Sharpening Part 29 – An Example

The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.
Confucius

This is the final post in our series about Sharpening Japanese Woodworking Blades, in which I will try to bring all the information provided in the previous posts together into a single practical example. That does not mean the entire contents of those posts is repeated here, however, so please refer to the previous articles if things become confusing. I have provided some links in the text, and provided links to all the articles at the end.

But before we dive into our practical example, I would like to create some context.

Paying Debts

The purpose of this blog, as I have mentioned before, is not to sell stuff or attract clicks but to help our Beloved Customers increase their knowledge and improve their skills in maintaining and using the high-quality hand-forged professional-grade woodworking tools we purvey.

Another purpose is to pay a debt of the kind that can’t be recorded on paper, only in the heart.

In this series of posts I have carefully NOT promised quick and easy results, nor have I given abbreviated explanations or promoted dumbed-down techniques tailored to fit neatly within the publishing parameters of a book, magazine article, or a pretty little video. This is because the series is not about me, or my skills, or what I think is best, or selling stuff but rather helping our Beloved Customers obtain real long-term results and life-long skills of the sort expected of professional Japanese woodworkers. And since I can’t instruct them directly, our Beloved Customers must truly understand the principles and techniques so they can train themselves. Fragmentary instructions and short-cuts would be far easier to write about, but wouldn’t help with that training.

I share many experiences in common with most of our Beloved Customers, but I’ve also had some unusual experiences working with and being mentored by extremely accomplished Japanese professional craftsmen including sword sharpeners, tool sharpeners, carpenters and joiners. None of those gentlemen charged me a notched nickle for the things they taught. Likewise, I have never sought compensation for teaching others those same techniques. And so we come to the other reason for this series, namely to pay those gentlemen back for the time they spent and the kindness they showed me.

So gird up your loins, recall the information and techniques presented in the previous 28 posts in this series, and let’s sharpen a blade.

Removing Damage and Correcting the Bevel

We will not even try to deal with all the possible starting points for sharpening a woodworking blade. In this example we shall assume the lands surrounding the hollow-ground area at the blade’s ura are already flat, planar, and polished. If your blade is not in this condition, follow the instructions at the end of this section. We shall also assume the edge has a small chip that must be removed first. These conditions will cover 80% of sharpening jobs.

If the blade’s cutting edge bevel angle is where you want it to be, the bevel is already flat, and the blade isn’t damaged, please skip to Step 11 below.

1. Examine the Bevel Angle: Check the bevel angle with your bevel angle gauge. 27.5° ~ 30° for plane blades, 27.5° ~ 35° for oirenomi and atsunomi. No less than 24° for paring chisels.

2. Correct the Bevel Angle: If, based on the check in the previous step and the blade’s actual performance, you determine the bevel angle needs to be adjusted, correct the bevel angle using your 400~800 grit diamond plate or FLAT carborundum stone either free-hand or using a honing jig like the Lie-Nielson product, the Eclipse jig, or whatever catches your fancy. If you use a honing jig, you may want to add a drop of oil to the moving parts before they get wet. Be careful to avoid making skewed or curved (cambered) cutting edge unless that is specifically what you need.

3. Examine the Edge: Examine the blade by eye and touch. Stroke the edge with your thumb (over and away from the edge not into the edge!) to confirm its condition, and run a fingernail along its length to check for defects as described in the previous post in this series. Your fingerprints will snag on any rolls or burrs, and your fingernail will detect irregularities invisible to the eye. Assuming there is some minor damage, go the next step. If there is no damage, the bevel is in good shape, and the blade is just dull, skip to step 11 below.

4. Remove Damage: Remove chips and dings from the cutting edge by standing the blade, cutting edge down, on a flat 1000 grit stone, with ura facing away from you, tilted a few degrees from vertical towards you, and pull the blade towards you without applying downward pressure. Usually one or two strokes will suffice. The goal is to remove damage by creating a flat at the cutting edge. Examine the flattened edge with eye, fingertip, and fingernail to see if the chip or defect has been removed. Repeat until it’s gone. Don’t overdo it. Whatever you do, don’t allow the blade to become skewed! This method takes a bit of courage the first time, but it is the quickest, surest, and most economical way to get the job done.

5. Clean the Blade: Carefully clean grit and mud from the blade and the honing jig’s wheel (if you use one) to prevent contaminating the next stone. This is important.

6. Check and Color the Bevel: Check the bevel frequently to confirm full contact. You might blacken the bevel with a marking pen or Dykem to make it easier to monitor progress. This step is worth repeating between stones because it is helpful in monitoring what you cannot see otherwise.

7. Sharpen on the Rough Stone: This is the most important stone in the process. Now that all the damage has been removed and the bevel is in good shape, we need to abrade the bevel until the flat we made in step 4 is gone and we have created a tiny, clean burr. Sharpen the blade’s bevel on your roughest diamond plate or FLAT carborundum stone. If sharpening freehand, take short strokes. Always use the entire face of the stone, including corners, edges and ends as described in the previous post in this series. Turn the stone end-for-end frequently to compensate for your natural tendency to work some areas of the stone harder than others. Watch the edge carefully to make sure the width of the flat made at the cutting edge in Step 4 above gradually decreases in width evenly along the cutting edge’s length. If the flat becomes narrower at one corner than the other, apply extra pressure at the wider side, or hang the corner of the blade’s narrower side off the stone for a few strokes to correct. Stop when the flat is gone, and a clean, uninterrupted, but barely detectable burr is created. With practice, you should be able to do this without a honing jig. When using all the stones and plates in this process, keep them wet at all times, and add water as necessary. If the stone becomes dry, not only will it clog and stop cutting efficiently, but friction may cause localized heating of the thin metal at the cutting edge softening it. Remember, you’re tearing metal from an extremely thin cutting edge. You cannot see it and your fingers cannot feel it but this destruction heats up metal at that thin edge.

8. Check the Burr: Your fingertip will feel the burr long before your eye can see it. Stop when you have a small, uniform burr without interruptions the full width of the blade. Confirm this with your fingernail. Anything beyond this is just wasting metal and stones. With practice, this process will go very quickly, and you can move onto the next stone while the burr is barely detectable.

9. Create Skewed Scratches: When you have a uniform burr, work the blade sideways, or at an angle, on the stone to create diagonal scratches on the bevel removing the straight-on scratches the stone produced.

10. Clean the Blade: Wipe and wash the blade (and the honing jig’s wheel, if you are using one) to remove grit and mud. This is very important to prevent contamination of finer-grit stones.

At the conclusion of step 10, the bevel will be flat, uniform, and at the correct angle. The flat created during step 4 above will be gone, and you will be able to just detect a full-width tiny burr using your fingers.

For the next steps, keep the blade attached to the honing jig if you used one in the previous steps. Otherwise, sharpen freehand if you can. Don’t let the honing jig become a crutch that slows you down and prevents you from developing control.

Normal Sharpening Procedures

This is where the sharpening process normally starts when the blade is not damaged and the bevel is in good shape but only needs to be sharpened. It usually does not include a honing jig which can only slow things down.

11. Check and True the Medium-Grit Stone: You may decide to use more than one medium grit stone. I always use a 1000 grit, and often use a 2,000 grit stone as well. Whatever you use, it must be clean and flat. As described in previous posts, you need to check your stones flatness frequently with a stainless steel straightedge. To do this, wash any mud off the stone and pad (don’t rub) the stone’s face dry with a lint-free clean cloth or paper towel. Hold the stone up to a light source, place the straightedge along the stone’s length, across its width, and across its diagonal and check for light leaking between stone and straightedge. Make a pencil mark, such as a line or circle, on high spots using a wide carpenter’s pencil. Once you understand if and how the stone is distorted, flatten it using whatever method you prefer, a diamond plate, a specialized truing block, or my preferred method, another stone of the same grit. If you use my way you won’t need to worry about grit contamination and can save time and money by truing two stones at the same time. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.

12. Sharpen on the Medium-Grit Stone(s): Work the bevel on your medium-grit stone in short strokes using the stone’s entire face from side to side, end to end, and corner to corner, turning the stone end-for-end frequently and being careful to avoid rocking the blade. A bulging bevel is bad news, Bubba. You will know you are done with this stone when all the diagonal scratches from the previous stone, especially at the extreme edge, have been removed. The burr may or may not have disappeared by now. Check with your fingerprints and fingernail. If it still remains, it should be just barely detectable. If it is still big, you need a few more strokes on this stone to shrink it. Using a loupe at this point will be informative. End your work on this stone by creating some new diagonal scratches on the bevel erasing all the previous straight scratches.

You may want to repeat this step using another medium-grit stone, such as 2,000 grit, to save wear on your finishing stones. Either way is fine.

13. Clean the Blade: Wipe and wash the blade (and the honing jig’s wheel, if you are using one) to remove grit and mud. This is very important. Remove the honing jig at this point if you have been using one.

14. Polish on the Finishing Stone: Move onto your finishing stone, usually a 6,000~8,000 grit synthetic stone. This may not be the final finishing stone you use. Be sure it is flat, uncontaminated with grit from rougher stones, and wet. You may want to use your nagura stone to create a slurry from the stone’s corners and edges that will accelerate the polishing process. The finishing stone serves a polishing function, and because it’s grit is so fine, it lacks the ability to distort the bevel badly, so you can take longer strokes and polish the blade on both the forward and return strokes. When all the diagonal scratches from the previous stones are gone, you are done with this stone. If there is still a burr left after the medium-grit stone, it should have evaporated by now. If not, the burr was probably too big to begin with and your technique needs refinement.

15. Examine the Bevel: Take a good look at the polished bevel. Are there still scratches left from the previous stone? This may be because you did not remove all the scratches from previous stones. Or it could be because this stone or previous stones in the series were contaminated with dust or rougher grit. If so, you should figure out why and correct that problem before the next sharpening session.

16. Polish the Bevel Using the Final Finishing Stone: This step may not be necessary, depending on the time available, the degree of sharpness required, and your inclinations. This extra polish probably won’t make a significant difference in the cutting tool’s cutting performance so is often abbreviated during a busy work day. If you use a natural finishing stone or a 10,000+ grit finishing stone, this is the time to use it. Simply repeat the process in step 14 above, but be sure to apply light pressure, keep the stone at least a little wet, and sharpen on both the push and pull strokes.

17. Polish the Ura: With the bevel polished as finely as you intend it to become, polish the ura on the final finishing stone only. Place the last 1/2” of blade’s length on the stone’s edge (the stone MUST be flat) with the cutting edge parallel with the stone’s length, and the rest of the blade hanging off the stone but supported by your right hand. Press down on the bevel with two or three fingers of your left hand. Be sure to apply even pressure with these fingers. These fingers press down only and do not push the blade. The right hand pushes the blade back and forth and onto and off-of the stone. Take light strokes focusing pressure on the extreme cutting edge, but without lifting the blade’s head.

18. Polish the Bevel (Again): After several strokes on the ura, polish the bevel.

19. Alternate Between Ura and Bevel: Go back and forth polishing the ura and bevel, but keep in kind that you want to limit the number of strokes on the ura side (assuming it’s already highly polished as discussed above).

20. Examine the Edge: Check the full length of the cutting edge frequently with your eyes, fingertips and fingernail. The burr should be gone entirely. The edge should be sharp, and absolutely smooth. All the rougher scratches from previous stones should have disappeared. I make a final sharpness test by shaving an ultra-thin slice of skin from a callous on a finger allowing my bones to sense the degree of sharpness. This method is much more accurate than shaving hair off the arm. If you try it please don’t draw blood.

21. Clean, Dry and Oil: After you are done sharpening the blade, rinse it with clean water or sharpening solution (Item 5 in Post 17) and wipe it dry on a clean cloth or paper towel. You may want to strop it lightly on a soft clean cloth (or the palm of your hand, if you are confident in your abilities) to remove hidden water. I recommend applying a spray liquid rust preventative to the blade that displaces moisture, such as CRC Industries’s 3-36 or WD-40. CRC3-36 is paraffin based, floats water out of the blade’s nooks and crannies, and leaves a film that will prevent corrosion long term. However, please note that, while WD-40 is very convenient and displaces moisture, it evaporates entirely and is therefore not adequate for long-term corrosion protection. If you are going to use the blade right away, a little oil from your oilpot is cheaper, more convenient, and will do the job just fine.

With practice, and assuming you have not let your stones become too distorted, this entire process from Step 1 should take no more than 10~15 minutes. This assumes the blade is chipped or damaged and you need to correct the bevel or use a honing jig. Honing jigs slow the process down but are convenient when using rough stones and coarse diamond plates.

If the blade is in good shape and just needs normal sharpening, the goal should be 5 minutes from the medium grit stone in step 11. If you can’t do that quickly right away, don’t rush, just practice and get a little quicker each time: Slow is smooth; Smooth is fast.

Note: If you are sharpening a new blade, or the ura needs to be trued and/or repaired, work the ura on all the stones used in the steps above, but be careful to limit the number of strokes on the rougher stones to the absolute minimum. Also, instead of keeping just 1/2” of the blade’s length on the stones, move it diagonally in and out towards the blade’s center to prevent the stones from digging trenches in the ura. Use special care during this process.

I recommend covering at least your finishing stone with something when you are not using it to protect it from contaminating dust. I simply wrap mine in a sheet of newspaper. It doesn’t take any time or money. Some stones prefer to read the sports pages, others prefer current affairs. Just ask them.

Conclusion

I am confident the techniques described in this series of posts will prove useful if sharp tools matter to you. Your tools may not talk much, but if you train yourself in these techniques I promise they will sing their appreciation.

I trust the gentlemen that taught and mentored me would be pleased with the content in this series of articles, although I doubt they have time for reading nowadays. I will ask them when I see them again in the big woodpile in the sky.

YMHOS

Links to Other Posts in the “Sharpening” Series

Sharpening Japanese Woodworking Tools Part 1

Sharpening Part 2 – The Journey

Sharpening Part 3 – Philosophy

Sharpening Part 4 – ‘Nando and the Sword Sharpener

Sharpening Part 5 – The Sharp Edge

Sharpening Part 6 – The Mystery of Steel

Sharpening Part 7 – The Alchemy of Hard Steel 鋼

Sharpening Part 8 – Soft Iron 地金

Sharpening Part 9 – Hard Steel & Soft Iron 鍛接

Sharpening Part 10 – The Ura 浦

Sharpening Part 11 – Supernatural Bevel Angles

Sharpening Part 12 – Skewampus Blades, Curved Cutting Edges, and Monkeyshines

Sharpening Part 13 – Nitty Gritty

Sharpening Part 14 – Natural Sharpening Stones

Sharpening Part 15 – The Most Important Stone

Sharpening Part 16 – Pixie Dust

Sharpening Part 17 – Gear

Sharpening Part 18 – The Nagura Stone

Sharpening Part 19 – Maintaining Sharpening Stones

Sharpening Part 20 – Flattening and Polishing the Ura

Sharpening Part 21 – The Bulging Bevel

Sharpening Part 22 – The Double-bevel Blues

Sharpening Part 23 – Stance & Grip

Sharpening Part 24 – Sharpening Direction

Sharpening Part 25 – Short Strokes

Sharpening Part 26 – The Taming of the Skew

Sharpening Part 27 – The Entire Face

Sharpening Part 28 – The Minuscule Burr

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Sharpening Part 28 – The Minuscule Burr

Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small.
Lao Tzu

A key milestone our Beloved Customers should aim for when sharpening a blade is the production of a “burr” at the edge when abrading the bevel (not the ura) using the first rough stone in the series. The formation of the burr indicates that the extreme edge of the bevel side of the blade has been abraded enough.

In this post in the Sharpening Japanese Tools Series, we will examine how to raise this burr and why it is important to do so, how to use the burr to test the condition of the cutting edge as you are sharpening, and how to transition from one stone to the next finest stone in the series

Raise a Burr

The steps in creating and then abrading away a burr. The size of the burr in step 2 is grossly exaggerated for clarity. Indeed, unless severe damage to the edge needs to be repaired, you should not normally be able to detect the burr by Mark 1 Eyeball alone.

Japanese plane and chisel blades tend to have harder steel at their cutting edges than Western chisel and planes, and consequently, their steel does not exhibit the plastic deformation necessary to readily produce large burrs, or “wires” as some people call them, when being sharpened. In fact, “burrs” on professional-grade Japanese chisel and plane blades may be difficult to detect.

The key point to remember is that a clean, uniform, smooth burr signals the elimination of all major defects, chips, and dents at the cutting edge. If there are a lot of deep defects to remove, the thickness of the metal at the edge that must be abraded is correspondingly greater, and the burr developed will tend to be correspondingly larger. But a large, loopy burr or wire is not desirable because it will tend to break off prematurely leaving a jagged, ragged edge that will actually set back the sharpening process.

You want to create a barely-detectable, tiny and clean burr as soon in the sharpening process as possible. My advice is to do it on the roughest stone, although you may not be able to test if it is clean until after a few strokes on the medium-grit stone (1000 grit).

As we discussed in a previous post in this series, the way to keep the size of the burr minimal and the blade’s bevel flat is to focus the pressure of abrasion as close to the extreme cutting edge as possible, but without overbalancing and gouging the stone and dulling the edge. This is the most essential skill in freehand sharpening.

Now that we have a burr, let’s look at how to test it next.

Testing the Burr

As you are working to produce the burr, you will need to quickly test its progress, but that can be difficult, if not impossible, to do by eye alone. To make this process easier and quicker, rub the pad of your thumb or finger over the ura’s edge, away from the cutting edge, thank you very much, when using your rough stones. Your fingerprint ridges will snag on the burr long before you can see it. If the edge is chipped or damaged, the burr will not be consistent but will be interrupted at each defect. There is nothing at all to be gained and much to lose by allowing the burr to become larger than absolutely necessary, so pay attention.

Once you have a small burr, you then need to test it for defects. If you run your fingernail along the burr’s length (the width of the blade), you will feel interruptions in the burr long before you can see them. Keep working the blade’s bevel on the rough stone until the burr is consistent across the full width of the blade, and free of dents and chips.

In the case where you need to remove serious damage to the cutting edge, you may want to use a loupe to ensure the defect has been transferred entirely to the burr and is not longer in the cutting edge.

If you are careful to focus the abrasive effect of the stones on the extreme cutting edge instead of the rear of the bevel, the burr created before moving onto the medium grit stones should be barely detectable. Once again, except in the case of removing large chips or blade damage, creating a big burr is not only a waste of time, stones and steel, but if the large burr is torn off during sharpening, it will leave behind a tragic amount of damage that must be repaired by once again abrading the edge and raising a new burr. Don’t start chasing that tail.

Best to create just enough of a burr to confirm that damage has been removed and then encourage it to evaporate.

Don’t forget to check the angle of the bevel with your hand-dandy bevel gauge. See the section on Pixie Predation Prevention & Pacification in Part 11 of this series.

After the burr is in good shape, then polish the bevel on the medium and then fine stones. The burr will be polished off without special effort.

Assuming the ura is already polished on your finest finishing stone, you shouldn’t need to touch the blade’s ura on any stone until the final finishing stone.

Transitioning From One Stone to the Next

Recall that the purpose of each stone used after the roughest stone in the series is simply to replace the deeper scratches left by the preceding stone with finer scratches. In fact, there is nothing to be gained and much to lose by moving onto a finer stone before all the scratches from the previous stone have been replaced. Therefore, it is important to check that all the scratches from the previous stone have been polished out before moving to the next. This is not always easy to confirm without magnification, so to make it easier and surer, I suggest you skew the blade’s bevel on the stone for the last 3 or 4 strokes to make new diagonal scratch marks at an angle different from those produced previously.

These skewed scratches will be at a different angle than those produced by the next stone, of course, and will be easy to differentiate from the new scratches with the nekid eye. When the next finest stone removes them entirely, you will know you have probably spent enough time on that stone, and can go to the next. But don’t forget to skew the blade again before going to the next stone.

Of course, there is no need to skew the blade on the final finishing stone.

Summary

We have discussed three important sharpening techniques in this article which you must master if you have not already:

Raise a burr by abrading the blade’s bevel on your rough stones using your skillful technique;
Test the burr for size and completeness using your fingertip ridges, and for defects using your fingernails. If the burr is incomplete or has detectable defects, continue to work the blade on the rough stones on the bevel side only until the burr is good.
Skew the blade during the last 3~4 strokes on each stone (except the final finishing stone, of course) to create diagonal lines. When all those diagonal lines are polished off by the succeeding stone, you will know it is probably OK to move onto the next finest stone in the series.

You now have some powerful tools to use when sharpening your excellent tools, and none of them cost you a nickel. How’s that for value? (ツ)

Be forewarned, however, that if you use these techniques you may be forced to choose between a glamorous career as an international professional fingernail model or the quiet life of an expert woodworker. What to do what to do…..

In the next and final post in this series we will use all the aspects of the sharpening process discussed previously to sharpen a blade step-by-step. Be there or be square.

YMHOS

Sharpening Part 27 – The Entire Face

A beautiful face: Oohirayama Lotus stone

If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.
Woodrow Wilson

The subject of how to use the face of your sharpening stone is so basic and seems so unimportant that few give it the attention it warrants. But it is not trivial: it deserves its own post because it can truly make a big difference in the time and money you spend sharpening.

Money Down the Drain

Instead of focusing his attention on the blade alone, a wise man will make a conscious effort to use the entire face of his sharpening stone from edge to edge, end to end, and corner to corner instead of digging an oval swamp in the center of his stone’s face.

This habit will help to keep a stone’s faces flatter over more strokes longer, saving time truing the stone, and extending its life thereby saving money.

Remember that you paid money for the stone, the entire stone, not just the hollowed-out oval area in the center most people create when carelessly sharpening. How much of a stone do most people throw away? Idunno, 20%? If you paid $100 dollars for the stone, that means $20 was turned into mud and washed away without providing any benefit to you at all. And don’t forget that you had to spend time cutting down those high spots to keep the stone’s face flat. That makes it more than a $20 loss if you count your time worth anything, which you should.

Why not use the sides and ends of the stone too?

Developing Good Habits

When developing these intelligent work habits, use a carpenter’s pencil to cross-hatch the stone’s surface to help you keep track of the areas you have not yet touched. Industrial diamonds are made from graphite, it’s true, but pencil lead is still softer than the finest sharpening stone and won’t affect the sharpening process one way or another.

Also, before and while sharpening, frequently use a thin stainless steel ruler to check the stone’s face lengthwise and crosswise at various locations, and of course on the diagonals to monitor wear. Don’t guess, lazy bones, examine. Between ruler and pencil you may discover you have developed less-than-efficient sharpening habits. With some thought you will also figure out how to change those habits so your sharpening efforts will be quicker and more cost-effective.

Before long, you will be able to detect uneven wear and warpage fairly reliably without using either tool as much, so stick with it until you do.

Hang Ten

One conundrum you have probably already discovered is that it is impractical to use the extreme right and left sides and both ends of the stone’s face to sharpen a blade. Or is it? Here is wisdom: Teach yourself how to sharpen with one corner of the blade hanging off the stone part of the time, alternating between right and left corners, of course. Strange as it may seem this technique is effective at not only keeping your sharpening stone flatter, but for keeping the cutting edges of your blades straighter. If this doesn’t make sense to you, think about it real hard. Then give it a try and you will see what I mean.

And since you are taking short strokes anyway, why not work the blade crosswise at the ends of the stone? A lot of expensive stone going to waste there.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but you will find that making short strokes will make it much easier to use the entire face of the stone.

If you feel this post needlessly states the obvious, or is “verbose,” allow me to remind our Gentle Readers once again that the purpose of this blog is not to provide entertainment, sell stuff, troll for clicks or snag subscribers but to help our Beloved Customers develop good work habits through education. Some of them are newbies, and others are old hands, but if I were to write only for the professionals then I would be neglecting the newbies, so if you know this stuff already please congratulate yourself and celebrate your good fortune by buying a new carpenter’s pencil.

YMHOS

Sharpening Part 26 – The Taming of the Skew

My relationship to reality has been so utterly skewed for so long that I don’t even notice it any more. It’s just my reality.
Ethan Hawke

The Taming of the Skew

You will have noticed that it is easier to keep a blade stable when sharpening its bevel if you skew it on the stone. There is nothing wrong with skewing the blade so long as you understand the natural consequences of doing so and compensate for them appropriately.

Let’s examine some of those consequences.

First, a skewed blade tends to wear-out, or hollow-out, the center area of the stone quicker. This is inefficient, wasting time and stones, but can be compensated for if you pay attention and work the blade evenly over the stone’s entire face.

Second, people tend to place uneven pressure on a skewed blade, wearing the blade unevenly.

In addition, the leading corner is exposed to more fresher, larger grit particles (which cut more aggressively) than the trailing corner. As a result, the blade’s leading corner tends to be abraded more, causing the blade’s edge to gradually become skewed or rounded in shape over many sharpening sessions. This is definitely bad, and is often mistaken for the work of those devilish iron pixies. But if you are aware this can happen, and pay attention, you can compensate for it.

Third, and I have no way to confirm this, I am told by the guys with microscopes that diagonal scratches at the extreme cutting edge leave it a tad weaker, causing it to dull just a bit quicker. The way to compensate for this is to keep the blade’s cutting edge perpendicular to the direction of travel during the last few strokes on the finishing stone.

So in summary, habitually skewing a blade while sharpening is fine, but may cost a little efficiency, and may cause your blades and stones to become distorted.

Please read the quotation at the top of this article and consider whether or not your sharpening reality has become skewed without your realizing it. I know mine was for a long time.

These aren’t things you wouldn’t have figured out for yourself eventually, Beloved Customers and Gentle Readers, but now, at least if you pay attention, you’re a few years ahead on the learning curve.

In the worst case, at least ignorance isn’t an excuse anymore.

YMHOS

Sharpening Part 25 – Short Strokes

Long-term consistency beats short-term intensity.
Bruce Lee

Festina Lente Doors in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy

We have discussed many details about sharpening in this series, and while this may be the shortest article of the bunch, it is by no means the most insignificant. For some it will be the most difficult technique to master. The classical references shouldn’t prove too onerous.

If our clever Gentle Readers pay attention to their blade’s movement when sharpening, they will notice how each reversal of direction tends to cause the bevel to rock forward and backward on the stone’s face. And what happens when we let the blade rock-n-roll? That’s right, the crapulous bulging bevel rears its ugly head and spits in our eye.

Short strokes, somewhere around 1-½ inch in length, make it easier to keep the blade from rocking.

A Gentle Reader named Oskar observed that, following the logic in the previous sentence, shorter strokes result in more, not less, reversals in stroke direction, and therefore shorter strokes should lead to more rocking rather than less. I concur with Oskar’s analysis and conclusion and am adding the following clarification to avoid confusion.

A short stroke results in smaller changes in the angles of one’s joints and tendons during the stroke compared to the changes during a longer stroke, making it much easier to maintain the bevel at the correct angle on the stone’s face. In other words, in the case of short strokes, the angle of joints and tendons at the beginning of a stroke does not change much by the end of the same stroke, making it easier to manage joints and tendons during and between strokes yielding greater repeatability.

In addition, shorter strokes tend to focus one’s attention on properly indexing the bevel on the stone during each individual stroke, attention that tends to wander more during long strokes.

Please note that this analysis is simply my opinion, and perhaps not a weighty opinion at that because I am not a physician, nor have I conducted physiological studies and dissections upon which a rigorous opinion must be based.

I know that making short strokes feels inefficient, and it is compared to a machine, but you, Gentle Reader aren’t a Cyberdyne Systems product. However, with practice, you will find you are able to increase the distance and speed of each stroke especially as your focus and hand-soul coordination improves and your wrists and elbows relax and become trained.

Long extravagant strokes on rough or medium grit stones are for sharpening axes and kitchen knives, not chisels or planes.

The exception to this rule is the finishing stone, as mentioned in the previous article.

Festina Lente

In conclusion, and in order to improve your classical education, let’s review our latin lesson from the previous article: “Festina lente” translates directly as “make haste slowly.” It is defined in the dictionary as as “proceed expeditiously but prudently.” We chose to translate the phrase as “Slow is smooth; Smooth is fast. ” At least two Roman emperors, one Pope, and the powerful Medici family of Italy, back in the days when emperors, popes, and noble merchants had real power measured in armies they controlled and cities and continents they ruled, thought these two words important enough to include in their mottos and coats of arms. The words even appear in the original French version of the tale of the “Hare and Tortoise.” They are also relevant to sharpening if you are clever enough to understand why.

YMHOS

Woodwork in the Laurencian Library in Florence Italy with the Medici’s motto of Festina Lente and the turtle with a sail carved into it.

Sharpening Part 24 – Sharpening Direction

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
Lao Tzu

When using the rough stones, and especially when learning basic sharpening skills, it is best to sharpen the bevel in one direction only, lifting the blade off the stone, or at least removing all downward pressure, on the return stroke. The reason for this seemingly inefficient movement is simply that, at least for most people, trying to abrade the blade on both push and pull strokes is extremely likely to cause the blade to rock creating the dreaded bulging bevel.

There are certainly many exceptions to this rule, and we actively encourage you to try to develop the concentration and muscle control required to sharpen in both directions on rough and medium stones, but be aware it may take some years. In the meantime, remember the ancient adage and imperial moto: festina lente, which we chose to translate as “Slow is smooth; Smooth is fast. “

Part of the difficulty of sharpening in both directions is the resulting loss of concentration: the swing of the thing is hard to sense. Perhaps another part of it is due to the difficulty of controlling the complicated and constantly-changing angles of bone and tendon. Both of these natural mental and physical tendencies can be overcome by talented and determined people given time and daily practice, but in the case of everyone I have ever talked with on the subject, it takes many years of focused on-the-job practice, and extreme concentration at first to overcome pre-existing bad habits and avoid developing bad muscle memory.

Which Direction?

At this point you need to make a decision, unless you have already made it inadvertently. That is, to sharpen on either the push stroke (pushing the blade away from you) or the pull stroke (pulling the blade towards you). Most people choose the push stroke, as do I, but in reality the pull stroke is actually a little more efficient because the pressure tends to focus closer to the bevel’s front instead of back, and rocking is reduced. Whichever direction you choose, use it consistently.

However, and this is critically important, when it comes to the final finishing stone, work the blade back and forth in both directions. The finishing stone is not abrasive enough to change the bevel’s shape, and since you need to polish the last few microns width of blade’s cutting edge, a very tiny amount of unintentional rocking is actually helpful, as mentioned in a previous post.

Training Techniques

If you decide you want to develop the ability to sharpen on both push and pull strokes, I can share some helpful guidance that was given to me many years ago by a sword polisher.

The first step in training yourself is to begin by lifting the blade on the return stroke (either push or pull depending on your preferred direction). All the things mentioned above apply. Becoming proficient with this technique is foundational. Strive to project your senses into the blade traveling over the stone, indeed right down to the last few microns of the cutting edge.

When you are able to create a sharp edge while maintaining a flat bevel consistently and without much concentration using this “one-way” technique, then move on to the second step, which is to keep the blade in contact with the stone on the return stroke, but relieve all downward pressure. Begin slowly with full concentration and and seek for smooth motion. It’s at the transition from one direction to the other where those nasty iron pixies cast their spells of confusion.

And finally, when you have mastered the “light-touch” technique, try applying downward pressure in both directions, beginning slowly at first and with full concentration striving for smooth motion.

Remember, don’t grip the blade like a thrashing snapping turtle, but hold it lightly in your hands like a small bird: too tightly and it will be crushed; too loosely and it will fly away. Don’t lock your wrists or elbows, but actively and consciously rotate them to keep the blade’s bevel always perfectly flat on the stone (your stone is flat right, right?). And don’t forget to use your small, thin stainless steel straightedge and brass bevel gauge to frequently check the bevel for flatness and proper angle.

And as always, brutally crush bad habits, and don’t allow new bad ones to take root.

Sadly, this is a skill that, once learned, tends to deteriorate with time unless practiced frequently. As with cherry blossoms, muscles, tendons and eyes are neither static nor eternal. Setsunai, desu ne.

YMHOS

Sharpening Part 23 – Stance & Grip

When the show starts, I am in my SpongeBob stance, and I walk like SpongeBob, and the first step that I take, I am SpongeBob.
Ethan Slater

Stances

There are several practical stances for sharpening, including standing, sitting on a bench or in a chair, squatting, kneeling on the floor, or sitting on the floor. With practice, all these stances can be made to work well.

When starting out, however, I think most people benefit from using a standing position with the stones placed on a workbench or table, or on a board spanning a sink.

Whichever stance you choose, locate and be conscious of your center of gravity, (usually just below your belly button), and try to keep it at the same elevation while moving the blade forward and back.

Flex your knee joints, and loosen your elbow joints and wrists. Locking up your wrists and elbows will make it impossible to avoid rocking the blade. This is important. Actively concentrate on allowing the wrist to rotate in a manner to keep the blade’s bevel flat on the stone’s face.

In the case of a normal resharpening job, instead of a major repair, remember the goal: to abrade and polish the last few microns of steel at the extreme cutting edge, using the flat bevel as an alignment jig, exactly as craftsmen have been doing for thousands of years.

Don’t let yourself get lost in the forest of trees and focus just on abrading and polishing the entire bevel. Focus the majority of pressure on the extreme cutting edge, and less on the rear of the bevel, but without lifting the rear of the bevel off the stone. In the case of Japanese blades, the rear of the bevel is all soft jigane iron and will take care of itself. Yes, it is a balancing act. Yes, it takes focus. Yes, you will make mistakes, overbalance, gouge the stone and mess up the cutting edge a time or two. Everyone since the day the first caveman tried to grind his stone axe on another stone has made that mistake, so don’t worry about it. You fell off your bicycle the first few tries, scraped your knees and elbows, survived, and now ride like the wind! Yiiiiiihah!

Get a Grip

The way you hold your plane or chisel blade during sharpening will greatly influence the quality of the end product and the stress placed on your hands during the process, so it is worth paying attention to.

There are as many was to hold a plane or chisel blade when sharpening as Baskin Robbins has ice cream flavors. And like ice cream, none are right or wrong, except Burgundy Cherry, which of course is superior to all others (ツ)。 In the interest of brevity, we will only look at three grip methods. If you are not using them now, I suggest you give each a try over a couple of sharpening sessions to see if they are an improvement or not. Feel free to adapt these or develop your own from scratch once you understand the key points.

The Gorilla Grip

First, let’s examine what I call the “Gorilla Grip.” With the plane blade resting ura facing up, the blade’s long axis pointing at 11:00, and the cutting edge furthest away from you, grip the blade’s sides with your right-hand’s thumb on the left side, ring finger and pinkie on the right, the tip of the middle finger resting on the right corner directly behind the cutting edge, and index finger extended alongside the middle finger. Then lift the blade and roll your ring and pinkie under it.

Rest the tip of the ring finger of your left hand on the left corner directly behind the cutting edge, with your middle finger and index fingers extended and their tips resting adjacent.

Extend your left palm over your right thumb’s last joint, and wrap your left thumb under the blade. You are now ready to rock-n-roll, without the rocking and rolling motion

The advantage to this grip is that it is very strong, ergo “ gorilla.” The downside is the blade tends to end up skewed on the stone because the right wrist must be twisted to keep the blade straight. Also, because the wrist joints are at very different angles with respect to the blade, and it is easy to apply a lot of force, extra care is necessary to keep the wrists firm but loose and rotating in harmony.

Notice how thumbs are poised to fit under the blade’s head

Four fingers pressing down on the blade’s ura as close to the cutting edge as reasonably possible.

Finger position on a chisel. The left hand thumb passes under the blade’s neck supporting it vertically, while the pad presses against the neck’s right side. The right hand thumb passes over the top of the neck, restraining the tool vertically, and presses against the neck’s left side firmly securing the neck between both thumbs. More fingers can press down on the ura in the case of wider blades. Conversely, only one finger can press on narrow blades.

The Three-finger Grip

The other grip is one I call “three-finger,”（指三本） after the most proper way of bowing in Japan when seated directly on the floor (preferably tatami mat) in the “seiza” posture with legs folded underneath the body, both hands touching side by side with the pads of three fingers of each hand extended and touching the floor in front of the knees, and the thumbs and pinkies tucked out of sight. Very proper, and elegant especially for ladies.

In the case of the three-fingers grip, the blade is oriented directly in front of and on the body’s centerline with cutting edge furthest away. The hands hold the blade in a more symmetrical fashion than the gorilla grip, with the middle and index fingers pressing down on the blade’s corners closest the cutting edge (depending on the space available), with the thumbs curled under the blade’s head (end opposite the cutting edge), and either the ring fingers or pinkies touching the blade’s sides to assist in lifting it.

The advantages to this grip are less tendency to skew the blade, looser wrists, and better control of bevel angle. The disadvantage is slightly less power because it is harder to get the shoulders over the blade. This is the burgundy cherry version, in your humble servant’s opinion.

The Three-finger Monkey Grip

A hybrid of these two methods is one I call the “three-fingered monkey.” Place the right-hand thumb alongside the blade’s left side, instead of under the head forming a combination of the gorilla grip and three-finger grip. This method provides a little more power than the three-finger grip, and less skew than the gorilla grip.

Is one of these grips best? It’s like riding a bike: None are wrong, but some work better than others.

In all three of these grips, most of the pressure will tend to focus at the blade’s corners which can create uneven wear on the ura. While this may be unavoidable, especially in the case of narrow blades, try to focus the majority of pressure on the centerline of the cutting edge. It seems insignificant, but if left uncorrected, the resulting unbalanced pressure will cause the blade to wear quicker at the corners and become curved. Yes the blade is iron and steel and does not flex much, but it is a verifiable fact that the points where your fingers apply pressure will be abraded quicker.

There is a saying in Japan which is quite appropriate when talking about sharpening that says “Dripping water wears away stone.” In this case, just a little differential pressure from your fingertips will shape the blade over many weeks and many passes over the stone, wearing away both stone and steel in useful ways or not. It is worth being aware of this potential and paying attention.

Chisel Grip

The grip I use on chisels is very similar to the grip for planes, and varies with width.

The long handle makes chisels tail heavy and a bit more difficult to manage so it is often useful to select a grip style that is absolutely stable using just a single hand.

Most solutions involve holding the chisel in the palm secured by middle finger, ring finger, and pinkie, with the index finger extended and centered right behind the cutting edge.

The index and middle fingers of the other hand can also be pressed near the edge and the thumb wrapped underneath the handle.

Polishing the Ura

When polishing the ura of a blade, be it plane or chisel, make sure the stone is flat. If it isn’t, you will regret it later without realizing why.

Let’s look at a plane blade first. Notice in the photo above how my right hand is curled under the blade’s head supporting it while my thumb presses down on the bevel close to the cutting edge, a grip that makes it easy to apply a lot of pressure precisely while maintaining control of the blade.

Two fingertips of my left hand are pressing down on the bevel for a total of three pressure points. The thumb can press down as light or hard as you feel is necessary, but it typically applies the highest amount of pressure. It’s important the left hand fingertips apply equal downward pressure to avoid creating uneven wear (unless one corner of the blade specifically needs more pressure applied).

Try to remove nearly all the weight of the blade’s head from the stone so that all but a tiny amount of applied pressure is focused on the “itoura” cutting land at the blade’s extreme cutting edge. No good can come of wearing a trench into the ura’s side lands.

Move the blade in two directions at the same time: Mostly to and fro in line with the cutting edge; but also on and off the stone’s edge perpendicular to the cutting edge. This will help avoid wearing a trench in the side lands and produce a stronger cutting edge (IMO).

Keep the stone flat and reverse it frequently to ensure even wear and less wasted stone.

Concentrate your senses and develop hand-soul coordination : You are a leaf on the wind; Watch how you soar (Hoban “Wash” Washburne in Serenity). I hope you have better luck than Wash did…

In the case of chisels, I hold the handle in the palm of my right hand and place thumb and forefinger on opposite sides of the neck/shoulders pinching it between them. I place the tips of the fingers of my left hand on the bevel, and move right and left hand together. And as in the case of plane blades, I move the blade both forward and backwards and left to right at the same time.

Give it a try. What do you have to loose?

In the next post in this series on sharpening, we will look at which direction to sharpen in. Few give this matter any thought, but most should.

YMHOS

Previous Posts in the Sharpening Series

Sharpening Japanese Woodworking Tools Part 1

Sharpening Part 2 – The Journey

Sharpening Part 3 – Philosophy

Sharpening Part 4 – ‘Nando and the Sword Sharpener

Sharpening Part 5 – The Sharp Edge

Sharpening Part 6 – The Mystery of Steel

Sharpening Part 7 – The Alchemy of Hard Steel 鋼

Sharpening Part 8 – Soft Iron 地金

Sharpening Part 9 – Hard Steel & Soft Iron 鍛接

Sharpening Part 10 – The Ura 浦

Sharpening Part 11 – Supernatural Bevel Angles

Sharpening Part 12 – Skewampus Blades, Curved Cutting Edges, and Monkeyshines

Sharpening Part 13 – Nitty Gritty

Sharpening Part 14 – Natural Sharpening Stones

Sharpening Part 15 – The Most Important Stone

Sharpening Part 16 – Pixie Dust

Sharpening Part 17 – Gear

Sharpening Part 18 – The Nagura Stone

Sharpening Part 19 – Maintaining Sharpening Stones

Sharpening Part 20 – Flattening and Polishing the Ura

Sharpening Part 21 – The Bulging Bevel

Sharpening Part 22 – The Double-bevel Blues

Sharpening Part 23 – Stance & Grip

Sharpening Part 24 – Sharpening Direction

Sharpening Part 25 – Short Strokes

Sharpening Part 26 – The Taming of the Skew

Sharpening Part 27 – The Entire Face

Sharpening Part 28 – The Minuscule Burr

Sharpening Part 29 – An Example

Sharpening Part 22 – The Double-Bevel Blues

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It

It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand – Michelangelo Buonarroti 1475-1564

In the previous post in this series on sharpening Japanese tools, we looked at philosophical points such as making tools a long-term investment, as well as the upsides, downsides and causes of the bulging bevel. In this post, I would like to touch on a subject that will make thoughtful people think and befuddled folks lucid: The Double Bevel.

The Double-Bevel

Some people advocate creating double-bevels (primary and secondary) bevels, or what is sometimes called “micro-bevels” on plane and chisel blades. Multiple bevels have three useful applications in my opinion:

The first useful application is to repair a tool’s blade in the field when there is not enough time to do a proper sharpening job. If a blade dulls or chips in the course of a job, we can quickly add a secondary bevel at a steeper angle to the blade’s primary bevel in a few seconds and get right back to work, but there will be a price to pay later over many sharpening sessions to restore the proper bevel, so it is only a temporary, not a long-term solution;
The second application is to quickly adjust a plane blade’s angle to reduce tearout immediately when proper sharpening is not possible. Once again, a lot of remedial sharpening becomes necessary afterwards. This application is usually restricted to the primary bevel, but we will look at a more esoteric and risky application below.
The third application is to efficiently restore a blade’s bevel to the correct angle in the case where pixies or our inattention has made the blade angle too shallow.

Case 3 above often goes like this: A blade that cuts well suddenly starts dulling quickly, maybe even chipping. Whiskey tango foxtrot!?! When this happens, our Beloved Customers, being of exceptionally high intelligence, use the bevel angle gauge described in Part 11 of this series to check the bevel angle. They may discover the bevel angle has become too shallow for the wood it is being asked to cut.

Image result for lie-nielsen honing jig photo

We could increase the bevel angle by welding metal to the bevel and regrinding it, but such barbaric behavior would ruin the blade, so the most expedient way to correct the bevel is to add a steeper secondary bevel at the desired angle. We can grind this new bevel by hand, or use a honing jig like the Lie-Nielson widget. I find I can apply more downward pressure using this jig to get the job done sooner and more precisely.

Honing jigs are undeniably useful, but they often become an impediment to learning professional sharpening skills, and they are more time-consuming to use than freehand sharpening. Jigs can certainly make the sneaky snake of multiple bevels workable, but please don’t ignore the inescapable fact that if one uses a jig properly, over multiple sharpening sessions the result will be… let me think about it…. wait a second while I make a little sketch here…. oh yea, a flat bevel. Hmmm….

Hey, I’ve got an idea. When performing routine sharpening (not the 3 cases listed above), instead of taking shortcuts and adding micro-bevels which turn into secondary bevels and maybe even bulging bevels, why not start with a flat bevel and keep it flat? And then just maybe we could take advantage of the natural indexing properties of that flat bevel to sharpen freehand and save a lot of time NOT polishing skinny secondary bevels or fat bulging bevels? You know what, it just might work!

A honing jig is very helpful for making big angle corrections. I own several, but the Lie-Nielson model is my favorite: I use it every third blue moon. If you decide to use one, however, reserve it for emergency or drastic measures. Don’t let it become training wheels, kiddies.

The Nano-bevel

In this and previous posts we discussed bulging bevels, which are convex bevels on plane or chisel blades; secondary bevels and double bevels, which are additional bevels; and micro-bevels, which are a tiny secondary bevel. But there is another type of secondary bevel a clever Beloved Customer called a “nano-bevel.” I like this term and so will use it, but I caution you that, like all secondary bevels, you should employ this bevel judiciously.

We will go into freehand sharpening techniques in greater detail in future posts, but to avoid confusion when discussing the nano-bevel, we need to touch on some of those techniques now.

You may have noticed that, when sharpening freehand on every stone but the finish stone, most, but not all people do a better job by applying downward pressure on the blade only on either the push stroke away from their body or the pull stroke back towards their body, but not in both directions. This is because placing downward pressure in both directions tends to make the blade rock resulting in a less-than-flat bevel, or Saints preserve us, the demonic bulging bevel. As you can imagine, if this rocking motion gets out of hand on the rougher stones the bevel angle can get out of control quickly.

However, on the finish stone, it is most efficient to apply light downward pressure in both directions. The advantage is that a teeny tiny bit of unintentional rocking helps to ensure the last few microns of the blade’s cutting edge are thoroughly polished. And because the abrasive power of a finish stone is so small, there is no danger the bevel will become rounded, at least if you don’t get carried away. From the wood-shaving’s eye view, this creates a tiny bevel at the last few microns of the cutting edge. This is one example of a “nano-bevel.” Stropping produces the same result on a larger scale. There is also another type of nano-bevel for emergency use.

When using a finish plane on wood with twisty grain you have no doubt experienced frustrating tearout. The usual litany of solutions is to reduce the blade’s projection for finer depth of cut, skew the plane, oil and adjust the chipbreaker, resharpen the blade, adjust the plane’s mouth, or even slightly dampen the wood with a planing fluid such as water, whiskey, or unicorn wee wee. All these methods can help.

On the subject of planing fluid, water works well but dries slowly and can have problematic secondary effects. And unicorn products are dreadfully expensive nowadays, even on Amazon, so I prefer a smooth, inexpensive, industrial-grade busthead. Please ask Ken Hatch for a demonstration and recommendations for a good planing fluid next time he invites you over to his house for his world-famous tacos.

Please note that I don’t drink any planing fluid other than water. Of course unicorn wee wee is more addictive than OxyContin and drives mortals quite mad. And alcohol is yeast pee pee and deadly, but I prefer whiskey for a number of reasons. First, whiskey has a good water/alcohol ratio that wets the wood about the right amount of time and then evaporates cleanly. Too wet and it penetrates too deeply. Too dry and it evaporates too quickly. Isopropyl alcohol works fine too but it is considered a pharmaceutical in Japan and so is very expensive. As with other alcohol products not intended for internal consumption, it contains poisons added at the demand of greedy governments for the sole purpose of maximizing tax revenues. I don’t need those poisons touching my tools or my skin. Whiskey doesn’t contain poisons (other than alcohol, of course), it’s cheaper and smells better.

Another classic solution to reduce tearout of course is to use a plane with a steeper blade bedding angle, but what to do if you don’t have a high-angle plane handy? A traditional, jobsite-expedient solution used by Japanese woodworkers is to create a nano-bevel on the ura side of the blade. This is accomplished during sharpening while polishing the ura on the finishing stone by lifting the head of the blade just a itsy bitsy teeny weeny nat’s nosehair thickness during the final stroke, pulling the blade towards you, of course, creating a “nano-bevel” on the last few microns of the cutting edge at the ura, effectively changing the approach angle of the blade.

Be forewarned that this is only for emergency use, and that if you are careless, or use it too often, the nano-bevel will become a microbevel, your blade will be damaged, efficient sharpening will become impossible, the chipbreaker will cease to function, and the gods of handsaws may curse you so all your hair will fall out and your dog will barf whenever it sees you! Or is it your dog’s hair will fall out and you will barf? I forget.

Now where did I set down that jar of planing fluid….?

Conclusion

A wise man will seek to avoid shortcuts that save a bit of time short-term only to waste more of his time and money long-term. If you simply make the effort to train yourself in basic sharpening skills, pay attention, and keep the bevel flat, time, steel, and stone-wasting monkeyshines such as double bevels will be unnecessary.

We have talked about the cutting edge’s proper shape. Beginning with the next post in this series, we will examine how to use sharpening stones to make it that way.

YMHOS

Well Dude, I’m done sharpening using my most excellent honing jig for now and am off to the beach on my chick magnet! Don’t wait up, Mom.

Sharpening Japanese Woodworking Tools Part 1

Sharpening Part 2 – The Journey

Sharpening Part 3 – Philosophy

Sharpening Part 4 – ‘Nando and the Sword Sharpener

Sharpening Part 5 – The Sharp Edge

Sharpening Part 6 – The Mystery of Steel

Sharpening Part 7 – The Alchemy of Hard Steel 鋼

Sharpening Part 8 – Soft Iron 地金

Sharpening Part 9 – Hard Steel & Soft Iron 鍛接

Sharpening Part 10 – The Ura 浦

Sharpening Part 11 – Supernatural Bevel Angles

Sharpening Part 12 – Skewampus Blades, Curved Cutting Edges, and Monkeyshines

Sharpening Part 13 – Nitty Gritty

Sharpening Part 14 – Natural Sharpening Stones

Sharpening Part 15 – The Most Important Stone

Sharpening Part 16 – Pixie Dust

Sharpening Part 17 – Gear

Sharpening Part 18 – The Nagura Stone

Sharpening Part 19 – Maintaining Sharpening Stones

Sharpening Part 20 – Flattening and Polishing the Ura

Sharpening Part 21 – The Bulging Bevel

Sharpening Part 22 – The Double-bevel Blues

Sharpening Part 23 – Stance & Grip

Sharpening Part 24 – Sharpening Direction

Sharpening Part 25 – Short Strokes

Sharpening Part 26 – The Taming of the Skew

Sharpening Part 27 – The Entire Face

Sharpening Part 28 – The Minuscule Burr

Sharpening Part 29 – An Example

Protecting Natural Sharpening Stones

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

Natural sharpening stones are wonderful things. At least the good ones are. Finding one that works well with our blades and sharpening style is a thrilling experience and a source of long-term joy. Such an excellent stone can be hard to find and will often be expensive, but whether dirt cheap or worth rubies, it will be delicate and need protection.

In a previous article we looked at how to select a natural Japanese sharpening stone: Sharpening Part 14 – Natural Sharpening Stones

In this post we will examine some methods to ensure your natural sharpening stone provides you long reliable service. I suggest you read this article aloud to your favorite stone to gauge its reaction. If you pay close attention, you may even see it wiggle just a tiny bit with gleeful anticipation, especially when you get to the parts about calligraphy, color selection, and skirts. Stones can be very fashion conscious, you know.

The Weaknesses of Natural Stones

The first thing to keep in mind is that Japanese natural stones are pieces of sedimentary layers that formed on the bottom of the ocean, essentially red-hot dust violently spewed high into the atmosphere by volcanoes, sifted and sorted by wind and waves and distance, and laid down on the seabed like pages in a book. They have defects even if you can’t see them. They naturally have top and bottom surfaces as well as side/end surfaces where the layers are exposed. Water tends to soak in-between these layers exposed at side and end surfaces sometimes causing the layers to separate and even crack in heartbreaking fashion.

This structure combined with the relative softness of the material makes most Japanese natural sharpening stones fragile.

The Stone Base: Objectives and Materials

So what can we do to avoid and/or mitigate these risks to our precious stones to ensure they are happy and will last a long time?

My first Ipe stone base. You can see the grooves on the surface cut for decking purposes.

The most important thing you can do to protect your stone is to make a durable base, and to attach your stone firmly to it. The base provides several benefits:

Seals the stone’s underside from water penetration, reducing the potential for separation and cracking;
Provides structural support reducing the risk of cracking, especially as the stone becomes thinner;
Makes the stone easier to handle, reducing the chances of dropping it, and protects it to some degree from bangs, dings and chipping;
Makes the stone more stable in use.

There are several options for materials from which to make a base. Probably the best material on paper is high-chromium stainless steel. I have never made a metal base but some friends have.

Wood is the classic choice, but it has some downsides, for instance, it can warp, crack, rot and bugs might turn it into both home and dinner. So if you select wood be sure to choose a suitable species and develop a base design that sidesteps these shortcomings.

Most people, including me, choose to make their stone bases from wood. Most woods will work. I enjoy experimenting, so at various times I have made and used stone bases made from White Oak, Hinoki, Alaskan Cedar, Honduras Mahogany, Teak, and Ipe. Alaskan Cedar is an excellent wood for this purpose, but the best wood so far has been Ipe. It’s amazing: dense, but tough; It absorbs very little water and won’t crack or rot; Once stable, it doesn’t warp. At all. Bugs hate it. I love it.

File:Roppongi-Mori-Tower-01.jpg — Roppongi Hills Mori Tower Building, Tokyo

So how did I learn about Ipe? An architect specified Ipe to deck an exterior engawa at a balcony on a commercial project I managed some years back, so I decided I had better investigate this material on the Client’s behalf. What I found in various installations in Tokyo and Yokohama was eye opening. A good example is the Ipe decking installed at Roppongi Hills Mori Tower in Tokyo. This building was completed in 2003. I have worked in a Client’s offices in this building off and on for 5 years.

The exterior wooden deck at RH is exposed to more nasty weather conditions than a postman, not to mention heavy foot traffic, but although it has turned grey, it has not split, warped, or rotted. The screws are still tight, and the surface shows very little wear despite several thousand people walking across it each day. Tough stuff.

So around 2010 when I bought my last replacement stone, I bummed a couple of decking cutoffs a local lumberyard had been using as stickers directly on the ground for years. The wood was wet and muddy, but was in good shape. I laminated them together to make the base pictured above. It has been better than any I made before that time.

A few years ago, I did another building with an exterior Ipe deck. The decking subcontractor had mixed in two very dark, almost black pieces of Ipe. At first glance I thought they were ebony. I had the subcontractor replace them for aesthetic reasons. Instead of throwing the boards away (they were already cut to irregular lengths), I scrounged them and made a second base for my favorite natural stone. Once again, excellent performance. Testing is complete.

The Stone Base: Design and Fabrication

Before you start cutting wood for your base, first flatten the bottom of your stone. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but you want at least 75% contact. A carborundum stone or diamond plate will work fine, but a cheaper and easier option is to rub the underside of the stone on a section of concrete sidewalk wet with running water from a garden hose. Be careful to choose a place with low foot traffic because the concrete can become polished and quite slippery as a result.

Depending on the shape of the stone, you may want to grind off rough spots and projections on the sides and ends too. Be careful when you do this to prevent spalling and other damage.

If the stone has visible cracks, let the stone dry in a warm dry location for a few days, then apply masking tape to both sides of the crack, and carefully soak a few drops of super glue deep inside. Hopefully this will prevent the crack from promulgating further.

Now that you have the stone’s final dimensions, make the base. Whatever wood you choose, select quartersawn pieces if possible for maximum stability against warpage, or laminate the base if not. Regarding dimensions, it needs to be thick enough to resist flexing much when pressure is applied during sharpening, and long enough to remain stable when pushed back and forth. Shape the ends so water runs off.

You can make it as attractive or as utilitarian as you like, but avoid creating too many nooks and crannies for stone mud to collect in. The base pictured above retains the beaded profile cut into the wood’s upper surface to drain water from a deck, and it does drain water away from the stone effectively, but mud tends to collect in between the grooves. Not a fatal flaw, but it takes a few extra seconds with a brush to clean.

Be sure to chamfer or round-over all the edges and corners

Place the stone in the exact position on the base you want it to remain forever and mark the stone’s perimeter on the base.

Sand the wood directly underneath where the stone will rest. Don’t sand with the grain, but diagonally to create a cross-hatched rough surface. Completely remove any dust.

Apply masking tape to the wood base at the outside of the stone’s outline.

Place the stone right side up on a flat surface and wrap, bend and fold a single strip of thin cardboard or manila file folder paper tightly around the stone’s sides and ends and secure it in place with masking tape to form both a skirt that seals tightly against the surface, and a reservoir to contain the epoxy used to glue the stone to the base.

Mix up some 2-part epoxy, enough the fill the reservoir at the stone’s underside plus a little extra. You want the epoxy to be thick, not runny. Any epoxy that will allow plenty of working time will do.

Force a little epoxy deep into the wood grain and sandpaper scratches with a small spatula or wood stick. Next apply the same epoxy to the bottom of the stone with your little spatula, and forcefully drive it into the nooks and crannies.

Pour the remaining epoxy into the reservoir. It should fill the reservoir all the way to the brim

Without letting the epoxy harden or flow out, set the stone on the base, or the base on the stone, whichever works best for you, in precise alignment with the masking tape outline you created earlier. Wiggle the stone a little to work any air bubbles out, and push the stone down hard until you sense it is contacting the wood.

Once the epoxy starts to set and become rubbery, but before it hardens, run a razor knife carefully around the stone’s perimeter cutting just a tiny bit into the wooden base, and then peel up and remove the masking tape and any epoxy squeeze-out. Be warned: this will be an armor-plated, DMV-style nightmare to cleanup later if you wait until the epoxy sets hard.

After the epoxy sets, finish the base with whatever material appeals to you. I soak mine in polyurethane thinned 100% and wet sand several times. I then wipe off any PU that remains on the surface. I guarantee you that any finish material you apply that remains on the wood’s surface will fail and look nasty after a few years of use.

I also like to apply a thin coat of Titebond Type III glue to the underside of the feet and base just for good measure. Does it make a difference? I dunno, but I’m a belt, suspenders, and staplegun kinda guy.

My second Ipe stone base. Naturally black as ebony and almost as heavy. I wanted an unusual but subtle shape, one that could not be produced by power tools, so I made the far ends straight, transitioning into a radius at the base’s top surface. This stone is an irregular shape but it does wonderful things to steel. I’m sharpening a Keisaburo 70mm blade using all the stone’s surfaces.

The Stone: Protecting and Reinforcing the Sides

It’s important to limit water from soaking into the stone’s sides along the sedimentary layers to prevent separation. In Japan it’s SOP to paint the sides with natural urushi lacquer, a toxic tree-sap that loves water and doesn’t easily chip. This material may be difficult to obtain outside of Japan and China, I fear.

Another option is an extremely high-solids (aka “goopy”) natural urethane made from the sap of the cashew nut tree called “Cashew.” The material is made in Thailand and sold in Japan, but it may be difficult to obtain outside Japan. Or you can just use a commercial urethane.

Whatever finish you use, it is best to apply the manufacturer’s recommended primer, or at least a thinned initial coat of the same finish to the stone’s sides and ends so it will penetrate thoroughly into the cracks and crevices further reinforcing the stone. Subsequent coats should adhere well to this primer coat if applied before it cures entirely.

Any color will work. I have a habit of painting any tools I might take to a demonstration or jobsite orange. It seems to stunt darwinian leg growth. Besides, orange was the color of the first GC I worked for back in Las Vegas many moons ago and it brings back pleasant memories. They painted everything orange.

One other thing some people do to reinforce their stones is to apply a strip or two of washi paper (traditional Japanese paper made from mullberry tree fibers) to the sides and ends using urushi lacquer, or whatever material they used for the stone. Despite being paper, washi is made from continuous fibers and is surprisingly strong.

Some people go so far as to use washi with printed images or calligraphy on it, and apply a clear coat of polyurethane over the top so the printing is visible. I have never done this before, but it does look interesting.

A large natural sharpening stone called a Numata Tora with printed washi paper applied to sides to reinforce against water infiltration and cracking. To the right you can see one of the cracks this is intended to control.

Some people use cloth but this beyond my experience.

Here is a link to a blog by an artist named Mr. Kobayashi about his sharpening tools with some photos of pretty stone bases. It is written in Japanese, but the pictures are informative. Not sure how well Google Translate would work.

The Stone: Storing & Transporting

Finally, I recommend you wrap your natural stone and its base in clean cloth or newspaper immediately after each sharpening session, while it is still wet, to protect it from dust and dings. After it has dried, store it in a box with a lid. A wooden box is nice, but a plastic one is more practical.

Here’s a link to a video about making a simple traditional Japanese tool box from softwood. If you haven’t made one of these before, they can be fun and quite useful. They don’t see much use on jobsites nowadays because the plastic ones are more durable and much better suited to loading onto construction vehicles.

The high-impact plastic box pictured below is one I use for my sharpening stones. Manufactured by Reese in Japan, it has “Tool Box” heat stenciled into the side. Tougher than boiled owl and stackable, these containers will keep the contents dry no matter how hard it rains so long as the water level stays below the lower lip of the lid. Spring clips at each end do a great job of keeping the lid closed and attached even if the box tumbles off the back of a moving truck onto the road. The road rash will be bad, but the tools will stay inside. The problem is the truck following too closely behind…. Don’t ask me how I know. (ಥ_ಥ)

A Reese brand toolbox. Made of high-impact plastic, these boxes are tough as boiled owl. Rainwater can’t get in, but water vapor can get out. And because they have a standardized footprint, they are stackable so they ride well in the bed of construction vehicles. Just make sure they are strapped down (ツ). This type of portable toolbox has almost entirely replaced the traditional wooden carpenter’s box for practical reasons.

YMHOS

Sharpening Part 21 – The Bulging Bevel

This is what a flat bevel looks like. So sweet.

For everybody in their busy lives, you need to invest in sharpening your tools, and you need to invest in longevity.
Ryan Holmes

In the previous post in this series about sharpening tools we looked at why and how to true the ura, the hollow-ground area on Japanese chisel and plane blades. This post will focus on the opposite side of the wedge that is a cutting edge: the bevel. This discussion is relevant to all plane and chisel blades, not just Japanese tools.

Preface

Before we dive in, I need to clarify something.

Some of our Gentle Readers have been blessed with the opportunity to learn about tools from accomplished Japanese craftsmen, as was I, or have figured them out on their own. If you find this or other posts boring, please remember this blog’s primary purpose is to provide instruction to our Beloved Customers who have not had similar opportunities.

These Beloved Customers are located in many countries and range in experience from newbies to professional woodworkers, so I try to include both advanced information for the professionals, and detailed explanations so newbies can keep up. Consequently, these articles are sometimes long and wordy. I humbly request your kind indulgence on behalf of those who may benefit.

Investing in Longevity

The quote above by Mr Holmes is applicable to the all the principles of sharpening I have described in this series of posts so far. He is a computer dude, not a contractor, joiner or furniture maker, but it is no coincidence he chose to use handtool terminology: it is encoded in human DNA.

His first point is a self-evident admonition, but what about this “investing in longevity” stuff? By definition, an investment is an expenditure of time, resources and/or effort intended to produce a return greater in value than the expenditure. Then how do we go about investing in the longevity of our chisels and planes, and what return should we expect?

While simply grinding sharp edges on our tools helps with making things from wood, I don’t see it as an investment in tools. Rather, if we train ourselves in professional sharpening techniques, and use those techniques to maintain our tools so they function more efficiently and last longer, we can hope to obtain a real-world return we can quantify financially. The investment I encourage you to make is not in things, therefore, but in your own skills.

The Pros and Cons of the Bulging Bevel

The “bulging bevel,” as I call it, is a deformation too frequently seen in plane, chisel and knife blades. It is simply a cutting edge bevel that is protruding and convex instead of flat. In most cases a bulging bevel can make it difficult to properly sharpen a blade adequately, so it deserves our attention. Most bulging bevels are born unintentionally and are harmful, but some are hatched with a purpose in mind. Let’s examine the pros and cons, and throw in some scientific results just for fun.

The geometry of the bulging bevel is clearly superior in a few applications such as carving chisels and knives used in a gouging, scooping motion where a rounded bevel provides better control. Another is chisels used for cutting large and deep mortises where a rounded bevel helps pop out waste easier. Only timber framers cut these kind of mortises, however, and most of them use machines to at least rough out the mortises.

Hidari no Ichihiro 42mm Oiirenomi. Nothing obese about this sweetheart.

Our Beloved Customers are, without exception, extremely intelligent people, so right now some of you are no doubt saying to yourself: “Self,” (that’s what they call themselves when they silently cogitate profound matters) does a rotund bevel make my blades sharper or duller?” Let us consider some scientific results.

When I was a grad student in Japan, a fellow student wrote his thesis on the efficacy in plane blades of the bulging bevel versus the flat bevel. He developed experiments, fabricated testing apparatus, and used scientific methodology and microscopic photography yielding indisputable results. We repeated some of his experiments, discussed his research, and pored over photographs and fondled shavings late into the evenings at his lab in Building 11 at University of Tokyo Hongo campus as I drank coke and he drank sake. I’m not sure he made it home some evenings.

The conclusion he reached was that, from the viewpoint of the wood, and based on the classic sharpness test of cutting rag typing paper, there is no difference in the cutting performance between flat and bulging bevels, so long as two conditions are met: (1) Both types are sharpened to the same bevel angle and same degree of sharpness; and (2) The bulge is not so large as to interfere with the cut. The “same degree of sharpness” condition in proviso 1 is critical to this discussion.

Let’s examine the cutting edge closely. It’s effective scope is only the last few microns (μ) or so of the blade’s width at the extreme edge. 1μ=one millionth of a meter. A human hair is 90μ in diameter. We need to precisely repair and polish this narrow strip of steel using our sharpening stones, but remember that working anything beyond this strip contributes nothing to making the blade sharp.

Here’s an important point we can learn from a careful examination: Given the same number of strokes to the same blade on the same stones over the same amount of time, it is difficult to make a bulging bevel as sharp as a flat bevel, unless one spends the time to use a sharpening machine and jigs as my grad school friend did in his research room.

But the most important point, and one I want you to grasp with both hands and feet and all your teeth is that the time expended and amount of stone consumed when sharpening by hand to a set level of sharpness at the last critical microns of a bulging bevel’s cutting edge is huge compared to a flat bevel. Sharpening using machines and/or honing jigs takes even longer.

In addition to time and cost, another factor we need to consider is certainty, because if we are going to invest the time and stones to sharpen a tool, we need to be sure it will consistently achieve the same level of sharpness every time. Unfortunately, the sharpness of the bulging bevel is uncertain because, instead of guiding the blade to ensure consistent contact between steel and stone at the critical location on the cutting edge, the shape of the bulging bevel causes a significant number of strokes to be wasted on polishing a mound of metal that does nothing to make the blade sharper, but is simply in the way. Not convinced?

Consider the undeniable fact that, despite your best efforts, this irrelevant lump causes the blade to rock around on the stone’s surface like a boat over ocean swells, with the result that, given a fixed number of strokes, a high percentage of those strokes end up polishing the bulge instead of the cutting edge. This is important because, once again, the last micron of the blade is the only part that actually does any cutting, not the bulge.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that you can’t create a fiendishly sharp edge on a blade with a bulging bevel. I’m also not saying that, within reasonable parameters, a convex bevel cuts less efficiently or dulls quicker than the same blade with a flat bevel. It absolutely doesn’t, as my colleague’s research showed. Allow me to restate and summarize the facts so there is no confusion.

It takes longer to create a given level of sharpness at the extreme cutting edge of a bulging bevel than a flat bevel, all else equal;
It consumes more sharpening stone to achieve a given level of sharpness at the extreme cutting edge of a bulging bevel compared to a flat bevel, all else equal; and
There is greater uncertainty about the actual degree of sharpness achieved at the blade’s extreme cutting edge when sharpening a bulging bevel by hand compared to a flat bevel, all else equal.

If you doubt these statements, you must find the truth yourself. Buy or borrow a quality loupe or microscope with enough magnification to detect the scratches left by your usual finishing stone. Start with a dull blade with a truly flat bevel, sharpen it freehand using a set number of strokes, and observe the scratches at the last few microns of the cutting edge with your microscope. Then test the blade’s sharpness with your skin or fingernail. Next, repeat this test with a dull blade with a rounded bevel using the exact same sharpening tools and procedures and the same number of strokes. Once again, observe the scratches and test the sharpness. My grad school friend and I performed this side-by-side experiment at the University of Tokyo several times, with consistent results. Actually, it was a bet and I won. He had to buy the drinks and snacks for a month.

The Causes of Bevel Obesity

Besides pernicious pixies, the most common cause of bevel bulge is simple carelessness, which you can take steps to avoid once you realize the causes.

It is human tendency to try to stabilize the blade’s bevel on the stone while sharpening by applying more pressure on the rear half of the bevel, resulting in the rear half of the bevel (which is all soft jigane in the case of plane blades, and mostly soft jigane in the case of chisels) being abraded quicker than the front half (which contains the harder steel lamination), causing the bevel angle to gradually decrease or even become rounded. Even the best craftsmen make this mistake sometimes.

To avoid this tendency, train yourself to focus pressure on the front half of the bevel closest to the cutting edge. At first, you may overbalance and dig the cutting edge into the stone a few times, but with practice and attention, it will become second nature. It is almost a meditative process. Every professional woodworker worth his salt must learn this skill.

There is nothing wrong with making mistakes when learning a muscle memory skill like freehand sharpening, but too many people can’t be bothered to learn, and then become frustrated when their skills don’t improve immediately. In the end, they become defensive, and twist themselves into knots defending their inadequate techniques. Patience, grasshopper.

BTW, don’t forget to use your handy dandy brass bevel gauge to both check the bevel angle while sharpening and to keep those piratical pixies away.

Hidari no Ichihiro 30mm Atsunomi. What ignorant savage would grind multiple bevels on this?

Another cause of the tumescent bevel is the use of secondary bevels or micro-bevels. We’ll look at these aberrations in the next post in this series.

To make multiple bevels work one almost must use a sharpening or honing jig of some sort. Many allow sharpening jigs to become a substitute for real sharpening skills they didn’t bother to learn. Such jigs can become, in effect, training wheels those who rely on them never grow out of. So sad.

Conclusion

I encourage you to “invest in longevity” with regards to your tools in three ways:

First setup your planes and chisels properly so they will provide you with long, reliable and efficient service. Setting up chisels improves not only their longevity but in many case their performance too, strange though it may seem. I will post articles about setting up and maintaining Japanese planes in the future.
Second, true the ura of your plane and chisel blades efficiently without reducing their useful lifespan needlessly, as described in previous posts; and
Third, invest in yourself by developing and honing the hand skills necessary to sharpen your blades quickly and efficiently while wasting only the absolute minimum of valuable time, steel and stone.

Image result for image of mandalorian helmet

Please master the ancient and bedrock-basic skill of freehand sharpening. All it takes is an understanding of correct principles, followed by concentration and practice; The rest will follow. I promise. “This is the way.”

We will look at other causes of bevel obesity in the next post in this series.