Freehand sharpening

[paulkray]

I recently started learning freehand sharpening. This is not the first attempt. Just the first attempt that is working consistently.

I previously tried freehand sharpening similar to the way one would if they had a sharpening jig, but without the jig. All that made me want to do is go buy the jig.

I am now sharpening the way that Bob Rozaieski shows in his podcasts. (Thanks Bob).

So at this point I am wondering at this point. Especially from people that have been sharpening freehand for a while now. What is your method? The sway like Bob or I act like I have a jig.

[lwllms]

Just use the traditional techniques that's been in use at least since Moxon was writing in the 1600's, that Peter Nicholson described in the 1800's and that Stanley described on their plane iron packages in the 1900's. It works, it's fast, it's repeatable and it's very simple. 300 years of use and I don't think anyone has improved on it:

[ChrisG]

I recently started playing with freehand sharpening also. I use a hollow grind like Bob R et al. but the swaying has work inconsistently for me. I've gotten slightly more consistent results from using the motion more like the one described above. I also have found the for some reason it's easier for me to lift up a few degrees from where the 2 contact points of the hollow grind would place the cutting edge. Don't have any idea why this has been easier for me. In theory the secondary micro bevel should make it harder since I am no longer referencing the two contact points, but for some reason I get better results with the secondary bevel. Anyway, I'm not yet ready to get rid of my honing guides.

[flairwoodworks]

I sharpen like Mr. Williams and Mr. Moxon do.

Just use the traditional techniques that's been in use at least since Moxon was writing in the 1600's, that Peter Nicholson described in the 1800's and that Stanley described on their plane iron packages in the 1900's. It works, it's fast, it's repeatable and it's very simple. 300 years of use and I don't think anyone has improved on it:

[lwllms]

If you use grinding to control only the size of the honed area or secondary bevel you can make honing very simple. I keep the secondary bevel less than 3/32". With well dressed oil stones, I use a medium India and a translucent hard Arkansas, you only need a few passes to raise the all-important wire edge on each grit. I never grind all the way to the edge of a chisel or plane iron to avoid over heating. Just use a coarse grinding wheel(36 grit) and keep it well dressed.

The easy part is the bevel. The flat back is where I see people having problems when we're out doing workshops. It can be a hassle to get the backs flat initially but it's very easy to keep them flat. To do that you have to keep your stones flat and be very particular about it. I prefer oil stones because they wear so slowly. Still, they need to be dressed frequently--at least at the start of each honing session. I dress them with an extra coarse diamond stone and leave the slurry on the stone for use. As soon as you feel the abrasive of the stone getting dull and the cut slowing dress the stone again. A diamond stone will last a long time for this, much longer than when using it on steel.

I grind most tools at 25º and hone at about 30º.

[paulkray]

Thanks for the input guys.

What I am starting to notice is the one thing that seems to get lost in the shuffle of learning to sharpen. Everyone seems to focus so much time on how do I get a razor edge. That by the end of the lesson everyone has forgotten how the primary bevel was created. I think that the initial step of creating the primary bevel with a grinding wheel is the important factor here.

[paulkray]

Awesome and I see you are from down south. I grew up in Houma.

I recently started playing with freehand sharpening also. I use a hollow grind like Bob R et al. but the swaying has work inconsistently for me. I've gotten slightly more consistent results from using the motion more like the one described above. I also have found the for some reason it's easier for me to lift up a few degrees from where the 2 contact points of the hollow grind would place the cutting edge. Don't have any idea why this has been easier for me. In theory the secondary micro bevel should make it harder since I am no longer referencing the two contact points, but for some reason I get better results with the secondary bevel. Anyway, I'm not yet ready to get rid of my honing guides.

[joestyles]

I am self taught I read lots to begin with but just had to learn this. I get good results. My stuff is razor sharp and it stays sharp longer it seems than other methods of sharpening I have seen. I didnt use hollow ground until recently I like it. The way I hold a tool is probably similar to most peoples and has become a comfortable thing for me. I think the important thing with free hand sharpening is time spent doing it. If I was going to teach some one I would give them a guide to begin the process because they are like training wheels to me (no offense to those who use them) Spend enough time learning to sharpen using the guide and then remove the guide and your body should adapt quickly to free hand. MY advice to anyone learning to sharpen is to use a good guide to start and spend lots of time doing it. I got so I could put a good edge on a kitchen knife and then went around to some of my friends and sharpened their knives. I spent many hours sharpening free hand I can feel the difference between good steel and poor steel when I sharpen an edge now. I can by hand restore a good edge to most types of edged tools now. But I do love the bench grinder for those jobs now. Time on the tool is the real key to free hand sharpening in my opinion.

[bois]

I am pretty much wed to my MK II honing guide, and I've found little reason to get rid of it. It seems to me that you could never get an edge as sharp by honing by hand, simply because there will always be a fraction of a degree of inconsistency from one pass across the stone to the next. After 10 passes, you would have a slightly rounded bevel (even if only microscopically) regardless of how steady your hand is. To me, the jig doesn't slow me down much. I have it set at 25 degrees and ready to go, and just take each chisel through the progressions of grits. Changing blades is about a 20 second process - certainly worth it to me if I get a better result. Am I missing something? Does anyone have experience in both methods where they have gotten equal results honing freehand? I'm not suggesting it doesn't work, just that a jig will result in a sharper edge.

[flairwoodworks]

Though I have a Mk II Honing Guide, I usually sharpen by hand. For me, it's faster and I don't notice any difference in sharpness.

[Vic]

Because I'm "a bit" anal, I'll probably always stick w/ a honing guide. I use the Mark II. Yes, I believe you can get the required results many ways (read up or watch documentary on Tage Frid), but I'm not there yet and may never want to be. Like Rob said, it takes seconds. I have been known to quickly " touch up" freehand, but it's not the norm.

[Darnell Hagen]

I freehand my hollow ground beaters, but my LN and Berg chisels and plane irons are "ground" on sandpaper and honed on stones with a guide. I don't heat my good blades, and the guide keeps the edge square. I have a LV Mark I, I like the ability to advance the angle by degrees. I use an Eclipse for my wide irons, like my #80 scraper, I wish it had the LV's eccentric roller. Using a guide is pretty much as fast as freehand if you build one of these. It sure beats the stock LV angle setting jig.

[SMeekWoodworks]

I currently use the Veritas Mark II, but I've tried freehand multiple times with about 50/50 results. I'm hoping to get better at it. I'm planning on making a sharpening station to hopefully help with it. Rob Cosman uses a low station at the end of his bench. Since I saw him demonstrate it, I've been mulling over plans in my head. If it turns out the way I want it to, it may be something I offer for sale along with my planes.

[Bob Rozaieski]

Am I missing something? Does anyone have experience in both methods where they have gotten equal results honing freehand? I'm not suggesting it doesn't work, just that a jig will result in a sharper edge.

I get blades just as sharp freehand as I did with the jig (the original Veritas; haven't used one in years). The trick is the hollow grind. It prevents the rocking that you refer to that can dub the edge. With the hollow, there are only 2 thin edges contacting the stone so it registers solidly.

Are you missing something? Well, not if you are happy with the way things work for you now. I never liked the jig. It took too long to get the iron set up in it, so I would put off sharpening for too long. Now i can sharpen "on the fly" so to speak, stopping work for just a minute or two to touch up an edge and getting right back to work. I never wanted to do this with the jig because the process took too long.

The one thing to keep in mind with sharpening jigs is that they are limited to flat tools like plane irons and chisels. Once you start getting into anything that isn't flat, the jig is useless. So for all the other stuff in my shop, like drawknives, carving gouges, incannel & out cannel bench gouges, molding plane irons, tanged spokeshave irons, etc., the only choice is freehand. I felt like learning to hone my straight tools freehand paved the way for learning to hone these other tools, which are much trickier to hone than flat, straight tools.

[HoboMonk]

I like to use little scraps of wood that are cut to the angle I need. The chisel is held to the block with finger power. It's a type of simple Japanese block gauge called a Kigata-Jogi.

[bois]

Bob makes a very good point on the jig limitations to flat tools. I featured a goose neck chisel in my newest blog post, and I got a few questions about it. My comment back was that the only down side to it is that it has to be honed free-hand. So I suppose I do some freehand sharpening (I just don't dull that chisel very often). Also, good point on the hollow grind. Like some other folks, I prefer to stay away from hollow grinding my chisels for fear of bluing the steel. I also prefer not to grind my edges unless I am setting a new bevel angle (which for me is very rare) so most of my bevels are flat at this point making freehand sharpening a bit more challenging. I will say that building a dedicated sharpening station has made me much better about touching up my blades more often. It's always ready to go, and often I'm just hitting the microbevel with a few passes at 8000 grit anyway followed by a quick strop. I have a system where any time I feel a tool edge is getting a bit dull, and I can't hone it right away, I put a piece of blue tape on the handle or tote. This reminds me to touch up the blade before I reach for the tool the next time. It comes in handy especially when doing something like half-blind dovetails where I might have 3 or 4 chisels on the bench at a given time.

[lwllms]

I am pretty much wed to my MK II honing guide, and I've found little reason to get rid of it. It seems to me that you could never get an edge as sharp by honing by hand, simply because there will always be a fraction of a degree of inconsistency from one pass across the stone to the next. After 10 passes, you would have a slightly rounded bevel (even if only microscopically) regardless of how steady your hand is. To me, the jig doesn't slow me down much. I have it set at 25 degrees and ready to go, and just take each chisel through the progressions of grits. Changing blades is about a 20 second process - certainly worth it to me if I get a better result. Am I missing something? Does anyone have experience in both methods where they have gotten equal results honing freehand? I'm not suggesting it doesn't work, just that a jig will result in a sharper edge.

... Like some other folks, I prefer to stay away from hollow grinding my chisels for fear of bluing the steel. I also prefer not to grind my edges unless I am setting a new bevel angle (which for me is very rare) so most of my bevels are flat at this point making freehand sharpening a bit more challenging....

Bois,

I have no intention of trying to change how you sharpen. If you're successful with what you're doing, more power to you. I do think I can clarify a few things for others, though.

Over heating during grinding has some specific causes. Using too fine a wheel, not keeping your wheel dressed, trying to reform a bevel without first establishing the location of the new cutting edge, grinding all the way to the edge and using too much pressure are the main things I see people having problems with. Grinding is a rough shaping operation when first tuning up a tool. You don't sharpen on a grinder. After you have your tools tuned up, grinding is a way to manage the size of the honed bevel.

The problem with a rounded bevel is that you lose control of honing and waste a lot of honing time working on things that don't matter. But this problem assumes you hone the whole bevel. That's not the traditional technique. Grind the primary bevel, for most chisels and plane irons I grind at 25º. Hone the secondary bevel and I hone, those tools ground at 25º, at about 30º. I grind to keep that secondary bevel small. Here's a photo of an iron from a Stanley 607 that's been sharpened twice since grinding (sorry about the reflection off the honed secondary bevel):

As you can see, I only hone a very small portion of the bevel. In this case it's about 1/32". It just doesn't take many passes over the two grits of stones I use to raise a wire edge on each stone. Two, three or four usually does it. The bevel is the easy part and slight rounding here is insignificant.

The hard part comes from the fact that both surfaces that make up the edge suffer dulling wear in use. Removing the wear from the flat face is where I see almost all the sharpening problems people have. If this wear isn't removed, you can't get sharp. This can be pretty simple, though. Simple requires prep work. The flat face of the tool needs to be truly flat, at least to about within 3/4" of the edge. Your stones need to be truly flat too. When you change between grits, the abrasive signatures or scratch patterns should exactly overlap. If you're stones are cutting in different places on the flat face of a tool, you're wasting honing time making that flat face conform to different curved stone surfaces. If the stones and the back of the tool are all flat, all that's necessary is making sure the abrasive signatures go all the way to the cutting edge on each stone. Paying attention to this and raising a wire edge on each grit will assure a sharp tool and you can reduce honing time to less than a minute a tool.

[ChetlovesMer]

I've been woodworking for 20 years now, but up until last year the only tools I owned had whirling AC motors in them. I admit to being a Normite.

Anyhow, I've recently discovered hand tools. Did you know you can cut dovetails with a hand saw? ....

So I've been using my LV and my LN planes like crazy this year. I must be a slow learner because I can't do anything without my MK II. As a cabinet maker who's trying to find the fine woodworker buried inside him, I can tell you seeing guys hand sharpen a plane cutter is like some form of magic or wizardry. I believe it can be done, but I’m not nearly at the comfort level with sharpening yet. I think I agree with Joe Styles, if you want to be good at this, you need to spend some serious time at it.