Thread: Sharpening flowchart

When white collar invades blue collar's domain.

I get that it comes across as hard but seriously!! The only thing you need to know: when in doubt sharpen. With enough time (which it crucial) you will know when it's time to sharpen. A flow chart will never tell you that.

Blue collar tasks are all about hands on - nothing else. All the youtube videos in the world won't make you better.

Originally Posted by The Spin Doctor

When white collar invades blue collar's domain.

That's possibly the best description of an Amateur Woodwork Forum I have ever seen.

I've seen charts like that for establishing amortization bases in minimum pension funding!!

As well as a whole lot of other places.

Holtzapffel's book has a wonderful write up on sharpening. it's brief, stresses the importance of grinding shallower than sharpening and then prescribes +angles for softwoods and hardwoods that in my experience (which is a whole lot of experimenting to find somewhere around the same thing and then finding that holtzapffel write about it) prevent edge damage.

Or in short, they recommend grinding at 25 degrees, add 5 degrees for a final bevel with a single fine stone (turkish in their case, hard to follow that advice these days) for softwoods and 10 degrees for hardwoods.

that will generally prevent having to go through much of the flow chart. When the small bevel becomes slow to refresh (or really the time before), grind again and remove nearly all of it.

i can make a much more elaborate and wordy method to describe all of the why and how to maintain camber and where, but the average person probably is entertained by thinking of doing those things but just wants a sharp edge fast and straight for the time being is good enough.

We don't talk about feeling things in woodworking enough. It's not real competence for us until we feel what needs to be done and don't have to put it into verbal orderliness. Feel is more of a spatial-sensory thing and it's so much more efficient and with better accuracy.

It is what's missing from a lot of modern woodworking because people think they can't develop feel because it doesn't come in two iterations. For some things, it comes in 5 and others 50, but it is where bliss is (not zen, sensory bliss - it doesn't need to be religious or woo). And there isn't "it'll be good when I perfect it". It's good as soon as you start to get good at feel, it draws you back to do more and it just gets better.

I roughly follow what holtzappfel says, but cobbled it together on my own to be slightly different long before reading much about it - angle about 20 (I grind freehand on powered tools, so give or take a degree), and then secondary angle on that either with one or two stones and buff strop).

The last of the 7s - a Type 20 - YouTube the IM313 is large, but 8" bench stone versions of these stones are $25 and $35, respectively, and the buffer on the floor that I use to buff/strop the edge is the cheapest functional 6" high speed buffer that I could find.

I posted a picture of the resulting shaving from the slightly tarted up later stanley in another forum - it is linked here:


https://i.imgur.com/3XT58dp.png

that's cherry, it's just snipped from the same video . the video is way in the rabbet hole for the benefit of people who are intending to work entirely by hand. I can't really relate to much else, and it's going to be TMI squared for most anyone else.

but the method, which is stretched out to a long 1:30 or so here because the iron should've been freshened on the grinder before this, is generally more like a minute and it's accessible for a beginner. Two handed or one.

dings and significant nicking should be rare even shortly into a beginner's foray into woodworking.

The flowchart comes from Christopher Schwartz’s sharpening book