Sharpening Plane Blades And Chisels - In the Real World

hi I'm Rob Kaz and welcome to my shop when it comes to sharpening planes and chisels there are as many opinions as there are people making videos and a lot of it is confusing what I want to do in this video is explain to you or show you the simplest method to get a result on a piece of hard maple that leaves a surface Flawless with minimal time and fuss and make it something that anybody can do stay with me I'm going to walk you through and hopefully remove the confusion [Music] thank you when it comes to hand tools anything that has a Cutting Edge sharpening literally is the make or break it's that simple and this is a an art or a technique that for the most part has almost been lost with the Advent of power tools but now that more and more folks are getting involved in hand tools that's coming back and there's a lot of information out there on YouTube on various methods and techniques and tools but as I said a lot of it can be extremely confusing so what I want to do is just bring it down to the absolute Basics what is it you're trying to do you're trying to get an edge on a piece of Steel that will cut a piece of wood as easily as possible and leave a surface that can't be improved so here I've got my five and a half with a sharp blade in it piece of Eastern Maple with very little effort I'm pushing that blade Through the Wood I'm pulling off a thin shavings probably measuring less than a thousands of an inch but more importantly when I run my hand on that piece of wood it feels perfectly smooth and my eye or my hand could not see where there could be room for improvement now as long as it didn't take me a fortune to get there or take me all afternoon to sharpen it this is what I'm looking for so I want to show you something show you how little effort is actually required to make this work when it's properly sharpened just the weight of the tool is enough to pull off that shaving so how do you get it there well I kind of have to take a little bit of a a organized approach to this and there are four things that we need to take into consideration the first is the goal and the goal is to get it sharp enough that with little minimal effort we can push that plane over a piece of wood whether softwood or hardwood and get a Surface behind and as I mentioned already several times is perfectly smooth to the point where you can't get it any better to wear my hand or my eye is going to be able to tell the difference then there's also the technique how it process are we going to use are we going to use a jig or we're going to do it by hand whatever what is the process of actually manipulating that steel to get this kind of an edge third is the medium what are we going to use to sharpen it not just going to rub it on the sidewalk we've got to actually use something that has been prepared that will treat modern steel and allow it to cut fast enough and fine enough that we can get this kind of result and then of course the fourth one is when are we done when do we get to a point where we say anything any more time we put in is not getting anything back to us because we've already taken the wood to a point where it is as high finish as you're going to be able to get without putting a microscope on it to see room for improvement all right let's talk about sharpening goal this is mine I want to get these tools I'm talking about chisels and planes to cut that wood to a point where I can't improve the surface I've already done the plane I'm going to do it again just because I think it was time for repetition I'm going to Now work on a chisel I've got a piece of Northern white pine now the first thing you may say is well that's easy to cut well actually a chisel that will chop through Walnut and maple satisfactorily may actually just break the fibers and pine you have to have it really sharp in order to cut through something soft like Pine or Basswood without having to get crush the fibers so I'll take that edge and with very little effort which means I get lots of control it will peel through there and you can tell by the color it leaves a nice surface and if you're sitting there and run your finger on that it's nice and smooth but most importantly because it's easy to do it allows me lots of control and I'm not having to Grunt and groan and possibly slip and have this thing go flying out the other end sharpness and control are tied together and I'm a fanatic when it comes to sharpening because I want that control that will enable me to do the very best job I can so that's my goal with the Chisel I showed you this once with the plane we'll do it again a little wax to reduce the friction cutting a piece of hard maple in fact let's turn this around and try the end grain on that same piece of maple now first thing I'm going to do is just cut a little chamfer on the back side which just means I won't end up blowing out the fibers I'll use my block plane to do that keep that down low now this is not very flat so it may take me a bit to get that on one plane no pun intended now this is what most folks would consider to be toughest cut of the edge the face and the end we can peel through this with relative ease and pull off a nice controlled uniform thickness shaving on the end grain of this Maple and leave a nice surface now I'll go back and I'll just peel one off the edge I typically have the blade exposed a little bit more on the end grain so I'll pull that back in a bit almost effortless it just seals through that leaving a perfect surface behind that's my goal get that blade whether it's the Chisel or the plane to a point where I don't have to do any additional work that is ready for a finish part of sharpening is also knowing when to resharpen and as you can see the Shaving is starting to get serrated there's little Cuts in there so what happens with the freshly sharpened blade you've got a nice beautiful Edge you can take a thin shaving and it'll all stay intact as it starts to get break as it starts to break down you're going to get little fractures Along The Cutting Edge and the first thing that shows up are these little rips in the shaving now to show you how that can be eliminated if I Advance the blade just a little bit that disappears because I've managed to get down below those little fractures and your shaving is intact again but you don't have that same finish now Chris Schwartz labeled that working dull meaning it'll still cut it'll still perform but it doesn't give you that perfect finish that you once had so one of my Arguments for learning how to sharpen quickly is so that any given time you're less than a minute away from going back to that finishing phase which I call the part that allows you to literally go right from the plane to the Finish you don't have to do anything and you cannot improve that surface it sometimes helps to put this on a graph and you can grasp it a little bit better now I don't kindness to be scientific at all this is just from my however many years of use so here we go blade Edge retention performance time of use along the bottom level of sharpness up here so let's say we're going to get our blade 100 Sharp and this is where I argue that you can do it in 32 seconds the blade is such that in order for you to be able to sharpen it the manufacturer has to make it soft enough that using Stones you can manipulate the edge and create that Cutting Edge at the same time they want it to be as hard as possible so it'll stay as long as possible but there's a compromise so here's what happens you start up here as soon as you start using the blade you start to fall off of that what I call Finishing phase FP and that doesn't last very long and then you end up into what Chris Schwartz once labeled working dull and working dull is that stage in here where it'll still perform but it's not giving you that Flawless surface and as you get toward the end of this you end up with dust coming out and now the blade has gone well beyond where it should have been stopped you should have stopped and resharpened this is easy to obtain you learn how to do it you learn our system 32 seconds from the time you take your plane apart sharpen and put it back together it might be a minute so at any given time within a minute you can actually get to a point where you are putting a final finish what everybody else has to go through multiple grits of sandpaper and dust you can do it with two or three swipes of your plane also need to understand this that as you start to use the plane it's actually going to get shorter so if you were to look at the edge of the blade as it dulls this starts to get rounded over and you literally are shortening your blade that's the reason why as you plane you get to a point where the same setting and you're not picking up a shaving anymore and you've got to advance the blade a little bit more in order to get back in and engage the wood now there are folks that say well if you spend five minutes or 10 minutes you can get an even better Edge but I don't agree with that because if that were the case 32 seconds gives me this 32 minutes I feels the same why would you spend the more why would you put more effort in if you're not getting any kind of a payback and the other problem is that if it takes 30 humans to sharpen or even five minutes people have a tendency to avoid it and that's what I see most often with new Woodworkers new hand tool Woodworkers is they allow their blade to get out in here somewhere now it's going to take a fair bit of time to bring that back freehand sharpening there's one thing you have to remember your ability to hold that angle is extremely limited if you're trying to sit and do that for two or three minutes there's no way you're going to be able to but if you have good Stones they'll cut they'll do their job about 10 seconds on each one is all that it really takes I know it says 32 seconds and I'll explain that a little bit later but the amount of time I actually spend creating either one of those micro bevels is about 10 seconds so minimize the amount of time to sharpen that'll get you into this position and all the extra stuff that you can do and all the fancy measuring is not going to get that blade be higher than 100 sharp I said this is not terribly scientific this is just from Real World real world observation don't worry about this phase this is when you're just having to remove a bunch of wood and my process is always move the wood get it really close then come back quick resharpen put the finish on like I said in exchange for all that sanding that so many other folks do you're doing it with a couple of swipes there's no dust there's no danger there's no noise just a Flawless surface so the cosmic sharpening system how long has it been in the making well quick little history lesson this was my first plane this was belong to my grandfather I got that from him in the early 1980s and I used it for just about everything I have a hawk blade in there that's a new addition and I switched um mid 80s I switched to a number eight with a corrugated sole I I spent a lot of money having that machine so that it was Flawless and that was thanks to Ian Kirby and an operation that he had back then and now and for the last several years I use a five and a half and thanks to David Charlesworth I've been convinced that this is probably the without a doubt the best overall plane now the sharpening bit well it didn't happen overnight my criteria was I want the very best Edge the absolute best Edge how could you settle for anything less next was time I did not want to spend 15 minutes over there 15 minutes doesn't sound like long but if you're in the middle of building something and you're you're just in that mode and you've got to stop to sharpen and that's an interruption to the process can't have 15 minutes so I needed time I wanted to really make this quick also when I started teaching other folks I recognized they're in the same boat if you've got to stop what you're doing find a flat spot Get Out The Jig and all the rest of that stuff that you use it's dirty from the last time subconsciously I'm avoiding that and that's where people end up allowing their blade to get so dull that it's a long process of bringing it back my third criteria which I don't really even consider anymore is the cost the reason is this these materials that you're using to Sharp with are going to last you several years so if you divide that up by the number of days that you get to use it it's pennies um if it's going to produce the best possible Edge in the quickest possible time you have to factor that into your Woodwork and say well that's well worth it I mean if I quadruple the amount of time I spent that's taking away from what I'm wanting to do and then of course removing any of the frustrations a big deal as well so stopping to sharpen remove the lever cap take the blade and Chip breaker out be careful not to bump the edge loosen that take the chip breaker off here's my system I keep it right here at the end of my bench I keep it down low so I'm leaning on top of it much easier than trying to do it at bench height and you can go back and watch my video 32 seconds of sharp but I'll just do this and what I would call shop time feel the Burr one corner followed by the opposite corner and the Charlesworth ruler trick to finish off clean off the moisture for no reason to check it I don't shave my arms anymore I just put it back in and I'll know right away how it does get that within about a 30 second of an inch of the edge lock it in tight make sure there's no debris in the face of the Frog you want good solid contact careful when you assemble that that you don't bump anything make sure your chip breaker apparently your yoke and your lateral adjustment lever engage properly enough tension so that you can make adjustments but it won't slide around on you get that parallel to the sole you'll get the point where you can do that just by eye retract the blade verify that's parallel just as it disappears make any final adjustments I always pull the blade all the way in a little bit of wax to reduce the friction and then while you're planing start spinning the adjuster knob watch for the first bit of Shaving tell you whether or not the blade is parallel to the sole a little bit heavy on the left to just lean on that lateral adjustment levers ever so slightly a little more blade and you start to pull off that perfect shaving and get that surface that you want question that I probably get asked more than any other is how long will the blade stay sharp and that doesn't really have a definitive answer if I'm planing a piece of Northern White Pine which is relatively soft easy to plane and I could probably spend a half an hour and still be getting nice shavings now I'm just pulling that number off the top of my head but there's not a lot of uh wearing on The Cutting Edge as a result of that wood Flawless surface move to something like maple well it's obviously a little bit harder interesting enough I can get a thinner shaving off of maple just because of the nature of the wood now I might be able to get 15 minutes maybe less just depends and find if you do work Maple you'll often find black spots and those black spots are mineral deposits and they will literally take the edge off your plane one pass I avoid those like the plague now if I'm planning something like snakewood which is extremely hard of course that's going to take less time to dull The Edge but if you're in a spot where you can resharpen in a minute or less and you'll have to that's already skipping over I had the same setting and I'm already not getting an edge and just getting dust difficult hardwood to work so depending on the wood depending on how sharp you got it to begin with we'll determine how long it'll last but no matter what you have to learn to sharpen so that the very fact it starts the dull you can go over there reap and be back here in less than a minute and then it doesn't matter you've already got that process done you have to learn how to sharpen and free hands the way to do it so the next most popular question is which blade what's steel what's best so what I have in front of me represents everything from high carbon steel powdered metal cryogenically treated A2 Steel o1 which is oil hardened there's an old original Stanley now I don't know and I've been doing this for a while if it really makes that much of a difference I would definitely stay away from the thin blades the old Stanley blades the fact that they were thin they would actually Flex under the pressure of your fingers and in preparing the back they would Flex I just think that you the more beef you have in the blade the better it's going to easier it's going to be to sharpen believe it or not when it comes to the different manufacturers who are producing current steel I don't know if there's that much of a difference I I would challenge anybody to to do it Mast and be able to tell now this blade was made for me by a friend of mine I don't think he's alive anymore and it's extremely hard in fact it was so hard in trying to flatten the back I had to go in with a grinder and just try to lower that part in the middle so I was only working the perimeter it took forever but interestingly enough when he shipped them to me there was actually a piece broken off of that blade so you get above certain hardness and it becomes brittle uh the Rockwell scale is a means of measuring how hard the steel is and it involves how deep you can push the end of a little bearing under x amount of pressure into the steel they measure that and that gives you your your determining Factor on hardness 6062 seems to be the sweet spot for woodworking not too brittle not too soft you get much below that for instance in a saw blade where you want to sharpen it with a file you're down in the low 50s you're not going to be able to sharpen one of these blades with a file that'll just skate right over it so I am of the opinion today that it's more important learning how to sharpen so that you can do it quickly and efficiently that's more important than what steel you're using with the exception of I don't think the old ones are that much are really worth restoring if I had an old plane and I wanted to bring it back to life first thing I would do is go buy a modern blade I just don't like dealing with those thin blades and has nothing to do with the steel it's just the fact that the blade is so thin they don't they're not as solid in the plane meaning they're going to vibrate more and when you're actually handling them and working them they tend to flex on you and that sounds crazy but it actually happens so don't worry about the steel as much as worrying about your Technique and getting to the point where you can freehand sharpen quickly and efficiently whenever I would do a uh instruction on sharpening one of the first things I would do is explain what is sharp and I recognize that a lot of folks actually didn't know that's kind of like being in a race not knowing what the Finish Line looks like how do you know when you get there so what is sharp when it comes to a plane blade well some of the basics first this is the primary bevel and it's typically 25 degrees but a Cutting Edge consists of two surfaces this side and this side and the edge can only be as good as the lesser of the two meaning the surface quality the first thing I want to do is actually explain what we have to touch in order to get a good Edge so if you look at this primary bevel it's about 5 16 of an inch wide the only part of it that ever makes contact with the wood is actually on the back side but again you whatever you're going to do to one side you have to do to the other so we can actually do the very minimum up here it's going to be called a micro bevel and then on the back you see this big flat surface where we used to go in and polish all of that flatten and polish only to use right out here we now employ What's called the Charlesworth ruler trick which means we just end up doing a little strip right out here at the edge of the blade it's a less than one degree change so it really does not make any difference in the way the blade performs other than the fact it saves you a ton of time now I've done this before but I'm just going to quickly do it and then show you the result on the finished blades that you can understand what it is and I'm going to talk to you about how we actually get it to that stage okay this is the first stage of doing the back using the Charlesworth ruler trick thin steel rule elevating the blade less than one degree so you can see a polished strip it doesn't matter that it's wider over here than it is over there all that matters is any of these scratches you can barely see that come from the factory you do not want them going all the way out so this is a 1000 grit Edge now just like sanding I'm going to stop for a minute and explain this I've got three sheets of sandpaper here I've got a piece of 120 grit which means that there are abrasive particles that pass through a a one inch by one inch screen that had 120 holes in it that's how it was sized and that is going to scratch the wood so that it when it's done it's all the entire surface has 120 grit scratches then if you can move up to something like this which is 180 grit same idea only that one inch by one inch screen now is 180 holes in it and those particles fall through that's what's on that paper it's going to make this scratches a little bit smaller this one is 600 grit same idea 600 holes on a one by one screen very fine abrasive it's going to make a much smaller grit scratch on the surface of the wood so the question is real simple which is going to give you a better looking surface the 120 the one what they say it is 180 for the 600. well obviously the 600 well the same is true with sharpening the steel what we're doing to actually make this sharper we can't change the we cannot change the bevel angle otherwise if we made it too acute there just wouldn't be enough metal out there so the only other option is to take that surface and polish it with finer and finer grits so that the actual scratch pattern is extremely small and what that does out here in The Cutting Edge is it makes that radius and it is a radius under enough magnification but it makes it smaller and smaller until we get it to a point where it will leave a surface on the wood that by hand my eye looks and feels very smooth I want to show you something with a couple pieces of cherry I like to keep this really simple it doesn't have to be complicated I took a piece of cherry and I sliced it on the band saw so it's essentially the same piece of wood just two different pieces this surface I polished up to 240 grit sandpaper you can see what it looks like this piece was planed with a plain blade that was taken to sixteen thousand grit look at the difference just in the color there is no finish on this this is just right off of whatever we used to finish with like I said 240 here plain blade at 16 000 grit here this piece looks Alive looks fantastic and it feels wonderful so there is definitely a good argument for having a really fine Edge on your plane blade now let me finish this process after I gone through and created the 1000 grit back bevel I'm going to polish that up a little bit further and I'll take that to a sixteen thousand and you're going to see the difference in the way that it shines think about that piece of cherry when you see it yeah now as imperfect as the back is meaning not being flat you can see how shiny just a few minutes on the 16 000 grid is now I want to show you that piece of cherry again so that this will resonate quick look again there's the difference that a higher grit is going to provide I realize one is sanded one is plain but it's dramatic okay now I'm going to do the bevel side and show you how that plays into the whole sharpening process I'm going to go through okay so here's what the finished blade looks like there's my polished back that you've already seen and if you look over here that's a polished what we call a tertiary because after this after the primary we did a little secondary bevel a few degrees higher on a 1000 grit to straighten the edge and then we polish the Leading Edge of that with the sixteen thousand so minimum amount of work to be done now I'll show you this because we have to have a finishing Stone just like the Sandpaper on wood the higher the grit the better the surface is going to be but then you take it to a point where you don't get any additional benefit that you can identify so I've got four Stones here and I want I I want this to make sense so I put the approximate price on them so you've got a four thousand a six thousand and eight thousand and a sixteen thousand you've got to finish your stone with you've got to finish your Blade with something beyond the 1000 Grit and these are all going to last about the same amount of time so if you're doing this as a hobby you're probably going to get at least five years out of one of these stones you can pay seventy dollars and get your four thousand grit you can pay 75 and get your six thousand you can pay ninety and get your eight thousand so let's really just consider these two the difference is approximately forty dollars forty dollars spread out over five years is not even bother what we're thinking about so you can either finish at eight thousand Grid or you can finish the sixteen thousand grit you can finish that 240 grit paper you can go to 600 grit paper my argument is 600 it doesn't take any longer I don't have I don't spend any more time doing my final edge with the sixteen thousand than I would with the eight thousand and what do I get for that what do I get for that essentially extra forty dollars I get a Surface that when you run your hand over it you can't find any room for improvement it's fantastic it's finished so all kinds of gadgets to measure sharpness of edge I tell people I said look what really matters is what does it do on the wood sharpen your blade put it in the plane adjust it take a pass if you love the surface and you think this is fantastic don't go any further you don't need any of the rest of it but you do need good stones to get you there and I argue that the shopton 16000 is the best finishing stone that I've currently found and what I really like I didn't mention this what I really like about the 1000 grit Diamond Stone which is a CBN product on a flat plate what's nice about this is it doesn't go at a flat it lasts a very long time and it cuts really fast now unfortunately they've not been able to figure out how to take that up Beyond about four thousand I know there's some that sell higher but I've tried them and I'm not convinced they're any finer than 4 000 grit to go to that impressive higher grit you've got to go into a water stone or a ceramic the ceramic is the one that takes you up to the sixteen thousand you can actually go higher than that but this is this is where I think the best value lies now the downside is this has to be kept flat the way these are made it's a measured particle in other words the 16 000 grit particle held in place by some kind of a bonding agent to keep it all intact and as you run the tool over it the bonding agent wears and keeps exposing a fresh layer of cutting particles that's what keeps the speed up well the problem the wearing is it takes it at a flat the good news is if you've got a harder product like the back side the 300 grit side of this you can simply go on there and you'll watch how quick these marks disappear only takes a few seconds to bring that back to a nice flat surface got to remember to do that so here's the simple system 1000 Grit steel plate with CBN abrasive on it cuts really fast and the importance the reason why that's so important not only is it because I don't want to spend a whole bunch of time over here but when you're holding a blade freehand and you're trying to get that edge I do this a lot and my ability to maintain that angle is very limited I can't spend 60 seconds doing it but I can do I can spend 10. so I find my primary bevel get up off of the primary bevel just a little bit three or four degrees and I can spend 10 seconds doing these little circles with my wrist and my elbows locked pivoting for my shoulder and that'll cut fast enough that in 10 seconds I'm able to detect a slight Burr in the back side that tells me that I'm done the 16 000 which doesn't cut nearly as fast but once you've already prepared or straightened that edge when you set that straightened Edge down on a flat stone it makes contact from one corner to the other and by simply coming up off of that last bevel which means if I was up two or three or four degrees beyond the primary as long as I'm a couple degrees up off of that on this Stone then all I'm really doing is working the very Leading Edge and as we showed you on that other Stone it's so small you can hardly see it but when you take it to the wood it does the job okay to tie this all together it's got to be Sharp your tools work better when they're sharp they cut easier less effort less effort means you get more control regardless of whatever things out there about measuring sharpness of an edge and whatever what really matters is what does it do on the piece of wood my personal recommendation the diamond stone at a thousand grit to start the process the 16 000 grit Stone as your finishing Stone to finish it the whole thing takes 32 seconds to Sharp we'll leave a link below to that and you're able to do this now one last thing I want to add in and that is the convenience part as I mentioned earlier if sharpening is a process that's going to take you 10 minutes and you've got to go and gather up all the gear and find a flat spot you're going to avoid it so what I purposely do is have my sharpening station right here at the end of my bench that doesn't get used for anything else it's always set up it's always ready I'm never more than a few steps away from a sharp edge and at the height that I can easily lean over so that I can get farther away from The Cutting Edge instead of up here on the bench where you're pivoting from your wrist down here you can lean over and you can move that Pivot Point from your wrist up to your shoulder makes it so much easier to maintain that angle Stones want to cut them really want them to cut really fast so that you can get that done while you still have the accuracy and then the result is you get this beautiful surface don't delay get your sharpening gear learn a process that you like get really good at it get fast at it so that you'll always stay in that finishing phase of the cycle of a Cutting Edge hope this helps if you enjoy my method of work and like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level I've always said better tools make the job so much easier if you click on the plane and chisel icon below it'll take you to our site and introduce to all the tools that we actually manufacture right here in our shop it'll also give you information on our in-person and online workshops

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 162,826

Keywords: blade, chisel, chisel sharpening, chisel sharpening jig, hand plane, hand tools, how to sharpen, how to sharpen a chisel, how to sharpen a plane, how to sharpen chisels, plane, plane blade, plane blade sharpening, plane iron, plane sharpening, sharpen, sharpen chisels, sharpening, sharpening a chisel, sharpening chisel, sharpening plane blades, sharpening plane blades and chisels, sharpening planes, sharpening wood tools, tool sharpening, woodworking

Id: ybX9vyQtbiI

Length: 34min 17sec (2057 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 09 2023