CStanford

Stunning work, and a very informative series of photos and dialogue to boot. A tour-de-force piece. Your clients are very lucky people. This kind of work, from that period, is still the standard by which all other work is judged. Hard to overdo the superlatives. Doing this kind of work in commercially feasible timeframes, for a discriminating clientele, is about as hard as hard gets.

Probably is brand new... Their pricing looks about like break-even to me. That's great. If they're making money off the sharpening service it isn't all that much.

They would have made (be making) more money with them too though they still actually make a few Bailey models.

If you don't have a grinder, do it just as Sellers demonstrates.

Well, no, you would find a grinder handy even if you don't own a lathe. Flat grinding is fine as long at it's really flat. A problem arises when a slight rise is produced behind the cutting edge that makes the cutter jutter along or not cut at all. If you want to hone plane irons and chisels and not use a grinder then use Paul Sellers' method . You round under behind the cutting edge to maintain proper clearance.

Good one! I'm sure L-N would cry 'not fair' too...... It would be oh-so-delicious if they 'out copied' the copyists though I guess if Stanley made them they wouldn't be copies.

You would find one extraordinarily useful. Do you own a lathe? Are you flat grinding all your turning tools?

Never will understand why they didn't just produce new Bedrock models with few if any changes other than to kick the machining quality up just a notch or two. Trot out the old blueprints and have at it.

A teaspoon will take an edge but of course won't hold it. You're doing something wrong. Hollow grind the bevel at 25* and try again. Hone on the bevel angle. Don't lift to create a higher honing angle. In this instance, grind until you produce a burr all along the flat face but quench after every pass. You don't normally grind to a burr but I think you should to make sure you've removed any sort of rounding that might be at a higher angle behind the edge.

Based on this book, I'm still slow: http://www.thebestthings.com/books/1772pricebook.htm

I've done a few of these, folks seem to love them, this one took a fairly easy twenty hours from a dead start with rough lumber and all hand tools: http://s804.photobucket.com/user/charli ... Commission If I owned redundant handplanes, scads of saws, etc. it would have taken double the amount of time. I hand milled the lumber, cut the dovetails, and glued both drawers in about three hours and this is slow by period standards I'm pretty sure. The apron and drawer fronts are from one board for grain match. The board was ripped and re-glued leaving the drawer fronts out. The drawers are of typical British construction with slips. I used hot hide glue the whole way to keep things moving along briskly. It is difficult to keep things moving using PVA glue. Once you get the hang of the glue pot and learn to manage the initial tack of hot glue to your advantage things can proceed with a little pace to them. Barely $500 dollar's worth of tools were used and most of this total is in the Record 405 I used to cut the grooves in the breadboard ends. The dovetails were cut with a Lynx gent's saw that cost about $30.

You don't have to use the sole of a plane to transfer its flatness (or lack thereof) to a workpiece. You can use a shorter plane and simply test the surface with a straightedge removing humps until the surface tests true to the straightedge. Done. You decide the level of accuracy you require and obtain or make a straightedge to suit. It's faster to use longer planes, but you don't have to. Find high spot, plane high spot. Move to the next high spot until there are no more high spots -- no light under the straightedge.

"You don't need a microbevel. Hone on the hollow grind or hone a flat bevel in a honing jig." Jig it up and go.

You don't need a microbevel. Hone on the hollow grind or hone a flat bevel in a honing jig. A hollow grind is nothing more than a jig; it's makes the cutter self-jigging. Click the cutter to the stone and hone. This is why I love natural oilstones, you get an audible click, along with the feeling that the cutter has been registered to the stone fore and aft of the hollow grind. Do not use an 8" diameter or larger wheel to hollow grind thin cutters - the hollow is too shallow and you'll regulary be grinding all the way to the edge. You need a 6" wheel and it gets better when the diameter gets smaller over time. Proper hollow grinding never reduces the length of the cutter. One does not grind all the way to the edge to produce a burr unless the cutter is nicked. Only honing reduces the length of the cutter by the size of the burr produced at each honing session.

I'm pretty sure that Stanley was the first company to make this style honing guide. Like practically all things Stanley it was copied by other companies (or made as a private label brand). It's actually not a bad guide -- the roller won't wear out your stone (or the roller, by the stone) like other guides. If you've ever used a guide with a brass roller on an oilstone you can see the brass oil slick atop the stone when you're done, this is especially visible on a hard black Arky because of the color contrast. Brass in this application never made much sense to me, though it's a non-issue with the guide in question even though the roller appears to be steel. It just rides on the workbench top or jigboard for the stone and roller. I'd use it with gusto.