Tips for Sharpening Woodworking Tools

While there are some tools in your shop, table saw blades, jointer knives, planer knives, that you send out to have sharpened. There's plenty of tools in your shop that you should be able to sharpen. You really wanna maintain these edges keep them doing everything that they can do for years. People have told me since I was a little woodworker, a dull tool is way more dangerous than a sharp tool. And it's true because with a sharp tool you have better control and you're gonna keep everything working much better. So let's start with bench chisels. We wanna keep these cutting to a point where we can pair and grain with this chisel. How are we gonna do that? Well, first off, let's talk about stone selection. I really like working on diamond stones. Cause diamond are woodworker's best friend, right? I like working on diamond stones because unlike other stones we can't dish these out and in a little bit you're gonna see me sharpen some carbide. And if you're gonna sharpen carbide you gotta have diamonds. So lots of benefits here. We need a little bit of lubricant on there. The lubricant is so the swarf that we're about to create doesn't clog up the stone. Swarf is just the funny name for the filings that come off of whatever it is we're sharpening. Now let's do this chisel a couple of different ways On this first approach, I want you to watch really, really close making sure I got a puddle of liquid on here cause here's what I want you to do. Look right there where the tip of the chisel is about to meet the stone. About to meet the stone when I roll it up and couple things are happening. Watch the puddle form right in front of that tip there, it pushes the liquid out. Cause right there, the bevel is flat on the stone. The other thing I can feel is that bloop, the bevel is flat. What I do is keep this finger here see the puddle, feel it, go flat, make a stroke. Now, when you're first getting started what you may wanna do is see the puddle, feel it, go flat make a stroke. Once you get going, you can go in both directions. Now let's say you're doing that. And you're a little unsure if you're maintaining the angle. Bench chisels are generally sharpened at either 25 degrees or 30 degrees, not air temperature angle. Here's another alternative approach. Take a felt, tip color in the bevel. Let it dry for a sec. Now we're gonna test our work, touch puddle. Feel it go flat, stroke. Are we hitting the whole bevel, is all of the felt tip coming off. If I was only on the heel or only on the tip, we could see that here. I'm a little too far back. I'm not quite getting all of the tip. Getting there. Now here's the thing I'm doing too. And that is body mechanics. When I do sharpening of a benches like this I'm not moving just my arms cause my feeling is your arms are good at going in circles. You've got this joint up here and your arms like to go around. So I'm finding that angle and then I'm actually moving my entire body forward and back. I'm sort of moving at my ankles and that keeps me going in a straighter line. I find than just moving my arms. So again, puddle angle, body forward, body back. So the distance from my hands to my chest is the same all the time. But I'm rocking back and forth in order to get that angle right. Then with our bench chisel. The other thing we need to do is lap the back. That's our last step. You paid for the whole stone. So use the whole stone. In other words, I'm kind of traversing back and forth across the face of the stone here and not just. Kinda a tendency to just ride back and forth in the center. The good news is once we have this information at our fingertips pun sort of intended, we can apply it to other cutting tools. Now lapping the back, I'm just gonna take that chisel and lay it flat on the stone. I gotta come to the end of my plywood here. So the handle doesn't hit, lay that flat on the stone. And what that's gonna do is knock any burr that we've created off the back of that cutting edge. And you wanna have the back of the chisel nice and flat to really optimize the cutting capability of the chisel. We want the back of it to be dead flat. One of the things we can tell as we look at it is is the stone contacting the entire back of the chisel. And here it is, sometimes what happens is you can see honing marks on an edge end edge, but not the middle. That would tell you that it's not flat yet. All right bench chisel looks good. Now take that information, apply it to other tools . From our plane, I started life with a plane iron. There it is hiding under the paper towel. Same idea. It looks very much like a bench chisel on its cutting tip. So fresh water on there. See the puddle, bigger puddle. See the puddle, feel the bevel go flat. Check your work. And then once we've got that bevel done what do we need to do next? Just like the chisel, lap the bat. Plane iron. How about let's go to the world of turning. How about your skew? Same idea, a little more water. And you can always with plane iron and the skew you can take that felt tip and color them in to. Puddle, flat, stroke. Now, part of the difference with our skew is we're beveled two faces. So flip puddle, flat stroke. Well, we're really doing pretty much the exact same thing that we did to the bench chisel and the planer. Now in the world of lathe chisels. When we get into the gouge family, this is a roughing gouge. When we get into the gouge family you don't wanna go, cause we're gonna leave little facets on there. We got to kind of windshield wiper this across the stone. With this, with your gauges, you're not gonna see a puddle form but we're gonna feel that go flat. Now, if you find this cumbersome to do we got a lot of chisel here. We're trying to hold that angle just right. This could be a case where it's easier to take the stone to the tool, then the tool to the stone. What I mean is lack the chisel in under my arm, my left arm, right hand dominant. And I'm gonna take a stone. And roll it across that bevel. In order to do my honing. Either one of those approaches will work. Find the one that works for you. It's really important with sharpening that you have sharpening products and techniques that you're comfortable with so that you do the sharpening. Cause if this comes off as being a pain in the butt to do, you're not gonna do it then you're gonna end up with dull tools. Now, while we're on this guy, let's look at router bits. And this is cool because router bits of course are carbide tipped for the most part. The only thing that's gonna touch carbide is diamond. So we can hone our router bits. The key here is we're always on the flat part of the carbide, never on the profile and count strokes. One, two, three, four. 17, 18, 19, 20. Rotate, count strokes, let's go one. This is a great way to refresh the edge on your cutters. I do this a lot if I'm gonna use a dovetail bit on chippy material, Baltic birch plywood is a great example. I'll bring the router bit here to the diamond stone first. Dress that edge to make sure I'm really optimizing its cutting capabilities. Then put it in the router, dovetail jig cut the plywood. With your router bits, if you have one, that's got a ball bearing on it. This screw I've already got loose. You need to take the ball bearing off. And then once that's off. We can take the ball bearing off cause the ball bearing would be in the way of getting on the flat. Processes are the same just remember to take the ball bearing off. Now in the world of carbide. Carbide, lathe chisels have really come along. What do we know? We know that diamond will sharpen carbide. So think about this same way really we did the router bit. Which is wet stone don't try to sharpen the bevel, just work on the flat. And this is a way that we can refresh that cutting edge so that we're back to great quality cuts. When we're done, little bit of water, wipe down. And our diamond stone is nice and clean. Now, depending on where you need to start, of course diamond stones are available in a variety of grits. If we're taking a Nick out of an edge you're gonna wanna start at a coarser grit and then work your way up to the finer grit. So depending on if you're simply honing you're refreshing the edge you can go right to the finer grits. But if you've gotta do a more aggressive cut. Start with that coarser grit that takes care of some sharpening tips. Cause we sharpened a lot of tips. See how that all comes together? And hopefully that'll help you keep your tools on the cutting edge in your shop.