Originally Posted by
Schtoo
If the Lobster stones work fine, then these HSS chisels not that hard and pretty much any decent stone will work.
(Kind of disappointing actually. Normally I think of HSS as "ok, we're going to need to ramp it up a notch/pull some tricks to get them sharp". If standard, old school stones like the Lobster stones (King) work just fine? I dunno, I expected a little more than that.)
And much of what I wrote above will likely not apply. The list of what works becomes smaller as the steel gains hardness and abrasion resistance. One or the other, easy enough to deal with. HSS has the abrasion resistance, but if it's not 'hard' then sharpening it becomes rudimentary and shouldn't need anything really special. Proper stones for HSS make hard HSS simple to sharpen and moderately hard HSS a breeze.
As for the scary chisel? It seems to be able to do 3 times the work of regular, decent HSS chisel for the same degradation of the edge. In other words, my new 'test block' of a 2" x 4" jarrah lump blunts a normal chisel in seconds, HSS after half way through, the PM-HSS will take off a 1mm slice, and then go halfway again before it stops shaving arm hair, and there's no chipping at all. A few seconds on a good stone gets the edge back nicely.
Would be interested to have one of these H&S chisels to run up a sharpening schedule for the stuff, but it sounds like such a thing probably isn't needed.
Stu.