‘Be careful you don’t cut yourself. The edges are sharp enough to shave with.’ ‘Girls don’t shave’, Arya said. ‘Maybe they should. Have you ever seen the septa’s legs?”
George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
I mentioned in a previous article my belief that a love of sharp tools is embedded in the Japanese people’s DNA. I am convinced this is by no means limited to the people of these mountainous green islands for it is deep in mine too, and it may be in yours.
Whether they were made of bone, flint, copper, bronze or iron, humans of all races and all locations worked with axe and adze, chisel and scythe, sword and dagger to keep body and soul in close proximity for many thousands of years before written language was invented or the first Microsoft product crashed and burned. Our reliance on and love of sharp tools is still part of our DNA, to one degree or another, and for good reasons.
The words we humans make and use give insight into our deeper natures, so a very brief lesson regarding a single word in the Japanese language, one that is an intentional, defining characteristic of our tools, and one you will not find in any textbooks, may be illustrative of this point.
Cutting Flavor
The word your most humble and obedient servant has in mind is “kireaji” 切れ味 pronounced “ki/reh/ah/jee. This word is comprised of two Chinese characters. The first of the two ideograms being 切 , which is pronounced in its un-conjugated form as “setsu” or “kiru,” meaning “cut.” This is an interesting character. People who study these things say it is an ancient combination of two characters. The small one on the left looks like the character for the number seven 七, but actually it represents a vertical and crosswise cut in the shape of a plus sign 十. The character to the right, 刀 , is pronounced “to” or “katana” and means “sword.” So “kiru” means to cut with a sword or blade.
The second character in the word is “Aji,” 味 meaning “flavor.” Combined, these two characters mean “cutting flavor,” but the resulting word has nothing to do with the human sense of taste and everything to do with the feeling transmitted to the user when a blade is cutting. This word is used in reference to all cutting tools from axes to swords to razors, and certainly for knives, chisels, and planes.
In the English language, the closest word we have is “feeling of sharpness,” I suppose, but it isn’t the same. The act of cutting, in the Japanese tradition, is a sensory experience, one that can be pleasant, in the case of a well-designed sharp blade, or unpleasant in the case of a clumsy dull blade. I think you now have a sense of what the word kireaji means, and how how it feels, but do you understand why it is an important word when talking about tools?
When we speak with our blacksmiths and sharpeners about the tools they produce, the kireaji we expect of their products is always part of the discussion. A blade can have a good kireaji (良い切れ味), an indifferent kireaji (どうでもいい切れ味）or a “distasteful” kireaji (不味い切れ味). It can be “brittle” (切れ味が脆い）or it can even be “sweet” (切れ味が甘い）meaning soft as a spoiled child. We always insist the first meaning be applicable because anything less is failure. Even if some of our customer’s tastes may not be refined enough to discern the difference, ours are.
We work closely with our blacksmiths and sharpeners to make sure they understand our requirements for sharpness. And just to be sure, we constantly test their blades to ensure compliance. If you buy a tool from us that has an especially sharp edge and looks like it may have been used lightly, please understand this is part of our QC efforts and not a return or a reworked reject.
If you know of other languages that have a similar idiom, please let us know in the comments section below.
Like the flavor of fine wine, rich chocolate or gourmet donuts (mmm… donuts), the kireaji of cutting tools varies with materials, blacksmiths, and specifications. At C&S Tools we are not satisfied with outward appearance only, but take our products to a different level by making kireaji the very highest priority. This makes C&S Tools almost unique among retailers of edged tools.
Does kireaji matter to you?
Bon appetite!
YMHOS
If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.
Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie, may all my blades taste like a mountain troll’s nose-wiping rag.
The chisels, knives, and planes we sell are all hand-forged by ancient smiths. There may or may not be dwarvish ancestry in one or two cases, but without exception our blacksmiths make blades with unsurpassed crystalline structure that cut like Satan’s own scalping knife.
The Psychology of Steel
It’s important for those of us who use such sharp handtools to understand how they think. Allow me to put on my metallurgical psychologist’s hat for just a moment to expound. FYI this is a highly-polished brass skullcap engraved with runes of power and decorated with multiple rings of tiny silver bells suspended from stubby brass rods attached to the cap that tinkle prettily when I walk; Glitzier but more dignified than the aluminum-foil cap with projecting curly copper wires I wear daily to protect my mind from the brain-rays of alien used-car salesmen. But I digress.
High-quality blades are especially single-minded and simply live to cut wood. If you don’t believe me, just ask them. If you listen carefully you will hear the chirping and tapping sounds they make when they are happy. And the shavings and chips that fly from their misty silver edges will attest to the fun they are having. They love cutting wood best of all, but the problem is they will try their darndest to cut anything they can latch onto. It’s just their nature; something we must understand and deal with if we are to prevent the servant from becoming the bloody master in the blink of an eye.
Safety Priorities in the Real World
Not only does “haste makes waste,” but when dealing with sharp tools, haste can be relied on to produce leakage of copious quantities of red sticky stuff. Not that long ago, it was common, even acceptable, for serious injury and deaths to occur on construction projects, in factories and in workshops. Indeed, hundreds of deaths on a single major construction project were common throughout most of human history; This was just accepted as the cost of getting the job done.
When I was a young man working construction projects, most such injuries and even deaths were assumed to be the price the injured/deceased workman paid for failing to “pay attention,” or “not being careful.” Fortunately, attitudes have changed.
When I was still a schoolboy, my father (RIP), was a construction superintendent in Las Vegas undertaking a pre-cast concrete parking garage project. Due to a stupid and entirely-avoidable error at the pre-cast plant in Arizona, haunches on the reinforced-concrete columns failed and 5 floors collapsed like dominoes killing three workmen and disabling several others. This was not their fault anymore than it was my father’s, but men died, families were destroyed and he was made an emotional wreck for a year afterwards. No jobsite safety rules could have prevented or even mitigated this disaster.
More recently, I was peripherally involved in a project here in Tokyo where a combination of events, including a clear violation of well-established safety rules, resulted in a basement fire killing two workmen and three fire fighters. In this case, safety rules related to “hot-work” were in-place and compliance required by law, so that careful adherence should have prevented this tragic loss of life. It appears they were not followed, however. But the number of dead and injured could have been much higher if not for other safety rules and procedures that were followed.
Nowadays everyone says “Safety First.” Your humble servant finds this slogan irritating, however, because in the real world, safety is never first priority. If it was, no one would ever undertake any potentially dangerous work; No one would swim, drive cars, ride buses, bicycles, motorcycles, snowmobiles, or even walk outside; Staircases and bathtubs would be banned, and we would all huddle in grass huts wearing helmets and full body armor. And no hot sauce!
No, in the real world we all set priorities, and except for our small children, safety is never number one. So how do we deal with safety risks? We put on our boots, stride out into the world, analyze the risks we are aware of and find ways to either avoid them entirely or to mitigate their negative impacts. But we place getting the job done, and thereby feeding, clothing and housing our families, as first priority. At least that’s how responsible fathers live. Do you disagree?
What we must never allow to happen is the rationalization of avoidable injuries against profits, schedule, hubris or stupidity. Too much of that in politics. And as much as the conflicted lawyers may disagree, we must each take some responsibility for both our safety and of those we live and work alongside. Therefore, the wise man with aspirations to become an old wise man will study safety unceasingly throughout his entire life, and share the lessons he learns with others.
Since caveman days the first reaction by the members of a tribe to an accident went something like “how did Bubba manage to get stepped on by a woolly mammoth?!”!? Perhaps the second reaction, usually from a brother-in-law, was “He’s so stupid it was bound to happen.” Whatever the reason, whenever we hear of the serious injury or death of someone we know our DNA pushes us to learn from their misfortune. This is your humble servant’s ghoulish effort to share (シ)。.
Safety Rules vs. Safely Habits
As a natural (and often irritating) extension of the observations in the previous paragraphs, everywhere we look nowadays there are layers and layers of redundant rules with busybodies busily enforcing them and lawyers greedily profiting from them. They don’t call it the “nanny state” for nuttin.
Safety rules are helpful but don’t do us any real good unless we turn them into those unconscious actions commonly called habits. Like never using an electric toaster while taking a bath, or never pointing the barrel of a rifle at anyone anytime even by accident, or always putting on the car’s brakes before the vehicle crashes through the storefront, the potential consequences are just too severe to leave them as empty rules.
I don’t want to sound like a safety nazi, but as someone who has made one, perhaps even two stupid mistakes in his lifetime (difficult to believe, I know (ツ)), I feel compelled to point out one rule and a few wise safety habits worth developing especially to those of our Beloved Customers that purchase our chisels and knives and want to continue to have more than just an emotional attachment to their fingers, hands, toes and feet.
The most important cutting-tool safety rule you need to follow is this: Don’t let them bite you! This is a common-sense, obvious rule, one ignored constantly so I am reminding you politely… for now.
Sharp wide blades can cut a lot of useful stuff inside you in the blink of an eye. Even a deep injury won’t even be painful if your blades are sharp, at least at first, but the damage may be impossible to repair fully and too often is life-changing, never in a good way. So the application of this rule is to simply never give cutting tools an opportunity to do mischief.
OK, now that the big safety rule is on the table, let’s break it down into three basic safety habits.
Safety Habit Number One: Never Cut Towards Yourself or Anyone Else.
The first habit your humble servant begs Beloved Customer to embed deep into your soul is to never ever ever never cut towards yourself or anyone else.
An example: A universal mistake everyone, without exception, makes at least once is to hold down a piece of wood in one hand while cutting it with a chisel or knife motivated by the other hand towards the hand holding down the wood. They slip, or the chisel or knife jumps out of the cut, or the chisel or knife is dull and they lose control, or they apply too much force, or don’t allow enough distance to slow the tool down after the cut should end, or pixies distract them, or Murphy starts rockin like zeppelin. Whatever the cause, in the next instant the wood quickly changes a pretty crimson color, and one hand feels strange.
So please, never ever ever never allow your hands to get in this situation. Assume I’ve now yelled this warning into your ears 50 times while showering your face in fragrant spittle and wacked you in the forehead with a wooden mallet with each cockroach-killing screech to make the lesson sink in. It’s that important.
Safety Habit Number Two: Reject All Distractions While You Have a Cutting Tool in Your Hand
Another common mistake everyone makes from time to time is to allow a distraction to affect them while holding a chisel, knife or axe. For instance, trying to juggle a can of beer and a chisel in the same hand at the same time may place one’s nose or eyeball at risk (alcohol is such an uplifting beverage). Or scrambling to answer a call on a mobile phone without setting a super-sharp carving knife down first may result in the sudden appearance of an inconveniently leaking red nick in one’s neck that doesn’t quite compliment one’s intended fashion statement in hand-embroidered woodworking robes.
Case in point: Many moons ago, when I was a poor, self-employed student lacking my current elegant white beard and with much less dignity around the waist, I was cutting mortises for a custom door with a sharp chisel at my workbench setup on an apartment balcony, using the time-honored butt clamp, of course, when a yellow-jacket wasp (of which I have an uncontrollable phobia ever since a frantic encounter as a small child with a hornet’s nest in Grandma’s attic), landed on my leg. In a blind panic I swiped the wasp off my left thigh with my left hand, which by total coincidence was also holding the chisel. 40 years later I still have that big unsightly scar that ended my promising career as a bikini model before it really got started, tragically robbing the world of great beauty (ツ)。
Professional woodcarvers all know somebody with deep, crippling injuries to nerves and tendons in hands, arms or legs from using carving tools improperly or while distracted. Not a few have lost whole hands. The wise ones wear kevlar or steel mesh gloves when they must secure work by hand while using chisels or knives. While I don’t condone it, professional woodcarvers must sometimes violate the rules just to get the job done. These safety gloves are good for preventing slicing cuts, and help to reduce the severity of injuries in all cases, but may not stop a knife or chisel from stabbing you if it is motivated, so please don’t violate the first rule just because you’re wearing fancy gloves.
A stainless steel safety glove (right), kevlar safety glove (center), and a good reason to use a safety glove when carving
The solution? Set your knives and chisels aside in a safe manner and location before you do anything other than cutting wood. In other words, have the self control and situational awareness to reject all distractions.
Oh yea, and please don’t drink and drive knives, chisels, axes or adzes.
Safety Habit Number Three: Always Set Your Tools Aside in a Safe Place and So They Can’t Move
This final safety habit is related to number two above in that distractions often cause us to violate it. In this case the hazard is a chisel or knife falling from a work surface, at which point Murphy rolls up his sleeves, licks his eyeball with his long purple tongue, and painstakingly guides the tool cutting-edge first towards ankles, feet and toes. In Japan where work has traditionally been performed while sitting on the floor, a common problem is accidentally stepping-on or kicking a chisel. Of course, the chisel doesn’t appreciate such boorish behavior and bites back.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t wear thick leather steel-toed work boots in my workshop. I prefer flip-flops or crocs without the heavy and dreadfully unfashionable iron mongery. The problem is that flip-flops are not tough enough to prevent a 200gram atsunomi falling cutting-edge-first from a height of 70cm from severing a toe, so I am careful to not give Murphy the opportunity to place his bomb sight on my “little piggies.” I encourage you to always be aware of Murphy and bench kitties and never put yourself at their mercy.
The solution? Be careful of where and how you set your tools down and make good practices a cast-iron habit.
Don’t leave them hanging over the edge of your workbench, or balanced on top of other tools where a bump from a passing bench kitty or vibration from a hammer impact might knock them off. If you have several chisels or knives on your workbench at the same time, use a chisel box. Another effective solution is to make a tool rest by cutting some notches in a stick of wood, place it in a safe location on your work surface and rest the tool’s blades in those notches to keep them organized, to protect their cutting edges from dings, and most importantly, to prevent perfidious pixies and felonious felines from pushing or rolling tools off your workbench and Murphy from dive-bombing your wiggly pigglies. This is especially important if children have access to your workplace or you have imperious felines swanning around demanding snacks, ear-rubs and freshly laundered, fluffy warm cushions as is their due as the master race.
How to Develop Good Safety Habits
Everything we have discussed so far is only hot air and electrons unless you manage to actually ingrain wise safety habits into your soul. I don’t know how it works for you, but the steps below work for me. Whatever it takes please embed safety habits into your work procedures.
Step 1: In the construction industry of more and more countries, wise contractors have established procedures related to safety they perform when planning the work. There are multiple steps involved, but the essence is to analyze the work BEFORE it begins, write down the plan and list every serious risk imaginable, and have both management and workers review and comment. All of us are smarter than each of us, you see.
A satisfactory solution must be developed and documented either eliminating or mitigating each risk. The risky work is not allowed to begin until everyone involved understands the safety plan and agrees to comply. Supervisors must observe and enforce them. There must be consequences to encourage workers to comply. This process is irritating and seems wasteful at first, but the importance becomes clear once an avoidable accident occurs. Your humble servant has seen it save lives and limbs multiple times.
In the case of a single person working alone you may not need to write things down, but I encourage you to analyze the risks of pushing that chisel or swinging that axe, develop safety solutions, and employ them each time you perform that operation. This will limit sticky red messes.
Step 2: When you have an accident (and you will), stop working and figure out how it happened, and what you could have done to avoid it. Hopefully it won’t be while waiting for X-ray results after an iron worker drops a bunch of jagged cutoffs of corrugated steel decking on you from 14 stories above (that lesson in gravity cost me a tendon in my hand, scars on forearm, back and shoulders, lost days at work (back when no compensation was provided for such incidents), and destroyed a perfectly good hardhat). On the plus side, I instantly discovered a hidden talent for entertaining curse words!
Step 2: Every time you find yourself in a similar situation, stop and consider if the same bloody thing could happen again, and what you should do differently. For instance, figuring out a clamping arrangement that keeps your left hand out of the path of travel of a bloodthirsty carving chisel is something worth taking a few seconds to do. Remember, prevention beats Prozac.
Step 3: Remember the pain and embarrassment of the original accident, and use the solutions you developed every time. In this way Murphy is thwarted and a good habit is born.
I can also share a personal superstition with you. Everyone nicks themselves occasionally when using sharp tools. I know I do. When this happens, I place a tiny smudge of the red stuff on the tool that bit me, and on any other cutting tools that have yet to nick me, and let it dry. This heathenish action seems to quash their curiosity about how I taste in advance. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what I hear them murmuring when I’m wearing my brightly tinkling metallurgical psychologist’s hat (ツ）。
There is one thing I can promise Gentle Reader from personal experience: you will find a severed tendon or damaged nerves in a hand or foot to be more than just inconvenient. And if, like me, fashion is your life, scars may tragically preclude your picture from ever appearing in the Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated. Such a loss!
Be careful. Keep safety a high priority. Plan safety. Develop good habits and make them automatic. And don’t let your tools bite you or anyone else, even if they beg with those big puppy-dog eyes.
YMHOS
If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.
Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. May all my chisels seek my blood if I lie.
The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.
Confucius
In this article in our series about sharpening Japanese woodworking blades your always humble and obedient servant will try to bring all the information provided in previous articles together into a single practical example. That does not mean the entire contents of those articles are 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 risk creating more confusion than progress.
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 their instruction. 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 articles in this series, and let’s sharpen a blade.
Removing Damage and Correcting the Bevel
I will not even try to deal with all the possible starting points for sharpening a woodworking blade, but in this example we shall assume a starting point of the lands surrounding the hollow-ground area at the blade’s ura being 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.
Richard Kell 625-3000 Brass Bevel Gauge
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 your 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 diamond stones or FLAT carborundum stones 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 a 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 cutting edge with your thumb (over and away from the edge not towards the cutting 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 light 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 flat and in good shape, we need to abrade the bevel until the flat we made in step 4 is gone and we have created a minuscule, 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 violently 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, so cool it down with water.
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 you created on the cutting edge 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 mostly use a 1000 grit at this stage, but may use a 2,000 grit stone as well. Whatever stone you use, it must be clean and flat. As described in previous posts, you need to check the flatness of your stones 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 diagonals to 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’s face is distorted, flatten it using whatever method you prefer, a diamond plate/stone, a specialized truing block, or my preferred method, another stone of the same grit. If you use my method 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 blade’s 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 evaporated by now, so 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 especially important at this stage in the sharpening process. 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 6,000~10,000 grit synthetic stone. This may not or may not be the final finishing stone you choose to 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. Be sure to keep the blade’s bevel in close contact with the stone’s surface on both the push and pull 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 the cause 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. The final 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.
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 move 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 mind 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 readily available, 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 cheap, 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 it that quickly right away, don’t rush, just practice and get a little quicker each time: Remember the turtle with the sail: Festina Lente: 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 grooves into the lands at the right and left of 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 or the fashion page. Mine seem to like the funny pages. 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’ll make the introductions, so let’s ask them when we meet again in the big lumberyard in the sky.
In the next and final article in this series, we will consider how to restore a worn-out ura in a plane (and maybe even a chisel) blade. Is there no end to the excitement? Until then, I have the honor to remain,
YMHOS
If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the see the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.
Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may Mama Shishi bite my head off.
Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small.
Lao Tzu
A key milestone Beloved Customer 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 probably 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 the formation of a burr is only a milestone in the sharpening process, not a goal. A clean, uniform, smooth burr signals the elimination of all major defects, chips, and dents at the cutting edge. Indeed, if we seek an efficient cutting edge, we must remove through abrasion enough metal to also remove the deepest defect in the cutting edge. But regardless of the ductility of the steel, 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.
The milestone we need to pass in the sharpening process as soon as possible is the creation of a barely-detectable, tiny and clean burr. My advice is to produce it by abrading only the bevel side of the cutting edge on your 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 test it.
Testing the Burr
As you are working to produce the burr, you will need to frequently and 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 produced a small burr the full width of the cutting edge, and confirmed its existence with your fingertips, you then need to test it for defects. If you run your fingernail along the burr’s length (the width of the blade), your fingernail will snag on nicks and defects in the burr, something your nerves can sense long before your naked eye can detect them. Keep working the blade’s bevel on the rough stone until the edge and/or burr is consistent across the full width of the blade, and free of nicks, 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 no longer remains in the cutting edge.
In the case of quality Japanese woodworking blades, 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 or even non-existent. Once again, except in the case of removing large nicks, chips or other severe damage, creating a big burr is not only a waste of time, stones and steel, but if, heaven forfend, 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, polish the bevel on the medium and then fine stones. The burr will be polished away evaporating without special effort.
Finally, polish the ura side of the blade on the finest stone you intend to use. Feel the burr with your fingerprints and check it with your fingernail. Then polish the bevel on the fine stone. Repeat this front and back polishing process until the burr is polished away entirely.
Assuming the ura is already polished on your finest finishing stone, you shouldn’t need to touch the blade’s ura again 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, so please 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 all stones but the final finishing stone for the last 3 or 4 strokes creating new diagonal scratch marks on it.
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 scratches. 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 powerful tools at your disposal that can sense the state of a steel blade as thin as the edge of nothing, and without using your eyes, tools you’ve always had and which didn’t cost you a thing. 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
The University of Tokyo’s Yasudo Kodo building hidden behind Autumn Ginko leaves.
If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.
Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may my eyebrows grow 10 inches everyday.
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 it’s poor abused 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% maybe? Assuming this approximation is correct, just for the sake of illustrating a point, if you paid $100 dollars for the stone, that means $20 was turned into mud and washed away without providing Beloved Customer any benefit at all. And don’t forget the time you spent 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, ends and corners of the stone’s face too?
Developing Good Habits
When developing these intelligent work habits, it helps to cross-hatch the stone’s surface with a carpenter’s pencil to help you keep track of the areas you have not yet touched. Never fear, for while industrial diamonds are made from graphite, the form of graphite in pencil lead is still softer than the finest sharpening stone and won’t affect the sharpening process a bit.
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 a blade’s bevel with one corner of the blade hanging off the stone part of the time, alternating evenly and frequently between right and left corners, of course. Strange as it may seem this technique is effective at not only keeping your sharpening stone flatter and making it last longer, 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’d wager.
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 Gentle Reader once again that the purpose of this blog is not to provide entertainment, sell stuff, troll for clicks or to trip and roll subscribers into Google Analytics’ s*thole, 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
If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the see the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.
Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may my face fall off.
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
Beloved Customer has of course 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. In this article we will examine some of those consequences.
The first and most immediately obvious consequence of skewing the blade when sharpening it is that the blade tends to wear-out, or hollow-out, the center area of the sharpening stone’s face 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, including the edges, ends and those pesky corners. BTW, this is not a kindly suggestion but a commandment.
Second, skewing the blade usually results in the nut holding the blade placing uneven pressure on it, with the natural result that the blade wears unevenly, and quite often, develops a skewed cutting edge. Think about it.
In addition, the leading corner is exposed to more fresher, sharper, 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, especially in the case of kiwaganna and other skewed-blade planes, causing self-doubt, mental anguish, and even piranha in the head (aka “going bananas“). But if you are aware this can happen, and pay attention, you can easily compensate for this tendency thereby avoiding months of expensive psychoanalysis by Dr. Alonzo and the need to consume pallets of his pretty purple pills.
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 remove problematic diagonal scratches, BTW, is to make the last few strokes on the finishing stone perpendicular to the cutting edge.
So in summary, habitually skewing a blade while sharpening it is not ideal and should be avoided, but is not catastrophic. It will make one’s sharpening efforts a little less efficient and may cause blades and stones to become distorted, but these negatives can be dealt with, at some cost.
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. Your humble servant confesses, and Dr. Alonzo can confirm, that his was indeed skewed for a long time.
These aren’t things you wouldn’t have figured out for yourself eventually, Beloved Customer, 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. And there’s always those pretty purple pills to take the edge off (ツ).
YMHOS
Shakespeare’s Shrew, Katherine Minola, played by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1987 movie. In this photograph she’s obviously watching someone skewing a plane or chisel blade while sharpening it. Clint Eastwood probably learned a thing or two about squinting from this lady.
If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.
Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may all my mental faculties become hopelessly skewed such that the only occupation I will be fit for is politics.
Festina Lente Doors in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy
Long-term consistency beats short-term intensity.
Bruce Lee
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, so classical references shouldn’t prove too onerous.
If Beloved Customer pays attention to their blade’s movement when sharpening, you 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 go rock-n-rolla? That’s right, the crapulous bulging bevel rears its ugly head and spits stinky sticky stuff in our eye.
Using short strokes, somewhere around 1-½ inch in length, makes it much 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, as far as it goes, and am adding the following clarification to avoid confusion.
A short stroke produces smaller changes in the angles of one’s joints 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, the angles of the joints in hand, wrist, arm and shoulder change less during short strokes than in longer strokes, making it easier to manage joints and tendons 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. It’s that darn badger again.
Please note that this analysis is simply your humble servant’s opinion, and perhaps not a weighty one at that because I am not a physician, nor have I conducted the physiological studies and dissections upon which a rigorous opinion should be based.
I know that making short strokes feels inefficient, and it is compared to a machine, but Beloved Customer is probably not a Cyberdyne Systems product with a titanium alloy combat chassis. 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 hast slowly.” It is defined in the dictionary 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 the City State of Firenze 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
Bug-nibbled 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.
If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.
Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may my food turn to ashes in my mouth (a very ancient curse indeed).
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
Lao Tzu
When using rough stones ( ≤1000grit), 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, and until one’s hands and wrists beceome trained, trying to abrade the blade on both push and pull strokes is likely to cause the blade to rock creating the bilious bulging bevel.
There are certainly exceptions to this rule, and we actively encourage Beloved Customer 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 and angle of the dangle are hard to sense. Perhaps another part of it is due to the difficulty of controlling the complicated and constantly-changing angles of bones and joints. 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 your humble servant has ever spoken with on the subject, it takes years of focused on-the-job practice, and extreme concentration at first to overcome pre-existing bad habits and to avoid developing importune muscle memory.
Which Direction?
At this point you need to make a decision, unless you have already made it inadvertently. That is, whether to sharpen on the push stroke (pushing the blade away from you) or on 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, as mentioned in previous articles in this series, 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.
Training Techniques
If Beloved Customer is determined to develop the ability to sharpen on both push and pull strokes, your humble servant 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 from the stone’s surface entirely 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, becoming Zen Master Bubba.
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 strive for smooth motion. It’s at the transition from one direction to the other where Murphy will toss a banana peel under your heel.
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 alligator, 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?). This is very important.
And don’t forget to use your thin stainless steel straightedge and brass bevel gauge frequently to check the bevel for flatness and proper angle.
And as always, relentlessly beat down your inner badger, brutally crush and sow salt on 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
If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.
Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may my wife be plagued with runners in her hose.
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
In this post in our series about sharpening Japanese woodworking blades, your humble servant will propose some useful stances and grips to employ when sharpening. I hope we can do a better job than Mr. Squarepants, at least.
Stances
There are several practical stances for sharpening, including standing, sitting on a bucket, a bench or 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 above the floor while moving the blade forward and back.
Flex your knee joints, and loosen your elbow joints and wrists, because locking up your wrists and elbows will make it impossible to avoid rocking the blade. This is important: You must actively concentrate on allowing your wrists to rotate so as to keep the blade’s bevel flat on the stone’s face, because it won’t happen by accident, or because Jesus loves you.
In the case of a normal resharpening job, instead of a major repair, remember the goal that craftsmen have endlessly sought for thousands of years: to abrade and polish the last few microns of steel at the extreme cutting edge, using the flat bevel as an alignment jig.
But don’t let yourself get lost in the weeds; Focus on abrading and polishing the entire bevel. If you do so, the last few microns, which the human eye can’t see, will be in good shape.
Focus the majority of your finger’s 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. Remember, 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 when sharpening it will influence the quality of the results and the stress on your hands and wrists, 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’ll only consider three grip methods here. If you are not using them now, 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.
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 headFour 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, especially for elegant ladies.
In the case of the three-finger grip, the blade is oriented directly in front of and on the body’s centerline with cutting edge located 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-finger 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 and a rounded cutting edge. While this may be unavoidable, especially in the case of narrow blades, try to counteract this tendency by focusing 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 direct 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 ways that can be either useful or not, depending on whether you are the sharp-eyed master of the process or the grunting badger. Please remain aware of this potential.
Chisel Grip
The grip I use on chisels is very similar to the grip for planes, and varies with width.
Like the famous Mexican weather babe Yanet Garcia, the chisel’s long handle shifts its center of gravity towards the butt making it a bit more difficult to manage, so a grip method that is absolutely stable in a single hand is advantageous.
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
Polishing a 70mm plane blade’s 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. This too requires zen-like focus and strict control over one’s inner badger to avoid wearing notches 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 notches into 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. Few give this matter any thought, but most should.
YMHOS
The intrepid bucket of bolts Serenity.
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Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may I grow a lucky third nose.
It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand – Michelangelo Buonarroti 1475-1564
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
In the previous post in this series about 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 beastly bulging bevel. In this part of the series, your humble servant will touch on a subject that will make thoughtful people think and unfuddle befuddled folks: 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 your most humble and obedient servant’s 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. For instance, 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 never forget there will be a price to pay later over many sharpening sessions to restore the proper bevel, so it is only a temporary solution at best, and certainly not a useful 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 had cut 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.
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 by using 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 too 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 manageable, 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 a crazy 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 setting up honing jigs, or 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 barbaric 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 resulting in unsightly bulges even the best elastic girdle can’t conceal.
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 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 sole and mouth, or even slightly dampen the wood with a planing fluid such as water, whiskey, or unicorn wee wee. All these methods can help.
Emergency Nano-bevel Modification
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 buttfuzz 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 overdo it, or do it too often, the nano-bevel will become a microbevel in a bad location, 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 falls out and your dog barfs on your shoes! Or is it your dog’s hair will fall out and you will barf up shoes? I forget.
Now where did I put that jar of planing fluid….?
Planing Fluid
Allow me to explain what “planing fluid” is and why I use it. This term refers to moisture applied to the surface of the wood to reduce tearout when planing by either hand or machine.
The good Lord designed trees to move water from the ground into the sky, so wood loves water. When a tree is cut down it immediately begins to loose cell water making the wood lighter in weight and much harder and stiffer structurally. But it still loves water.
If we apply a little moisture to the surface of a board the wood’s fibers become slightly softer, more flexible and less likely to develop tearout when planed, at least temporarily. The moisture is usually applied with a damp rag. Not too much, now!
Regarding the moisture source, water works well and is priced right, but it may dry slowly and produce inconvenient side effects. 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.
Whiskey has a good water/alcohol ratio that wets the wood about the right amount and then evaporates cleanly. Too wet and it penetrates too deeply and can discolor the wood. Too dry and it evaporates too quickly.
I used Isopropyl alcohol when living in the US where it is dirt cheap, but it is considered a pharmaceutical in Japan and so is very expensive, another convenient case of collusion between manufacturers, retailers and government to fix prices. As with other alcohol products not intended for internal consumption, it contains actual poisonous additives demanded by greedy governments for the sole purpose of maximizing tax revenues. I don’t need those poisons touching my tools or my skin. Cheap whiskey, however, doesn’t contain such poisons (other than alcohol, of course), it’s cheaper and smells better.
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 invest 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 dudes and dudettes, I’m done sharpening using my most excellent honing jig for now and am off to the beach! Don’t wait up.
If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.
Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or thuggish Twitter and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may my blade bevels multiply exponentially.
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