The Most Comprehensive Sharpening Test Ever Done

you know I've done a lot of videos on sharpening and those are the videos that get the most comments of anything on my YouTube channel and so I was trying to figure out what system I wanted to bring into the cam tool store and to do that you know how we work here if it's in our store it's in our shop and so we wanted to find the best sharpening system we also wanted to answer all the questions and find out all the myths that need to be busted and so we set out and by we I brought in a real scientist Suman sarker yes thanks for having me of course he did a video on the diminishing returns of overly stropping it was really great and he used this tester this scale that tells you exactly how sharp a blade is and that is unlocked a lot of answers for us it's given us the opportunity to really find out what is sharp what is the best sharpening system should you stop should you not strop basically is it worth it is it worth it so we're going to answer that today we're going to do that by first defining what is sharp we're going to talk about what that looks like at home if you don't have one of these 350 testers which you probably don't if you don't have a microscope like this one and we're gonna we're gonna walk you through how to sharpen quickly and what it looks like when you get a good result so let's dive into some of the tests but first let's identify what is sharp the entirety of this test revolves around this scale here it's a pretty expensive piece of equipment it is a scale for measuring sharpness and the way it does this is it has these pieces of test media it can come in this thing where you set the the wire yourself or they have all these clips that are what did you say they're calibrated and tensioned properly so you don't have to use right one of the problems with this thing is you tension it yourself every time so you get different very variations of tension so we got these test clips that are all tensioned in the lab or something yeah so basically you take one of these you put it in your scale you zero it out and then you cut using either this fulcrum or you do it by by hand they say it should take four to six seconds for a test because if you go too fast you can snap the wire so basically you take your chisel and you slowly press down until it snaps like that and the scale what's really cool it measures in grams so it's very simple the lower the number the sharper it is what we had to do first before we did this test was identify what is sharp so tell us what is sharp too much so basically if you can cleanly and effortlessly cut a printing paper or if you can shave nice and cleanly without agitating your skin it's probably sharp enough for Woodworking and for that it's usually around 140 or less on this scale so keep that number in mind for all of the tests that we're going to show you today because you can kind of gauge the sharpness of everything else that we do and it has to be printer paper magazine paper or newspaper is not going to work because it's so much thinner it tends to rip you'd have to be at a much lower number to get a clean cut up foreign okay quick review on sharpening and I've maintained through all of my sharpening videos over the years that it is something that people put way too much emphasis on it is very easy to do because there's only one goal you have metal that comes to a point all of the cutting is done right on that point and so what you need to do is create a new Edge when you create a new Edge you create what is called a burr a burr looks like this on the microscope you can feel it with the tip of your finger your fingers are very sensitive you can feel it you want to feel it all the way across in fact if you're sharpening with a jig or by hand then you feel like you're out of square it's probably just a pressure thing a lot of times people put more pressure you know on their dominant hand and you'll start to get a bevel it's a little crooked that doesn't matter especially like for a plane blade you can adjust that with the lateral adjustment in your plane you mean you can adjust a plane blade many degrees and so if you're a little bit off that's fine with chisel a little bit more important to be square but it's also a lot easier to fix just put a little bit more pressure on your other finger or the different side of the blade if you're doing it freehand again doesn't matter so you go until you create a burn the way we did it is we created a burr on our lowest grit stone or or lapping film and then we moved up through the Grits doing the same amount of Strokes as we went up it was usually about 20 on the lower grits and then 30 as I got into the higher grids okay you can see here this is after only about 30 seconds of sharpening we have a nice clean micro bevel across and we've created a burr and a burr if you can feel it in fact you can almost see it right there I can pull it up it's a tiny little almost like a little wire and you can feel a little bump you can see it and it just is very easy to tell and that's what you need to knock off to make it finally sharp let me show you what that looks like under the microscope okay you can see here this is the 25 degree main bevel off the diamond Stone on the tormacher 600 grit Diamond Stone and then this is after we did the scary sharp system all the way through 60 000 grit or 0.3 microns and then this is our Burr here that's where you can feel that little piece of wire it's essentially where the blade got so thin and you remove so much material became like a piece of paper almost like a snake shedding its skin that's what's falling off and that's what you need to remove to make your blade finally stop then once you've gone through all of your grits all the way up before you strop if that is what you're going to do you then take it out of your hunting guide or if you're doing a freehand flip it over and do the back on the highest grip typically when you get a new Cutting Edge whether it's a plain blade or a chisel you want to lap the back once you lap the back and with a chisel I like to go about an inch you know as deep as you're really ever going to cut I think in inches as far as you need to go some people like to do the whole back that's up to you but it's a lot more work with a plain blade you can either lap the back or use the ruler trick which I believe is created by David Chatsworth I know Rob Cosman likes to do it but it's where you use a very small thin piece of metal a shim or a ruler and you just do the very tip because on a plain blade that's all that matters it's a great little shortcut the only downside is once you commit to that you're kind of stuck with it because you've now created such you know a small bevel on the end and to get it back to Flat you got to do a lot of work so that's how we did it each test each system we did it the same same number of strong folks and we tested a lot of different things [Music] first thing we see tested was the 25 degree bevel versus a 30 degree bevel was there any difference now typically people say to do a 30 degree Michael bevel because then just like the ruler trick on the plane blade it makes sharpening a lot easier just need to take off the very tip now when you get a new cutting tool whether it's a chisel or a plane iron I don't recommend re-grinding the Bella there's no need because again all that cutting happens at the tip so 25 versus 30 I mean it's simple as far as energy output 25 you've got to do a lot more work because that's usually what your bevel is at so when you come up to 30 degrees much less work to do all you need to do is get a thin sliver across the entirety of your Cutting Edge now we found that this is a great Baseline to talk about is just off all the stones 25 and 30 degree micro bevel it came to about 180 grams on the scale now you remember when we talked about it with Suman that 140 is your Baseline you want to get below that Baseline so 180 off the stones that's great but it was the same for 25 to 30. so there is no difference once we defined that 25 and 30 degrees had no difference on sharpness we proceeded with the rest of our test we sharpened everything to a 30 degree micro bevel using A2 tool steel it's really tough to say from Lee Nielsen so we used all the same type of plane blade and then all the same types of chisel which were the narrix Richter chisels both very high quality stuff if you want to see the difference between different types of tool Steels and how they affect sharpness head over to sumon's channel he's going to be publishing a video which I will link Down Below in the pin comment and description so here's what we did with the test we tested scary sharp Diamond Stones water stones we got these really expensive glass shapton stones we test different kinds of strops so we tested thin thick MDF the 60 000 grit scary sharp paper the thirty thousand grit Shepton Stone and then we did the grading sharpness so how fast does a blade degrade how long you have to go in between sharpening and then of course we defined what is sharp which we talked about in the beginning so let's go ahead and get into the test what do you guys say let's talk about straps first how to drop and which method to use is one of the hotly debated topics in Woodworking and sharpening you can use a soft leather hard leather and in my case I did a video that had a soft leather and created a lot of debates and people said to use MDF instead by the condition of this piece of MDF you can tell how Jonathan felt about it and how the test results came out yeah I think that the one thing we found from all of our tests during this video shoot was that strapping is really necessary you have to stop to knock off an edge and you have to strap to get under 140 right um which was that number we defined at the beginning as sharp enough but we found some really big differences between straps and then not a lot the biggest knot difference was MDF it was terrible really it got us close to that 140 number as would anything but I think really that just is the sharpening compound that was getting it there the hard MDF strop really didn't do a lot to get something sharper than we got off of any of these stones or sharpening systems where we did see a lot of results and a big difference was in the type of dropped we used this thicker strap that we used it didn't quite do as well as this hard leather strap in fact the hard leather strap only saw about a 33 increase in sharpness where the hard strap saw about a 39 increase in sharpness now where this gets really interesting is some alternatives to strapping right that's the 60 thousand grit 0.3 Micron in the scary sharp system or 30 000 grit glass ceramic shaft in stone now this is a 400 Stone and I was so excited to get this because we spent I spent I don't know three thousand dollars on this test and again if you want to head over to the cat's Moses tool store none of these videos are ever sponsored and we are supported by people like you heading over our website so we appreciate that helps pay for tests like this and these 3000 grit Stones which um in one word how did this turn out terrible terrible chapton did not do anything we saw 11 increase in sharpness going from sort of our highest grid Stone which is you know waterstones about 8 000 grit 1200 grit on a diamond Stone which is the Grits are measured much differently than those but the shafting had almost no impact on sharpness but the 60 000 Grant scary sharp system had almost the same it was 38 increase in sharpness versus the hard leather strop which saw a 39 increase so the absolute two best dropping methods are the scary sharp system and a hard leather strop uh the soft leather shop wasn't far behind and certainly not a bad alternative but I think that really plays into the video that you did about diminishing rate of return as you strop your blade starts to round over and the softer your strap is the faster that happens because it becomes like a cushion you know when you put your head on a pillow at night when you go to sleep you know it tends to wrap around the tip of that blade so the harder it is it's very thin leather strap I don't have a link for you because somebody gave this to me as a gift but I believe they got it off Etsy basically any very thin piece of leather with some honing compound make sure you get I'll link the best one we found and we did find there was a big difference between honing compounds um I'll link this one below it's cheap 13 bucks or something get yourself just like a hard piece of hardwood this is Cherry it looks like with a thin piece of leather stropping and that's a great strap a great option for stropping so after all of this dropping was concluded we then decided to do a edge durability test so we took a well pristine sharpened Edge mounted on a hand plane and took off 10 50 and 100 shavings on hard Mabel yes this is actually why I brought Suman so that I didn't have to do any hand but it was great this guy was excited he was exhausted yesterday but uh I was sitting there having a cocktail what was really interesting is we wanted to answer how often should you sharpen right right so we did this test and we got everything down to about 110 to 120 on the scale what we noticed it was so interesting is that sometimes we'd see actually an increase in sharpness after 10 Strokes because maybe there was a little Burr left yep there's a little bit of edge you need to be burnished almost so it was almost like it got a little bit sharper and then started to grid and it after 50 Strokes it degraded about 10 to 20 grams of pressure still well under the 140 right but then after 100 Strokes the interesting thing was it didn't really change at all we saw a very very very slow degradation of that edge and what that led us to find we did this many many times is that you don't need to sharpen that often I think that you know you could probably get anywhere from 200 to 500 Strokes between full sharpenings where you take your 30 degree bevel back and again you just have to get that little Burr and then stop and you're going to be fine occasional strop a hard strap just to really touch up your Edge is going to keep you going for a long long time I'll be interested to see in your video maybe these are published on the same day so this is a weird comment but uh and I'll already know the answer this is past Jonathan but I'll be interested to see you know what different tool Steels do to sharpness but what we found is people are sharpening too much your plane blade is going to stay fine and I think as long as you can get close to shaving paper that's where you're going to end up anyways because the thing about getting something crazy sharp that we found is it degrades so fast to just about that over that 140 number right so you can get it razor sharp and it shaves paper but in a matter of 10 Strokes you're going to be just over that where it's just starting to rip paper and so if you're always trying to be in that place where you can shave or rip paper you're really just going to be chasing your tail and you're going to be sharpening too much because it just is going to go back down to about that 150 Mark anyways so I think you can go much longer between sharpenings an occasional hard strap to touch up an edge when you need to do something real important maybe you're taking off the final pass on a dovetail or the edge of a mortise that's going to be visible or Tenon something like that that's when you need to touch up your Edge but until then you can just go go to town the key takeaway from all of this is that modern tooling steel are phenomenal they're going to hold an edge really well and there's no need to resharpen over and over again just to get back to a pristine Edge because there's still plenty sharp for Woodworking and I think importantly too we notice no difference between any of these systems as to like degradation of edge anything you use this is going to work fine I think that's the answer and I think that's going to be the theme to this video is it doesn't matter right like man people are so up in arms about all these systems and the thing I found from this is it doesn't matter all you have to do get a burr stop it go to town so now that I've said that let's talk about these different systems the pros and cons of each and what we found and there was some clear winners but again when you talk about that degradation of edge right it doesn't matter because you're going to drop down right away to something that is going to be your Baseline for the next 300 Strokes with your hand plan so let's come into the bench we'll talk about the different systems and how they work all right so let's talk about these different systems uh first let's talk about water stones water stones I feel like are one of those things that a lot of Woodworkers especially traditional Woodworkers really believe in and I you know I I think after this test it is not something I'm going to continue to use they are messy ah that didn't go the way I wanted it to they are so messy you have to soak them in water every time before you use them and then you have to flatten them so you need to also have a flattening Stone a good Diamond Stone will work as a flattening device you can also buy a dedicated flattening stones for them you know I think as a cost when you look at these a cheaper Whetstone with two grits is going to be anywhere from 20 to 40 bucks and then if you look at these shaft in Stones this 30 000 grit stone is about 318 on Amazon the 16 000 grit one is just over a hundred now again I have to really reiterate these did nothing on our tests they added no benefit over a strap in fact a strap got the a lot sharper than you using any Stones than a chapton so I would definitely recommend skipping these really expensive stones now shopton I know makes really high-end water stones and what you're paying for the more expensive your stone is it degrades less as you sharpen these cheaper Stones like this 8 000 grit I have to flatten it every time after I sharpen so I do one chisel 30 times I need to flatten the stone again you can see it starts to get a hollow in it and that's really a pain in the butt and when you flatten it's really messy and you need to worry about contamination of grits when you do that you flatten then you have to rinse it off because what you don't want to have happen is you sharpen on your 3000 and then you go to your 8 000 and you sharpen again and you have the green grit over here on the white so you want to avoid that these are incredibly messy when it comes to sharpening they are pretty good though and again it doesn't matter because you'll see these all got to basically the same place before stropping this was at about an average of 152 for the water stones and after stropping the Chisel got down to about 134 the plane irons got down to about 128. so they were able to get things very sharp and then we strapped and they were well below that 140 number which we're looking for so great Stones they do a good job they're just so messy and I think there's a lot of money you can put into these without any added benefit over some of these other ones now when we talk about Diamond Stones these are more expensive but you have to buy less because they're just ready to go I love Diamond Stones because they're so great at removing material quickly they remove material faster than any other system so when you need to lap a back or re-grind a bevel these are a great option the extra coarse one is very very coarse really easy to get your bevel down or your back lapped flat and then move up through the Grits they however are not as good at getting things sharp I think because of the scratch pattern from some of the lower grits it's harder to remove that scratch pattern sharpening is very much like sanding where you need to sort of remove the grip before it to continue to get sharper and sharper and so the grit on some of this real course stuff is so gritty that it leaves very deep scratch patterns and I think it can lead to a less sharp edge before shopping these were you know 220 to 240 so much much coarser than off the water stones and the scary sharp system which we'll talk about here in a second but after sharpening on the chisels we got down to an average of about 138 and with the planes we got down to an average about 142. so not quite below the 140 that we're looking for and I think that's the problem with Diamond Stones can't quite get as sharp but when you need material removal nothing beats a diamond stone and you can get pretty sharp I mean when I say like oh we only got down to 142. it doesn't matter because that's going to be right where you're at and it's going to come back around you know 170 180 after you use it a few times so a great option if you want the lowest mess the easiest no maintenance Stone I mean you just spray I spray a little water on them people use Windex I use there's this Bora fluid or tormac fluid that stops Diamond Stones from rusting which to be clear they're not rusting it's the filings from your plane iron that are rusting in there I love these there's Diamond Stones that are flat where it has continuous grit but I just found these and what I love about them is all these little holes catch the filing so you don't need to clean them off as often when you're sharpening especially when you're trying to flatten something or re-grind a bevel that really makes a difference you don't have to clean them off and get all the filings out of the way because that can clog up your Diamond Stones these holes are great love these great aren't going to get things as sharp so let's talk about the scary sharp system and again scary sharp is just the nickname that it's been given this is lapping film this is specifically for polishing metal now these sheets have pressure sensitive adhesive on the back of the PSA is what it's called and it's great you can see here this is how you apply it spray a little bit of water on a flat surface and then that allows you the water creates a thin layer so you can position it exactly where you want and then you squeegee it and when you squeegee it that creates pressure hence pressure sensitive adhesive and attaches it firmly to your flat surface now like I said I've been using this a couple years here's one of mine on float glass I used to be a fan of the float glass but I am not anymore like in fact here's a chip of it right here that chipped off while we were setting up for this video this float glass chips it's obviously not tempered glass so it can break very easily you have to be careful with it you know sometimes I cut myself on the edges they're very ragged so I'm becoming not a fan of what I have found is great is these tiles I got these from Home Depot you can get them from anywhere you can go to places that sell granite and marble and get off cut sometimes that is very flat but these tiles from Home Depot were like a buck 49 per square foot I bought two foot by one foot sections I just cut them with a glass cutter you can snap them over a dowel and they are very flat I'm sure that some scientists out there is snickering at me and you know because oh they're not Rick and Morty flat but you know what they're flat enough to get your chisel really really sharp and I really really like these now when you want to talk about surprising these got everything sharper than any other system here it was really incredible so dollar for dollar when we're talking about we just need to get a burr and sharpening doesn't really matter because you're gonna strop anyways this is going to be your best value now I know I've seen videos out there scary sharp system is dead and things like that but it really dollar for dollar when you don't you know we talked about how you don't have to sharpen that often you can sharpen less than you are and you just need to get that Burr this is an amazing option because when we want to talk about sharp this before stropping with the Chisel this got down to an average of 130 well below that 140 Mark which only the water stones did the the Diamond Stones did not uh and then with the plane iron this got down to an average of 114 which is by far the lowest of anything in the test now there is a reason for that which is the 60 000 grit paper that this kit comes with it's 0.3 microns which is about the same as a strap so you could absolutely just buy this scary sharp the lapping film system put it on something flat and you don't even need a strap so we have this over on our website for 14ish bucks or something I don't know I'll link them down below we just brought this in because of this test like I said at the beginning of the video we were looking for a sharpening system to bring into our store dollar for dollar this is one of your best options because you can get away without a strop so when we're looking at these three systems and we talk about the results of our test here's the answer guys it doesn't matter everything will get you down to where you need to be as long as you have a strop that's all that matters you you listen you sharpen however you want you can use an oil Stone a diamond Stone a water stone a sandpaper lapping film it doesn't matter we've proven it we did hundreds of of tests I mean look at this this is just some of the test strips we did we absolutely beat this to a pulp and I'm telling you right now if you have a strop it doesn't matter so if it was me here's what I would choose if I could just have one thing and not have all my fancy gadgets that we have in this huge shop I would pick an extra course which is 60 Micron or about 220 grit and of course which is 45 Micron uh which is about 325 grit for grinding bevels and lapping backs you can get that grip with the scary sharp system you get 300 grit 300 grit or 40 microns is your lowest piece of paper that comes with it but if you're grinding bevels and lapping backs you're going to rip through this and you're gonna have to replace it all the time but for just day-to-day sharpening when you're touching up your 30 degree micro bevel the scary sharp system you can't beat it at like a buck buck 50 a sheet and a strop so you can get through this and then with the strap you are going to get stuff so sharp you can split atoms and then when it settles in after you've used it about 10 to 20 times you're going to settle in about the 140 to 160 range and you're going to stay there for a long time and then you can just come back here touch up your Edge and if you don't want to get us dropped this 60 000 grit paper works great pick up some of these tiles for like two bucks a square foot or I think it was a buck 50 a square foot and your money you're golden and like I said I'm going to link everything that we talked about Down Below in the pin comment and description I just because of this test ordered the scary sharp system that's in our store so let's let's finalize this let's talk about a couple last thoughts in uh chicken with sumang so sorry for getting on my soapbox there but when we do these tests I love when we get results like this because it's like all of these myths and things and comments I get it's kind of like you know a mic drop moment for all those terrible comments I get on all those videos uh what was your biggest takeaway from after doing this yeah so having objective ways to measure something is very useful and in that regard the Shopkin 30 000 I was really rooting for this because it's the most expensive it's the fanciest Stone unfortunately it just didn't perform as well as we expected surprisingly stopping on a hard-backed surface is very effective at getting a really nice edge with some of these green compounds again we'll talk about the specifics of the compounds that work best that we found yeah in your video right yep I'm going to be definitely testing those as well that'll be linked Down Below in the pin comment and description so I mean the biggest takeaway from this task is there are so many videos on sharpening some of my most watched videos millions of views and the reality is it doesn't matter it doesn't matter and none of it everything with a strop will get you down to be really really sharp all of these systems will get you about the same results it's about finding what works best for you I think I know what works best for me after this test but that's up for you to decide and anybody who tells you any differently is wrong because it doesn't matter it really doesn't matter and I think that when it comes to sharpening if you progress through the Grits of whatever system you choose and you go with a hardback strapped or even a soft strap where it's great you're going to get fantastic results and you don't need to sharpen as much as you think you do and you certainly I think it's one of those things that beginner Woodworkers really get their their underwear in a bunch over because they just hear so much stuff about you got to do this has to be perfectly Square in this and lap in this and it has to be shiny and all this stuff it's like look just get a burr wipe it off with a strop and go to go to work and get some projects built guys thank you to sumon for being here head over to his channel he's got a great Channel subscribe watch that video he's putting out thank you if you want to support the channel head over to the cats Moses stools store we got scary sharp now which is super exciting uh and as always stay safe in the shop and I'm never sharpening again [Music] thank you

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 121,808

Keywords: woodworking, sharpening woodworking, sharpening, hand tools, how to sharpen a chisel, hand plane, chisel, sharpening chisels, chisel sharpening, chisels, how to sharpen chisels, paul sellers, how to sharpen, scary sharp, scary sharp system, sharpening a chisel, sharpening stone, diamond stone, water stone, sharp, sharp chisel sharpening, scary sharp vs waterstones, chisel razor sharp, make chisels sharp, sharpening technique, razor sharp, sharp chisel, sharpen, sharpening test

Id: GBjiEmN5HzA

Length: 26min 5sec (1565 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 02 2023