Hi James,
Welcome to the forum, your question can be regarded as the $60k one. It opens a huge set of, shall we say discussion options. There are proponants of just dragging the chisel along the street to those who wil spend lots of time and money on all sorts of setups. The chisels you have are fine to begin with and should really outlast you. If you really get into woodworking and want to make finer furniture etc then you will start to feel a need for "better chisels", and mainly this is due to the thickness of the sides of the chisels. The Dewalts are really intended as construction work jobbies. For finer work you would ideally have chisels designed for furniture working joints such as dovetails. These have a much lower/thinner profile and edge allowing you to get into the corners etc much more crisply. but you won't need to spend on these unless you are ready to go to the next stage as it were.
There is a common fallacy amongst many "newbies" that they need to spend a lot but you don't. Learn to use the basic tools you have first and then move on and up. With regard to sharpening almost everyone nowadays experiments with the various ways until they find one that works for them. There are many many threads here on the various options available. Speaking purely for myself, I have found that using diamond plates such as the ones from "ITS", which are inexpensive and cover a good range of grits "roughness of cutting" from course (300grit) through to extra fine (1200) and then moving on to a 8000 grit waterstone and lastly stroping on leather with jewellers rouge give me a more than adequate sharpness for my needs. The same effect can be had using just waterstones or oil/whetstones of varying grits and also using a system called scarey sharp (which uses differing grits of emery cloth/papper and lapping films to achieve the same result. Most agree the important thing is not what you use but the basic angle you achieve at the edge of the chisels. This should be around 25 - 30 degrees.
You can use a ready made guide block to hold the chisels to get the angle or you can learn to do it freehand. There are pros and cons fro both in time and effort/expense etc. The main thing to learn is to get the angle rightish and to create a slight burr (little swarfy jaggy flaky bit) on the back of the chisel. This tells you the edge is as sharp as it will get for that particular grit and then you give a quick rub to the back of the blade and move up to the next grit and repeat. by the time you get to the leather strop and rouge it is a quick few strokes to clean off the burr and you are good to go.
There are are a myriad of videos on youtube but I think all here would agree here that Paul Sellars would be a good place to start. His techniques are excellent as is his teaching but he can come across in some of his other writings as a bit well..... you decide.
The main thing is to look at the various methods and if any of the other members are near you, they may let you come along and try their systems before you spend a lot of mullah. Once you find a way you like just stick with it and you will get better and be happy with the results.
HTH
