Easiest Blade and Chisel Sharpening

[D_W]

I think you're probably joking, but I'm sure someone has tried it somewhere - especially machinists who haven't worked wood.

the person in question who helped me track down more data (than just feet planed, weight planed and pictures) is named Bill Tindall. He was a research chemist/pharmacist here who makes pretty nice furniture in retirement, but aside from wanting to know the answer, he and I don't really operate the same way. He understands the chemistry/physics of everything, formulates what should be, then tries to test a hypothesis. If things don't work right, then he searches for the answer and moves forward.

There are tiny things that make hand tool items work differently than other woodworking, and far different than diemaking or knifemaking, so I have always been of the school "nothing is better than carbon steel, it's easy to sharpen, it wears away sharpening issues as it's planing and it is always just dull and not damaged when it comes time to sharpen".

Bill's view is, look at the data, then get some things made and try them. I'll try things first, see how they work, and then use those to predict something next. I have had poor experience with steels that have great chart toughness and wear resistance but can't hold and wear the intial edge well. There's a very tough steel marketed as SGPS here in the states -if you can sharpen it, you can scrape a pipe with it and it doesn't take much wear. However ,it will literally give up its initial edge to a strop. That's worthless to me. I can only get a good edge on it with a buffer and it has to be rounded over.

To me, most of the steels come with compromises that I can't stand, probably because they have a lot of vanadium. M4 powder metal is very durable, it holds its edge but wears with a lot of friction in the wood. You can *feel* it. It made my wrists sore testing, I wished it wouldn't have lasted nearly as long as it did.

V11 has tiny chromium carbides in it and not much else. It's really slick in the wood, and you end up thinking "maybe I just had a good round sharpening", but I was very deliberate sharpening, and found through repeated iterations that indeed there were visible differences between the slick steels and the ones that experienced friction. japanese blue steel plane blades (the ones that are sold by woodworking suppliers) had surprising surface dullness (I expected them to be the best) compared to V11 and a lot of friction, both in beech and hard maple. Maybe in softwoods, they wouldn't.

Each edge started bright and clear in these pictures, but within 200 feet, the japanese iron edge looked like this:

WTF is that? The little bits that appear to be pulled out of the surface and then scuff the blade as they come out?

Here it is at 600 feet. the blade didn't last much longer than this, but by hardness and alloy, it should've outlasted O1. It didn't, they tied:

But O1 was nicer to use, and while it dulled fairly quickly, it did so uniformly. Here it is at 600 feet - lovely.

Here's V11 after 800 feet - there's a line of wear, and there's some oil and wood dust at the edge, but look how even the edge is. Like carbon steel. Lovely. Surface better at 800 than O1 at 400, but that brightness is just an indicator of sorts, all samples tearout free, so a scraper and sander isn't going to care.

Surface brightness, though, seemed to correlate with planing resistance.

Long story short, Bill has postulated all kinds of wear surfaces on plane irons, but he's finally given up (be it plated diamonds, metalworking tool coatings, etc). A practical test of all of these things together has yielded far more usable data.

And after much searching, Bill finally found a metallurgist who could talk to the difference between cutting steels for wood vs. wear steels for metal, and why vanadium doesn't seem to be that great in wood (despite its superior hardness) vs. chromium (chromium carbides are only a little harder than iron carbides). The answer from the metallurgist was related to size - lots of small carbides are good for cutting softer materials, and lots of bigger harder carbides are good for cutting really hard materials.

I'm still an ardent supporter of carbon steel and no faffing, but I cannot deny that certain high chromium (stainless) steels where vanadium is left out and the carbides are kept small by process are actually better at smooth planing than carbon steel. And tolerable to sharpen.

Everything harder with big carbides (like stellite, rex, etc.) is ideal for metal, not wood.

Oh, here's some ward water hardening for the fans. It only lasted about 550 feet, but it was sharpened on an oilstone. I think it would've gone another 100 with some more refinement - notice its ability to wear evenly despite the larger sharpening scratches from the natural stones. That is a very attractive property that O1 and old steel has. V11 shares it.

This also allows a look at what natural stone grooves look like vs. 1 micron diamond powder. I hate to say it, but when you get into the small oxides and diamonds, you cannot match them with natural stones. I wish that wasn't the case, as I'm a huge fan of the latter, and still using them (instead of the diamonds).

 

[sammy.se]

Wow. That's a passion for sharpening!

I wonder what the OP is thinking now :-D

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk

 

[Trevanion]

I think you're probably joking, but I'm sure someone has tried it somewhere - especially machinists who haven't worked wood.

Only joking a little :lol:. I've got a PCD router bit somewhere for flush trimming, it should last 10 times longer than carbide apparently which is why I thought that. I only thought of CBN since I've got a friend that machines hardened steel with CBN inserts. We have Stellite tips on the re-saw blades, they last far longer than the swage set blades without any form of tips.

Of course, all of these materials are used at very high speed and high load compared to pushing a handplane.

 

[D_W]

Some of it, I can't really reconcile in my mind - why won't those things work on a knife or plane blade? I don't know. Do they require substantial (machine) feed pressure?

feed pressure from us is downforce while planing. Increasing it yields sole friction and then we're doing unneeded work, so it's time to resharpen to avoid it.

When I started getting results, Bill had a paper from professors who studied the cap iron for the Super Surfacer machine use. They had used machines to plane WAY past where we would ever be able to, and made a blade shape that had so much negative clearance that the worn edge dipped below the cut. The machine had the ability to force the cut, anyway, and I think some of the planed distance totals that they had were numbers like 4 kilometers.

My longest planed distance was a little over 4000 feet on one sharpening on a favorable piece of beech. I had made the iron myself (out of the stuff that V11 is probably made from) and was so excited about the result that I thought I'd really had something. It turned out just to be a very favorable piece of wood, as O1 planed a little over 2000 feet on the same piece.

I have done something like this test twice now. Once each decade or so. I hope to not do anything like it again for at least another decade, as it's interesting to answer your own questions, but not that interesting.

(a box and a postal scale are in the background to get both distance and weight planed to be sure comparisons are accurate - needless to say, this pile didn't fit in the box. After each weigh-in, I stuffed the shavings in trash can and then took them out to the back garden and burned them when it was full)

 

[Jacob]

.... All of the chinese irons that I've gotten have at least been good, some have been great. .....

I've never had anything I'd call a bad iron. It's not rocket science and as long as they are steel they are probably OK.
Even the worst plane I ever bought (Indian brand SV or EssVee) had an OK blade. The rest of it was total carp.
Some take longer to sharpen and last better - some get blunter but sharper quicker. Not bothered either way!

 

[D_W]

I've probably had three that were too soft really to be used as a smoother in hardwoods, and perhaps three more that were not suitable for anything due to being chippy. Maybe they'd have been OK in a jack plane (two were ohio tool here, a low cost brand - they were just junk, and the third may have been something similar).

The three soft irons were probably about 40 years old.

Having made a bunch of planes and bought and sold a lot of stuff, that's out of, perhaps....250? 300?

I've had exactly one set of chisels that was completely defective - marples with boxwood handle and round bolster (modern, but not completely recent). 8 of 10 were unhardened.

Fully defective tools are rare.

Of the stanley 5000 and english marples sets I've had, it's not uncommon for one of the chisels in a set to be annoyingly soft (especially relative to the rest in the actual set), but more common for nothing to be wrong with any of them.

An iron that's a little too soft is still something that can be fine for heavier cuts, but the current environment of hand toolers doing mostly smoothing is probably one of the reasons the 70s stanley irons are whizzed on so much. They would be OK for rough work in a jointer.

 

[D_W]

.... All of the chinese irons that I've gotten have at least been good, some have been great. .....

I've never had anything I'd call a bad iron. It's not rocket science and as long as they are steel they are probably OK.
Even the worst plane I ever bought (Indian brand SV or EssVee) had an OK blade. The rest of it was total carp.
Some take longer to sharpen and last better - some get blunter but sharper quicker. Not bothered either way!

(along with this, I've never made a truly bad iron, so when I do come across one that's carp, I figure that it's from a complete ...complete lack of attention. Even when hardness is off of where it's supposed to be, it takes a big lapse even for that to happen).

 

[Jacob]

this one says HSS, and its only £3.50
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000219 ... drXEC&mp=1

i wonder if its really HSS though...

By all means fiddle about with alternatives but if you are having a problem with what you've got, buying a new blade is extremely unlikely to make any difference at all.
You have to go through the learning curve - doing it with just the one plane and blade is likely to be much quicker than chopping and changing. Each item of new kit can also be a new problem

 

[D_W]

sometimes it's nice to have an alternative. For $12, once you get those irons set up, they are nicer to use. They sharpen pretty much in the same amount of time with the use of a sensible method.

I had some preconceived notions before running my last test, though I knew some of them - I didn't know the magnitude of their effect.

For example, if I use something like a 4000 grit waterstone, I will have a plane iron lifting out of a cut somewhere around 70% of the footage that it will do so with 1 micron diamonds.

Well, I think using loose diamonds is a pain in the dingus, but as part of the testing, a nice fellow who has experimented with this stuff himself sent me a properly ground super flat piece of cast iron. Bingo, back to a minute 20 or so to sharpen. I still don't think the feel of cast is very nice, but must admit that with pretty much zero change in my method (that'll never change), the edge longevity in smoothing is better.

with a $12 iron, if I were using something like a later stanley iron, I've got edge life at 3 times what it would've been using the soft later stanley iron and the chinese iron. Sharpening time, same. Physical effort using the plane less.

Those kinds of things are nice, but they do assume that you can use any system. I couldn't give the slightest guess to the number of stones that I've had (synthetics, idwall, charn, washita, turkish/cretan, coticules, eschers, welsh slates, arkansas, india - yes, synthetic, but people for some reason think they're antiquated and they're fabulous, diamonds, agate, jasper, sandstone, ....). Every single one of the sharpening systems works fine. Every type of iron that I've used, works fine, same sharpening method (sometimes a change of media is nice, but not absolutely essential). ...

I wouldn't assume someone turning gear over to play with doesn't know how to use it. The real problem with all of the methods (irons, stones, whatever) is that they all work. If they didn't, maybe it would be more of a deterrent to the habitual tinkerers like me.

I did get another plane yesterday - a marples 4 1/2. The price differential between there and here allows me to tinker with something like that at generally no cost.

 

[Jacob]

Link here to my sharpening page. Out of date website, due for renovations any day now!
http://www.owdman.co.uk/howto/howto.htm

 

[D_W]

I prefer the extra laziness of a CBN wheel and a tiny finish bevel (not a tiny total bevel, but the very last work is done on a tiny spot), but I could live with your method and have done it plenty.

A medium crystolon wheel is absolutely the most lovely grind stone that I've ever used when it's in an oil bath. Some may read some of the links and determine that alloyed tools are a no no with this method (and with slow stones, they may be across the full bevel), but the crystolon will cut stuff that is loaded with vanadium, no problem. I accidentally wasted a bunch of powdersteel blade on a fallknaven knife because it was slow on everything else, and laminated, so a no no on diamond plates, but the crystolon stone obliterated it in short order.

IM 313 oilbath is a wonderful thing for someone who wants to sharpen full bevel but might have some hard stuff, too. Pricey, but often available used. The oil bath is just what the doctor ordered for the friable stones like the new crystolons.

 

[Jacob]

Just an afterthought. I was spreading my toast this morning and it struck me that it was technically on a par with, or slightly more difficult than free-hand honing a blade held at approx 30º.
Much more technically difficult is getting a spoon full of muesli in one's mouth! You probably won't remember your early failed attempts at spoon handling.
So (if you are) stop telling yourself you can't do it!

 

[guineafowl21]

This is a good perspective on things ^^^. We forget about the years of training needed just to move about effectively in a 3-d world with joints that have many degrees of freedom, and muscles that can only twitch.

‘Much more technically difficult is getting a spoon full of muesli in one's mouth!’
That’s because muesli is the scrapings from a pigeon loft, and your brain is telling you to eat something proper, like bacon, instead.

 

[Jacob]

This is a good perspective on things ^^^. We forget about the years of training needed just to move about effectively in a 3-d world with joints that have many degrees of freedom, and muscles that can only twitch.

Hitting a ball, throwing a dart, playing a musical instrument, woodwork processes, all vastly more difficult than holding a bit of steel at about 30º

‘Much more technically difficult is getting a spoon full of muesli in one's mouth!’
That’s because muesli is the scrapings from a pigeon loft, and your brain is telling you to eat something proper, like bacon, instead.

:lol:

 

[Trainee neophyte]

That’s because muesli is the scrapings from a pigeon loft, and your brain is telling you to eat something proper, like bacon, instead.

I was expecting a guineafowl to be more interested in muesli than bacon. Each to their own...

 

[Osvaldd]

In this thread the advice is not to flatten your stones. How do you take off the burr from the back of the iron if your stone is not flat?

 

[guineafowl21]

*popcorn emoji*

Ditto flattening plane soles and chisel backs during refurbishment...

 

[AndyT]

In this thread the advice is not to flatten your stones. How do you take off the burr from the back of the iron if your stone is not flat?

Run it right across.
For an extreme example, imagine that your stone is a teacup. You can't get to the bottom of the cup with a horizontal chisel but you can rub it across the rim, resting on both sides.

Incidentally, this is an advantage of a fairly narrow stone. Most old ones are 2" or less.

 

[Jacob]

In this thread the advice is not to flatten your stones. How do you take off the burr from the back of the iron if your stone is not flat?

Fair question. But in fact if your stone is typically slightly dished in the middle in the usual way, there will always be part of the stone on which to remove the burr. It's only a small movement, or you might even just use the edges (as AndyT describes above), or even the sides of a very worn stone.
Basically you just do it without thinking about it, with whatever stone you have.
The advice isn't "not to flatten" but more to spread the load and keep the stone as flat as you can, but not to worry if it's a bit off. Unless the stone has been really bashed about you never need to flatten during the lifetime of the stone (if you don't use jigs)

 

[D_W]

In this thread the advice is not to flatten your stones. How do you take off the burr from the back of the iron if your stone is not flat?

Run it right across.
For an extreme example, imagine that your stone is a teacup. You can't get to the bottom of the cup with a horizontal chisel but you can rub it across the rim, resting on both sides.

Incidentally, this is an advantage of a fairly narrow stone. Most old ones are 2" or less.

I'm fairly well convinced (maybe it's already established) that it's important for a stone to be relatively close to flat in its width, but not in its length. Because of that, older wide stones are rare - regular sharpening will keep a 2" stone flat in its width.

As you say, only a bit of the ends of the stone need to be managed to remove a wire edge.

There is probably something to a less than perfectly flat stone that makes it easier to use with a thicker oil (there definitely is). I always flatten stones when I get them (and I get a lot, but I am a pig and it is a side thing - not a logical productive thing), and then never again. While I've had hundreds, I probably have four that get used on a really regular basis, and only one that gets used almost all the time. I was dimensioning wood last night looking at it thinking about how it's been burnished into fineness by XHP steel (a particle stainless that acts a lot like carbon steel when honing, though it does grade oilstones a little bit), but I cannot see without a ruler that it's out of flat at all.

While it's close to flat, I don't know for sure that it is, so I always work the back of the iron over its edges.

It's somewhat faint memory now, but when I used a guide, I couldn't see why makers of stones would've been "so cheap" as to make a stone that wasn't wide enough. A 3" wide stone is a recipe for belly on an iron, though, unless it's constantly flattened, and constantly flattening finish stones that are not friable is a good way to always have a subpar edge.