Thread: Improvements on my current sharpening regime

I do all my chisels by hand with a Veritas Mk II on DMT X-Coarse to X-Fine, then finish on a Shapton 12000. The X-Coarse DMT chews through the steel pretty quickly and, as I'm sure you know, the Veritas jig keeps it nice and consistent.

You're welcome to borrow the X-coarse plate it if you want to give it a try.

Dry grinder and one or two stones freehand. All of it freehand. The tools we have tell us whether or not our skew is correct, etc, all we have to do is hone to maintain correctness, and then not grind off the edge completely in those cases.

Total time to grind and sharpen a chisel is two minutes. Total time to sharpen one for several times between grinds if it's significantly dully is about a minute. Add a minute for a plane as it's a little larger and it requires disassembly and reassembly.

I do follow some stones with a bare leather strop, but there's a multitude of ways to achieve the same thing as a leather strop (fine compounds on a burnishing plate, piece of wood, etc).

I don't generally have any significant damage on tools to grind out these days, but I did a lot of that when I was refurbishing tools, etc.

(I had a tormek quite some time ago, and gave it to a friend. I didn't want to let go of it because I didn't want to lose the turning tool jig, but I sharpen those freehand now, too (grind freehand and then touch up the edge with a stone), as I never turn anything large and the need for drastic damage removal doesn't exist)

The problem I have with this process is the time it sometimes take to complete my sharpening. The honing part is no more than 5 mins so I am pretty happy with that. But the grinding is what takes most of my time. i believe I am removing more material than I have to because the stone surface is not always parallel to the edge of my blade.

30" to grind a fresh hollow on my half-speed grinder with CBN wheel. 30" to hone an edge.

If it is taking you 5 minutes to just hone, and you feel that this is too long, then it is time to re-evaluate the strategy you are using. David (DW) likes 2 stones and a strop. He uses high carbon blades. I do the same, but increase this to 3 stones and a strop as the microbevel widens. The blades I use are predominantly A2 and PM-V11.

The key element is to reduce the steel to the smallest amount. Using the Tormek, grind the hollow to the edge of the blade before you hone. You do not need a coarse stone to establish a wire. I use a 1000 grit Shapton.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by derekcohen

30" to grind a fresh hollow on my half-speed grinder with CBN wheel. 30" to hone an edge.

If it is taking you 5 minutes to just hone, and you feel that this is too long, then it is time to re-evaluate the strategy you are using. David (DW) likes 2 stones and a strop. He uses high carbon blades. I do the same, but increase this to 3 stones and a strop as the microbevel widens. The blades I use are predominantly A2 and PM-V11.

The key element is to reduce the steel to the smallest amount. Using the Tormek, grind the hollow to the edge of the blade before you hone. You do not need a coarse stone to establish a wire. I use a 1000 grit Shapton.

Regards from Perth

Derek

I like the same setup for other stuff, but there are two avenues for more difficult stuff:
* refresh on the grinder at a smaller bevel size
* use a stronger stone

I have always lifted off of the primary bevel for everything except when i first started to hollow grind. Lifting off of the primary allows for the use of slower stones (actually, they're preferable in that case).

If I am sharpening high speed steel and being too lazy to walk over to the grinder, I will pull out a diamond hone. While I'm using it and honing an ever growing secondary bevel that in some cases takes up half of the width of the iron, I always think to myself "it would've taken less time to take 5 steps over to the grinder and grind this off instead".

I've found some of my initial suppositions about things to be wrong. For example, an india stone cuts a fresh lifted bevel on high speed steel easily fast enough, almost too fast. A hard arkansas will do it. What I thought was dullness in the distant past was the failure to remove all of the parts of the wire edge that were hanging on. On something like a diamond, little remains with the tiny bits (shapton, too, just a tiny bit of flashing that comes right off). With an arkansas stone, the wire edge is shallow but uniform and strong. It takes 15 seconds more time to hone it and weaken it so that it will come off.

For as many things as I've played with out of fascination, I have all manner of things I could torture everyone with - sharpening a full bevel, sharpening on the flats, lifting the handle, etc, but I always settle back on what I mentioned here and it instantly cleared up my desire to have "fast" stones for anything other than primary grinding (I like crystolons for primary grinding).

Can't say exactly why it is that I like carbon steel so much better than alloy steels now, but they (alloy steels) are no problem to sharpen with any stone as long as you have a good grinder and a strop.

Originally Posted by elanjacobs

I do all my chisels by hand with a Veritas Mk II on DMT X-Coarse to X-Fine, then finish on a Shapton 12000. The X-Coarse DMT chews through the steel pretty quickly and, as I'm sure you know, the Veritas jig keeps it nice and consistent.
You're welcome to borrow the X-coarse plate it if you want to give it a try.

Thanks for your generous offer and I might need to go down that path if the Tormek path proves to be unsuccessful. What grit is your X-coarse?

Originally Posted by D.W.

Dry grinder and one or two stones freehand. All of it freehand. The tools we have tell us whether or not our skew is correct, etc, all we have to do is hone to maintain correctness, and then not grind off the edge completely in those cases.

I tried free hand but the results were too inconsistent so I'm sticking to using jigs for now. My problem seems to be that when the grind stone is not completely square, the chisel grind becomes skew and unnecessary grinding off the edge takes place.

Originally Posted by derekcohen

If it is taking you 5 minutes to just hone, and you feel that this is too long, then it is time to re-evaluate the strategy you are using.

No, I don't think 5 mins spent in honing is too long. But the time I spend on the Tormek to grind to an edge is taking me too long (sometimes upto half an hour) because the stone goes out of square with respect to the jig or the blade is at a different bevel angle than the honing guide would like and so more material than necessary is removed. I wonder if other Tormek users true up their stone every time before they start grinding, but mine seems to go out of true after a few blades.

Originally Posted by justonething

Thanks for your generous offer and I might need to go down that path if the Tormek path proves to be unsuccessful. What grit is your X-coarse?

It's 60 micron, which, according to The Sandpaper Man, is equivalent to P240 grit

... the time I spend on the Tormek to grind to an edge is taking me too long (sometimes upto half an hour) because the stone goes out of square with respect to the jig or the blade is at a different bevel angle than the honing guide would like and so more material than necessary is removed. I wonder if other Tormek users true up their stone every time before they start grinding, but mine seems to go out of true after a few blades.

That does not sound right. My Tormek is very reliable and, when I was using it, I would clean the surface every few weeks. Truing it was done automatically when the surface was cleaned. At the end of 5 years of use, the wheel had lost 2" of its 10" diameter. I doubt that I spent more than 2 minutes grinding a fresh hollow on a plane blade.

It sound as if you either have a problem with the way the wheel runs, or you have user error (too much pressure in one spot).

Regards from Perth

Derek

I'd say I press the blade against the grindstone pretty hard sometimes especially when it is not removing much material.
Last night, I sharpen 6 blades. most of them are actually fairly sharp. It took about 2 hours. I and consciously making sure that I don't press down too hard. The shortest blade took just under 2 mins and the longest took nearly an hour - part of the edge was dubbed. I took a photo of it but the photo was so out of focus that it would be no point uploading it.
What do you use to clean the surface? I true up the surface 2 times last night - material removal was always fast straight after truing and slow down after a while. The grader doesn't seem to do much in terms of roughening up the surface. The fine side works quite well but the coarse side not so much.

First of all, I never regrade the wheel. I leave it on the coarsest setting, which is 220 grit. I want to grind fast. Throw the re-grader away!

Secondly, heavy pressure is unnecessary. What is important is setting up the grinding angle accurately to make the task repeatable. This way you are removing the same material and not extra. The hollow is widened, and not re-shaped because the angle has changed.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by justonething

I'd say I press the blade against the grindstone pretty hard sometimes especially when it is not removing much material.
Last night, I sharpen 6 blades. most of them are actually fairly sharp. It took about 2 hours. I and consciously making sure that I don't press down too hard. The shortest blade took just under 2 mins and the longest took nearly an hour - part of the edge was dubbed. I took a photo of it but the photo was so out of focus that it would be no point uploading it.
What do you use to clean the surface? I true up the surface 2 times last night - material removal was always fast straight after truing and slow down after a while. The grader doesn't seem to do much in terms of roughening up the surface. The fine side works quite well but the coarse side not so much.

The only thing that makes the tormek wheel grind fast is regrading. They should have a coarse diamond apparatus that scratches up the wheel without taking a bunch off or making you wait to resurface the whole thing with the diamond truing tool.

I also never found much use for the stone grader, and when I had a tormek, used one of those cheap, coarse T style grinding wheel truing tools to scuff up the tormek wheel. It worked OK, but it took a long time for it to scuff the surface because of the low wheel speed.

I think there are some operator error issues happening here. I use an 8 inch bench grinder with the Tormek bar attachment and a 240g Vicmarc CBN wheel for shaping. A once-off for each tool.

After that, it's either sharpening on either of my two Tormeks, one with a grey wheel, the other black.

Once you true the stone, it should stay that way for quite some time (unless you are sharpening say bowl gouges). The best way to check whether the wheel and bar on the Tormek are in sinc is to simply drop the bar onto the wheel and check for unevenness.

I rarely hone any more - I can get a plane blade or bench chisel sharp enough to shave my arm (that's always my test) on the grey wheel re-graded to 1000 grit with the stone provided. I only use the black stone for the higher quality/harder turning chisels (Vicmarc bowl gouges, Hamlet 2060, Henry Taylor Kryo etc).

I can understand why some use a secondary bevel if they do the sharpening by hand. But why bother when you can get just about any chisel etc razor sharp time after time quickly on the Tormek? For example, a bowl gouge (once you have the bar set on the A setting correctly) takes maybe 30 seconds to get razor sharp. Plane blades a little longer - say 1-2 minutes but I always use the permanent marker approach - others probably can do it quicker.

Tormek apparently have put out a new jig for sharpening plane blades that is probably worth a look if you want to knock the corners off the plane blades on the machine.

I hope the above makes sense.

Jeff

Jeff

I am curious to know what you sharpen - plane or bench chisels, or lathe tools? My experience with "sharpening" on the Tormek is that I can indeed shave hair, as you note. However the edge is not flat; it is still serrated - just a polished serration - and this does not leave a good enough finish on the surfaces of the wood I plane. I consider the Tormek a grinder and not a sharpener. For some I accept that sharp means something different, and it meets their needs.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Derek,

I think you just hijacked the thread. The OP wanted some advice on what he's doing wrong when using his Tormek.

To be as up-front as I can, I think the statement that the Tormek is a grinder not a sharpener is a good topic for another thread. And, for the record, I am about to have my brain zapped (ECT) next week, so don't rely overmuch on what I say.

I don't have a micro lens on a camera but do have a friend (who knows more about the Tormek system than anyone, including the makers) has a 5000 grit Wetstone for one of his Tormeks. He doesn't use it. Staying super-sharp for longer ie a few second is, dare I say it, a pipe-dream. Especially for woodturners who sharpen more often that woodworkers.

I admit that I went over to the dark side ie wood turning for quite a while but have resumed my original bent in woodworking. I sharpen almost everything I can on my Tormeks - paring, morticing and bench chisels, plane blades and round carbide inserts for my turning tools.

But I am off-track. All this is relevant to a separate thread.

And Derek, PM me your address and I will send you some fiddleback redgum that prefers sandpaper to sharp tools. I like all of your posts, but I think I sharpen more than most. I'd sure like to see someone sharpen a 45 degree paring chisel quicker than me using another non-Tormek approach.

Jeff

Hi Jeff

I was responding to your post about using a Tormek to sharpen. Earlier, I had responded to the original query about setting up the Tormek.

I am happy to respond to your challenge to plane fiddleback redgum

Regards from Perth

Derek