Setting up a honing guide for sharpening
I’ve been woodworking for 30 years and never realized how sloppy I’ve been about grinding and sharpening until I was asked to teach teenagers how to sharpen here at our school for woodworking in Mexico. After a lot of research I decided to go with the Eclipse honing guide on waterstones and grind to a 25° for both chisels and plane irons. I found two handy articles on an easy way to set up the honing guide, but to set up the honing guide for this angle I get a very different result than what I found in these two articles.
Christopher Schwarz says: The bottom line is that if I put the thinnest plane iron in my honing guide and set it to extend 1-1/2” from the front of the jig, it will sharpen the tool at 30°. If I put the thickest plane iron I have in my shop in the honing guide and set it to extend 1-1/2” from the guide, then it will sharpen the tool at a little more than 31°. Does that matter? No, no and no.
The point is that a 1-1/2” projection will return your tool to that same angle every time you sharpen. This will greatly reduce your time on the stones and save abrasive material, steel ….
The Lie-Nielsen article recommends
1 9/16″ = 30°
2 1/8″ – 25°
https://www.lie-nielsen.com/content/documents/instructions/AngleSettingJig.pdf
But I get 25° (checking with my brass Richard Kell angle gauge) by setting my honing guide 2 5/8″ from the edge. That’s a whopping ½ inch difference.
If anyone out there has a honing guide and a digital angle finder, I’d appreciate it if you could do some checking and let me know how far from the front of the jig you set a blade to get a 25° angle.
Replies
Primary or secondary, and close enough is fine
Hi,
Are you doing the primary bevel or the secondary (what woodworkers call the mirco-bevel, and machinists correctly call the primary bevel)? If it is the secondary one, I say forget the honing jig, set the primary bevel on the stone, lift the back of the blade just slightly, and do a couple of circles on the stone, and done. You can hit the back of the blade if you end up with a bur. Free handing seconds is faster and simpler that jigging them.
For primary, if you do want to use a jig (and have way more patience than I have,; I always grind those), hitting the exact angle isn't that critical. Most angle are "about 20" or "about 25" or "about 30" . Given differences in blade and stone thickness, adjust the angle gauge you already have to the angle you want, set the jig to it, and call it good. If you want, you could write down the distance for future reference.
Setting up honing guide
It's the primary bevel I'm concerned with. And I'm trying to come up with a system that will be easy for our students to use to get them started. I need to correct what I wrote in my original post - I get 25 degrees by setting my Eclipse honing guide to 1 5/8" from the edge of the jig. That's pretty close to the system Schwarz is using. Maybe the author of the Lie-Nielsen article was using a different sized guide. And the Eclipse guide actually states on the guide that it should be set to 40 mm for a 25 degree angle. That's just a 2 mm difference from my 1 5/8 setting. So I guess my problem is solved.
This morning I set the grinding wheel tool rest to 25 degrees and ground a hollow bevel on a chisel. I then used my setting for the honing guide and discovered that the tool rest and the honing guide are pretty close to the same angle, making honing much faster.
All good
Keen- Glad you got that worked out. Anything to get them youngin's into woodworking, and away from all those iWidget things:)
I cut out Pinewood Derby cars on my bandsaw for our local Cub Scout pack. I cut them out to their design and them hit them on the belt sander to pull the saw marks out while they watch (the scouts are not allowed to use power tools per BSA rules). I know that it would "build character" if I made them hand sand out the marks themselves, but I find that it just makes them hate woodworking. Small steps-
This forum post is now archived. Commenting has been disabled