Thread: Sharpening box/station

So I've been getting more and more into making stuff using hand tools and the thing that I realised has been annoying me the most is sharpening. I currently use a Veritas jig for most of my sharpening and it always takes a little while to setup. In addition, I tend to set up my waterstones in the kitchen so that I can soak the stones, and to have access to water to rinse etc. This creates a huge mess and always seems to take forever to set up and pack up.

Whilst at the Melbourne hand tool event last weekend at Chris Vespers workshop, I watched a very informative demo by Shinobu Kobayashi on hand-sharpening which inspired me to 1. work on learning how to freehand sharpen a lot more and 2. make a portable sharpening station.

So this weekend I made this portable sharpening station. It has two tubs that sit inside and that will fit two stones each. The two stone holders on top are a piston-fit so no slop but can be slid side to side to grab stones soaking underneath etc. I still need to make some wedges that lock the stones into the holders (most of my stones are on bases so don't require this but a couple do). It's made from some left over tassie-oak and black-butt. Nothing special, but I took the opportunity to cut all the rebates, dado's, bevels, dovetails etc using hand tools (need the practise!). So lucky I have the sharpening station because I really need to re-sharpen many of these haha!

The center brace piece is just for a little extra racking strength and also to cover the gap between the two plastic tubs to minimise the amount of water getting around them. It's dovetailed in and is also beveled either side of the centreline to not pool water.

20170325_175147.jpg20170325_175213.jpg20170325_175443.jpg

Just need to wait for the poly to dry and I can try it out tomorrow! Hopefully sharpening will now be far less messy and time-consuming as I can leave this with water etc under my bench and pull it out any time I need to in order to maintain my edge tools more regularly.

Cheers,

Dom