Thread: Best bevel for plane blade?

Hi Dengy,

I'm not very experienced but have done a little restoring and establishing bevels on beaten up old hand plane blades.

A curved bevel (assuming you mean convex) will be a little more durable (because it has more metal behind it) and may be easier to strop by hand on a stop with a little bit of "give". But it will be hard to do precisely and repeatedly without a fair bit of practice, and will be difficult to get both edges matching. This might be okay for some purposes but not where you want very square cuts running from one corner to the other (typically you will want with joining, shooting and rabbet planes).

(If you're talking about curved in the sense of a camber on each edge, that's a whole topic on its own!)

The benefits of a straight bevel are you can do it precisely and repeatedly with a jig or honing guide. It's also (for me a benefit), for a beginner, easy to check your progress and that you're removing metal right to the end as you expose the shiny area and you can mark with a sharpie and see if it's all being removed as you go.

For me, I'm doing a little of both because I've bought a few old hand planes to learn with. With old ones with thick blades (out of wooden planes) which come heavily convex and cambered, it's just too much metal to remove to try and straighten out so I try and sharpen on diamond plates following the curve. I tend to use these planes as scrub planes and for roughing out.

With ones reasonably straight to begin with, and a few new blades I've got, I use the Veritas Mk II honing jig (I ended up buying two - one with a camber wheel and one with a straight wheel and the narrow blade guide) and have been very, very happy with it as with a bit of effort you can get great, precise results even as a newbie.

Thanks Cgcc, I meant concave, as in straight off the grinding wheel. You have certainly come a long way as a beginner

I have spent a disproportionate amount of time fiddling with edges and sharpening! I bought a bunch of cheap planes off eBay thinking I would learn the basics on those - no point buying an expensive one, with no idea how to set it up or keep it sharp. But ended up with many planes to set up!