Thread: Star's Sharpening Journey.

Skews, stop chisels and knives are quite straight forward. Try to keep the edge at right angles to the stone/strop. That means twisting a skew off to the RH or LH side.

Crooked knives are very common and popular carving tools among native carvers of the Pacific Northwest. And with good reason: for the density of the common woods, western red cedar (Thuja plicata) and yellow cedar (Xanthocyparis nootkatensis), these knives are really fun to use.

Two types
a) purpose-built blades set into custom handles
b) repurposed hook knives, originally meant mostly for the farrier trade.

Sharpening is a bit fiddly, as the knives usually have a progressive sweep from flat (#1) to maybe a #8 or tighter at the tip.
I reshaped the 30 degree bevels with chalked up chainsaw files to 15 degrees from the original 30. 1K and 4K slip stones to smooth that out. Then, pieces of stiff belt leather with green honing compound to finish them off. You can see how black they get with polished off metal.
Confession = I can do those blades with 1500 grit paper on a dowel and carve. I have two pairs of Mora (Sweden) Equus #171 narrow, single edge blades. I used a #188 double for the planer knife with the 18" handle.
Get carried away some times, with a knife in each hand.

= = =
That's what I do, week in and week out. PLEASE ask if any part of this is fuzzy.

A few weeks of ordinary carving have come and gone. The WIP on the bench is a 450x85 caterpillar in Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata). Maybe 0.5mm growth rings, wonderful cedar-smelly piece of clear, straight-grained wood.

Pfeil (Swiss) makes a variety of wood carving tool sets & styles.
Full size 8/7: 250mm length & 50g
Smaller, the 'D' series 8/7: 200mm length & 40g
I got a bunch of 'D' series tools in a consignment of gouges & wood/all-or-nothing. Some are so small, my eyes don't see the bevels too well, I have to go by the designations on the handles.

Sure enough, I'm happily bashing away at the caterpillar and bump the D8/7. It rolled off the bench, fell nearly a meter and hit the concrete floor with loud, musical "tink!" Oh-oh.
As Russell Peters would say: " Sombody's a-hurt real bad."
I don't need better glasses or a bright light to see that the LH corner of the bevel is BENT.

I do not claim to know all there is about sharpening. I have learned enough to get the job done to finish with a carving sharp tool.
The U-shaped channel of a D8/7 isn't more than 50mm long and I've got a serious bend to try to straighten up. Carving experience shows me that I rarely ever have more than half the bevel in the wood. That puts this problem up and out of the way for the most part. BUT, every once in a while, I use a gouge upside down. Every once in a while, I'll rotate a gouge in a semicircle for some form of cut-out. There's no rule to say otherwise.
So, I got in there with a chalked-up chainsaw file and gently took the bent bit right off.
I have no stones coarse enough or small enough to do that. Once that was gone, I jumped to 1K then 4K water stones and the strop. Test in my try stick = good enough for me.