Thread: Preparing a Woodie - Paul Sellers

Yep, went out and flattened my woodies after watching this they work much better! I've had to give up using his freehand sharpening methid though I must be doing it wrong because I've kept persisting with it for months but can't get things sharp, and I don't mean stupidly sharp just not blunt. (

Originally Posted by code4pay

Yep, went out and flattened my woodies after watching this they work much better! I've had to give up using his freehand sharpening methid though I must be doing it wrong because I've kept persisting with it for months but can't get things sharp, and I don't mean stupidly sharp just not blunt. (

Sharpening freehand is the easiest method I know of.

Stewie;

Originally Posted by code4pay

Yep, went out and flattened my woodies after watching this they work much better! I've had to give up using his freehand sharpening methid though I must be doing it wrong because I've kept persisting with it for months but can't get things sharp, and I don't mean stupidly sharp just not blunt. (

This is with an old parallel iron, or a taper iron? Got any photos?
What are you sharpening on?

I am nowhere near to any sort of sharpening guru ... distance to the moon away from that actually ... but the best single bit of advice I ever had was looking for a thin line across the cutting edge with zero reflection.

The thing is when I first read that ... there is a really classic old website regarding sharpening by hand ... I'll try to remember it ... but I read about the no reflection ... but I didn't "get it". It took me a while to understand ... but if someone showed you in person you would understand immediately.

Marking up the iron with a texta is a good way to see where you are abrading, and if it's not even.

I like doing it by hand - I always wanted to be able to ... but it did help for a while to have a go by hand and then use an eclipse guide to put a single microbevel over whatever I had done by hand. I'm not sure how they go with holding the old irons, now.

This is new to me .. I hadn't seen it before ...

Sharpening freehand takes a bit to get truly right. It's not really difficult, but you do have to work at it 'til it comes, & when it does, you'll wonder what the fuss was all about. Everyone has their own style, & they all work. I still do it the way we were shown in primary school in the 50s. This method starts with a clean, straight bevel off the grinder. Our teacher did that using his fingers as a guide & through years of practice, he could produce a perfect result in no time without over-heating anything. It's the one part of the operation where I find a guide helps. It's just two bits of wood clamped to the blade that run along the grinder rest. That way I can lift it off to check progress or let it cool & know it will go back in the right spot every time. If I had stuck at it, I'm sure I could have learned to do without the guide, but my guide is an extremely simple thing that takes seconds to apply, & regrinds are infrequent events, so I've been too lazy to put in the effort.

The oilstone (or waterstone) bit is all freehand. A cleanly-ground surface nicely indexes the blade, even on the thinnish old-style plane blades, & is very comfortable with thicker blades like chisels. The 'secret', if there is any, is to use short strokes, so that your arms don't introduce too much rotation & the two facets that form (either side of the hollow) stay even & flat. Use the stones cross-wise, instead of lengthwise, that will limit your strokes (& allows you to sharpen wide blades on narrow stones). My 'microbevels' (the term wasn't used in the 50s!) are made by the final honing strokes on the finest stone, and really are 'micro'. If you keep this secondary bevel really fine, it's quick & easy to re-establish the primary bevel when re-sharpening, because most nicks & scratches only go as deep as the secondary bevel.

It's really just a matter of working at it. Easy to say, of course - I've watched my friend sharpen drill bits freehand, and he does it without thinking, but it's one of those arts I haven't had enough exposure to, & my drill-bit sharpening is worse than woeful! I keep promising myself that one day soon, I'm going to settle down with a bunch of old bits & work at it 'til either I get it right, or I have nothing but a few drill stumps left!

I just have about a zillion other priorities to deal with, first...
Cheers,

Edit: Hmmm, I swore I would never enter a 'sharpening' debate, & now I've gone & chipped in - don't take the instructions too literally, just the encouragement to stick at it!

OK thanks guys sorry for hijacking the thread. Ian part of Paul's method is to actually introduce a curve on the blade with a rocking motion. I think my issue might be rocking to far forward on to the edge therefore actually blunting it. I use a system pretty well exactly like Paul's diamond plates and a strop. Can get things sharp when I use a jig and a micro bevel but actually blunt when freehand, I'll have to have a few more goes. I do like the idea of free hand sharpening.

Originally Posted by planemaker

Sharpening freehand is the easiest method I know of.

Stewie;

Yeah I am sure I'm doing it wrong works for plenty of people.

Originally Posted by pmcgee

This is with an old parallel iron, or a taper iron? Got any photos?
What are you sharpening on?

I am nowhere near to any sort of sharpening guru ... distance to the moon away from that actually ... but the best single bit of advice I ever had was looking for a thin line across the cutting edge with zero reflection.

The thing is when I first read that ... there is a really classic old website regarding sharpening by hand ... I'll try to remember it ... but I read about the no reflection ... but I didn't "get it". It took me a while to understand ... but if someone showed you in person you would understand immediately.

Marking up the iron with a texta is a good way to see where you are abrading, and if it's not even.

I like doing it by hand - I always wanted to be able to ... but it did help for a while to have a go by hand and then use an eclipse guide to put a single microbevel over whatever I had done by hand. I'm not sure how they go with holding the old irons, now.

This is new to me .. I hadn't seen it before ...

I can't see any reflection but they are blunt as pushing into pine end grain sort of tears and bends it so really blunt! Doesn't seem to matter. Plane blades chilsels I can blunten them all! Using the same sort of system Paul uses diamond plates and stropping. And can get things sharp with a jig using them. I'll check out the video thanks.

The more I see of Paul Sellers the more I like the no frills message he is puting out there. I know there are a lot who dont always agree but I think most of his tips just work and work with the minimum of effort.
When I first saw his freehand sharpening I was not on board with his aim being a cambered bevel as all my years of sharpening had been aiming for flat bevels. I have been using a guide to get the primary bevel and then freehand hone on the secondary. After that freehand hone when required to keep sharp. There then comes a time when the secondary bevel has grown so far that the hone starts to take too long so that is time to regrind the primary. That has worked for me for a long time but thinking on Pauls method I became aware that after many tuchups the secondary does become rounded even when the aim was for flat. I have also noticed that a lot if old planes have a rounded bevel when first found after long years of neglect and I used to think the past owner was a poor sharpener. I now think that this method reduces the need to regrind the primary as often and most likley extends the life of the blade by saving metal. Something the old timers would have liked as good tools were even more costly for them back then than now.
I guess the next step is to try it on a couple of blades over a period of time and check result against some done my normal way. That is if I can get to grips with that rocking method of his. This will take time so the answer nay take a while.
Regards
John

John, I guess it really doesn't matter if the bevel is rounded or flat, as long as the edge is clean & sharp & sufficient clearance is maintained. The thing you do need to watch, though, is that the secondary bevel doesn't get too rounded and steep & reduce clearance too much. If you use the 'standard' 25/30 combo you should have 15 degrees of clearance, which is ample. But because you don't have a reference when doing the secondary bevel freehand, it's easy (for me, at any rate) to allow them to get too rounded, because the tendency is to lift the blade a little each time you re-hone, to get a sharp edge without having to remove much metal. It used to happen that I'd end up with a blade that was sharp, but cut poorly when replaced in the plane. These days, I keep secondary bevels very fine, and touch them up only once, or at the most, twice. I prefer to work the full bevel, on a medium stone to restore the edge, then finish the secondary bevel on the fine stone. It's actually not much more work with hollow-ground blades & fast-cutting stones. I have no idea how many times I sharpen between re-grinding, but it is quite a few - my bench planes probably get higher than average use, & are usually touched up at the end of each day's use, at a minimum, unless I'm working with really hard woods (some spotted gum I've been working on the last few days takes the edge off in about 30 passes!) I doubt I would need to re-grind more than once a year on my high-use planes & less-often on the ones that are used less frequently.

I bought a box full of old planes last year.
20131027_165441.jpg20131027_165449.jpg20131027_165505.jpg

I have only restored one of them so far. They are a "one day I will fix them" project.

Originally Posted by chook

I bought a box full of old planes last year.......

I have only restored one of them so far. They are a "one day I will fix them" project.

I am not as bad as that. I only have two planes and my friend dropped off another the other day. Told me to put them with the others. I relabeled the container while he was still there to include his name. The extra one he will have to fix.

Good Morning Guys

Parts of This thread sounds like deja cue all over again.

I tried to learn freehand sharpening for over forty years and only succeeded in blunting and skewing and waving blade ! Some friends do it intuitively, others are like me. There seems to be a gene that predisposes some of us to never mastering freehand sharpening. It must be a gene, not lack of effort.

I like Paul Sellars videos a lot, and have learned a lot from him, but I think he is guilty of downplaying the fifty years of skill that he has accumulated in his hands. He is a very skilled craftsman and it takes many years to develop that expertise.

Six or seven years ago I asked some basic questions about my difficulties - thread title = Sharpening for Dummies or similar - and got some very helpful advise especially from Derek C and Ian.

For those of us who a genetically challenged then the advice was to buy a good honing guide and build a skill base from there.



Fair Winds


Graeme

Here are 4 things which make freehand sharpening straightforward.
1. Paint the bevel with black felt marker so you can see immediately where the metal is coming off.
2. Draw the required bevel angle on a large card and stand that up parallel to your stone(s).
3. Use you body as the jig= press your forearms to your sides. Match the card angle with the tool blade. Eash pass is made with a whole body, swaying motion. It prevents you from lifting your elbows and rounding off the bevel, right at the very end of the pass.
4. At the end of each pass, STOP. Lift the blade straight up, go back to the start and straight down for the next pass. It's a mechanical, rectangular sort of path.

Doing wood carving gouges on flat stones is just as easy. This time, you start the pass on one corner. Using your fingers alone, rotate the gouge to the other corner in the length of the pass. 2/30 or 9/15, they're all the same.

Adze blades and crooked knives have a sweep and the bevel is on the top/inside.
Anchor the tool and move the sharpening device. Same body motions.

If you stood beside me and watched me do this, I doubt that you'd recognize the essentials for what they are.

Robson, as mentioned above, I usually refrain from entering any discussion on sharpening, there are just too many ways to remove the skin from this particular moggy, and they all do the job in the right hands. Your technique is quite unlike mine, yet we both get the results we want - a clean, sharp edge that cuts. That's the only goal, & how you get there is a product of your natural & acquired abilities, the gear you have, & practice. If you want to sharpen freehand, it certainly helps if you were blessed with reasonable hand/eye coordination, but sheer determination and doggedness can make up for that to some extent.

However, if you've put in a good effort & simply aren't getting what you want, I see no shame at all in using whatever aids you find helpful. There's no point in banging your head needlessly against any wall. Whether you work wood for fun or profit, there's no point in making the tasks unpleasant! I prefer freehand sharpening simply because I'm the impatient type. For me, freehanding is simpler & seems faster, but then I've been doing it for quite a while, too. I did try using a guide, about 30 years ago, but the guide (an old Eclipse) had some severe limitations, imo, like not being able to hold some of my bevel chisels properly. I wasn't getting any noticeably better results, and the guide actually made it harder to keep a straight edge on very narrow chisels. After about a year of persisting with it, I chucked it in a drawer & there it remained until I got rid of it a few years ago.

Whatever method you choose to get your tools sharp, you should get better at it with practice, but you will also become more demanding, so it may seem like a long, weary road for a few years. My advice is always, choose a method that seems intuitively practical to you, & stick at it until you get there. However, if your edges aren't satisfactory to you after a reasonable time, you certainly need to re-evaluate. And don't forget, it may even be the tool itself that is faulty - there are plenty of blades out there that won't take or hold a true edge despite any amount of effort - damhik!

Cheers,