point we'll take the burr off put it in the plane and see how it works now you want to learn to hold the blade the same way every time you do it and the advantage of doing that is you will eventually develop the exact uh the ability to get the exact same result every time now you might be asking why is my sharpening station so low well if you try to do this freehand sharpening at bench height you're going to find that you're pivoting from your wrist as you do this which is very difficult not only that but if your stone to avoid wearing your stone in one spot you start your little circles here and you recognize that i've got to cover the entire stone so in the process of trying to do that and this the same time most people make a mess what i discovered while teaching people to do this if you lower your sharpening station to be just above knee height it allows you to lean over the stone and now you can move your pivot point from your wrist all the way up to your shoulder well the farther away you get it the easier it is to maintain that angle and we only have to do it for 10 seconds the other advantage is instead of having to move my arm and in both the circular motion and forward and back i can simply rock on my heel and toe while i'm doing this and i'll cover the entire surface of the stone so here's how we do it five fingerprint me four fingers to distribute the pressure as uniformly as possible along the cutting edge i actually start by gripping the blade like this i'm being right-handed i use that hole as an indexing point so i take my index finger of my opposite hand i put it in there then i put my pinky my ring finger my middle finger and i move this one over so that those four fingers are distributing the pressure as uniformly as possible along the cutting edge now to keep these two hands working together i squeeze my right thumb between my left thumb and my left index finger like that just a comfortable grip light to moderate don't squeeze excessively and i hold it on an angle like this if you hold it like that and start doing this you're going to find that your blade is exiting the side of the stone with every circle if you hold it like this and do it you'll stay on the stone the entire time so find your primary you just have to rock it to feel it now you don't want to polish all of that primary so you come up just a few degrees and then lock that one two three four five six seven eight nine ten feel for a burr if you can detect the burr that runs corner to corner that's all you have to do so what i'll now do is go back to my ruler trick and this is the maintenance part all we have to do is get rid of the burr so i'm going to set that on there pull it onto the stone and spend one two three seconds removing that bur now the only downside to using oil is it gets a little bit messy that's why i prefer water but have a good rag handy now just in case the bur didn't get completely eliminated you can use your palm if your skin's tough enough and just flip that back and forth be careful or if you don't want to do that you can take a piece of wood and just back and forth what you're doing is just flexing that little burr until it eventually drops off take your chip breaker put it the screw has to go in that hole put it on sideways like that pull it down slide it over now with holding it like this you have lots of control slide that forward until it comes within about a thirty second of an inch of the edge now where is my screwdriver now if you want more detailed instruction on setting up your plane we we did a video a while back and we'll leave a link in the description below make sure that that's good and tight the reason is you want or part of the adjustment of the plane works on the actual chip breaker and it has to bring the blade with it you don't want it sliding so you want a screwdriver that you can get a lot of torque with and also you'll notice that there's no taper on the end of that so when it sits in there it makes good contact and it doesn't have a tendency to wreck the upper part of that slot i'll leave you a link on that as well now i'm going to change out the blade and this one's a little bit thinner so i'm gonna have to tighten that up just a bit make sure there's no debris on the face of the frog you want good solid contact i should say good positive contact make sure there's no debris in the back of the blade set that in place now there's three points of contact you have to be aware of and this is in that video i just mentioned but i'll say it again here you've got the back of the blade laying a flat on the face of the frog you've got this thing right here called the yoke that has to go into that little slot in the chip breaker and you've got the bearing on the end of the lateral adjustment lever that has to fit in this long slot in the blade all those pieces have to meet properly so that that'll lay nice and firmly on the face of the frog now with a light colored background and i think that's a that's yeah just a little bit too loose snug that up just a bit sight down the sole now i see a lot of blades so i'm going to retract and then i'm going to use my lateral adjustment to get it as close to parallel as i can and tighten that up a little bit more i want to pull the blade in all the way i don't want to see any blade at all but i'll make some fine adjustments just as it disappears to make sure it's parallel to the sole now i like to wax the sole of the plane the reason is it just reduces the friction so that your effort is spent pushing the blade through the wood instead of pushing the plane over the wood now this was a 13 second sharpening procedure if you eliminate the time we spent setting it up originally so i'm going to start planing and while i'm planing i'm going to start advancing the adjuster knob first bit of shaving came out on the right so i moved the blade over just a bit i'll advance it a little bit more and on a piece of pine is relatively easy to plane but you can pull off a decent shaving and you can get a pretty good surface i say pretty good going to the 16 000 particularly in hardwoods is going to make a substantial difference but anybody can learn to get this first step and when the time comes that you want to advance and take this a little bit further you're not having to replace anything you're just going to add to that system your 16 000 grit stone your heavy holder and you use the back side of that diamond plate to keep that stone flat now again we did that video entitled to 32 seconds to sharp we'll leave that link down below and that'll give you all the information you want and inspire you to go a little bit farther i hope this helps if you like my work if you like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level and i've always said better tools make it a whole lot easier if you click on the icon with the plane and the chisel it'll take you to our website introduce you all of our tools and also talk to you about our online and in-person workshops good luck in your woodwork

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 28,058

Rating: 4.9662061 out of 5

Keywords: sharpening hand plane blades, sharpening hand plane, hand plane, hand plane iron sharpening, hand plane sharpening, hand plane sharpening angle, hand plane sharpening stones, rob cosman hand plane sharpening, sharpening, plane sharpening, sharpening handplane blades with a diamond stone, how to sharpen a plane, how to sharpen a plane blade, trend diamond sharpening stone, how to sharpen with diamond plates, rob cosman, sharpen with diamond stone, woodworking

Id: 7Ja3cDCx3ds

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020