Hi all. New forum member here. I'm reasonably new to this. See there is a lot of experience and expertise on here.
My question relates to touching up chisels by hand when they get a little blunt and some observations on an issue I found when trying to match sharpening angles between the Tormek and a manual honing guide.
My garage doubles as my workshop - so there is not a lot of space and I can't leave my Tormek permanently set up. It lives in a cupboard. Rather than setting up the Tormek each time I need to do a quick blade touch up, I figure I can give chisels a few swipes on my waterstones.
Originally I was planning to use my eclipse-style honing guide to do this. I have a jig when allows me to set the blade at a precise 30 degree (or whatever) sharpening angle. But that's when I noticed a problem. I was sharpening a decent size firmer chisel (30mm or 1 1/4") and I found that even though I had set my grinding angle on the Tormek to 30 degrees using the angle master, it didn't nearly match the (precise) 30 degree angle on the honing guide. So I scratched my head a bit and realised that, in fact, the 30 degree sharpening angle on the Tormek only applies to the very leading edge of the chisel bevel. Since the sharpening wheel is round, the bevel is obviously ground concave. So the angle on the leading edge is 30 degrees but the grinding angle somewhat higher on the trailing edge of the chisel bevel. In fact, when I use the bevel angle gauges on the angle master side to check the Tormek ground angle, the bevel angle didn't really match the 30 degree gauge at all.
I played around with the angle master to give me a grinding angle which would match the precise 30 degrees of my manual jig. The easiest way to do this was to change the stone diameter setting in the angle master. I found that if I set the stone diameter to just over 200mm (whatever that is in inches) I got a match with the 30 degree bevel achieved with my manual honing guide. Clearly the Tormek bevel is concave and the manual bevel flat. But it would be good to easily set up an angle on a manual honing guide to add a very small microbevel to the Tormek edge.
And then I did a bit of reading and see that some people touch up (or finish sharpening) their Tormek sharpened chisel blades by free hand with a few strokes on a waterstone using the concave chisel bevel surface as an angle guide. This gives you a very small microbevel - essentially coplanar with the ground bevel edge. So I figure it is too hard to match a manual honing guide jig angle to a Tormek angle.
So this was a long way of getting to my question. I'm about to try using the freehand manual approach. Is this the best way of touching up my blades rather than setting up the Tormek each time?
My question relates to touching up chisels by hand when they get a little blunt and some observations on an issue I found when trying to match sharpening angles between the Tormek and a manual honing guide.
My garage doubles as my workshop - so there is not a lot of space and I can't leave my Tormek permanently set up. It lives in a cupboard. Rather than setting up the Tormek each time I need to do a quick blade touch up, I figure I can give chisels a few swipes on my waterstones.
Originally I was planning to use my eclipse-style honing guide to do this. I have a jig when allows me to set the blade at a precise 30 degree (or whatever) sharpening angle. But that's when I noticed a problem. I was sharpening a decent size firmer chisel (30mm or 1 1/4") and I found that even though I had set my grinding angle on the Tormek to 30 degrees using the angle master, it didn't nearly match the (precise) 30 degree angle on the honing guide. So I scratched my head a bit and realised that, in fact, the 30 degree sharpening angle on the Tormek only applies to the very leading edge of the chisel bevel. Since the sharpening wheel is round, the bevel is obviously ground concave. So the angle on the leading edge is 30 degrees but the grinding angle somewhat higher on the trailing edge of the chisel bevel. In fact, when I use the bevel angle gauges on the angle master side to check the Tormek ground angle, the bevel angle didn't really match the 30 degree gauge at all.
I played around with the angle master to give me a grinding angle which would match the precise 30 degrees of my manual jig. The easiest way to do this was to change the stone diameter setting in the angle master. I found that if I set the stone diameter to just over 200mm (whatever that is in inches) I got a match with the 30 degree bevel achieved with my manual honing guide. Clearly the Tormek bevel is concave and the manual bevel flat. But it would be good to easily set up an angle on a manual honing guide to add a very small microbevel to the Tormek edge.
And then I did a bit of reading and see that some people touch up (or finish sharpening) their Tormek sharpened chisel blades by free hand with a few strokes on a waterstone using the concave chisel bevel surface as an angle guide. This gives you a very small microbevel - essentially coplanar with the ground bevel edge. So I figure it is too hard to match a manual honing guide jig angle to a Tormek angle.
So this was a long way of getting to my question. I'm about to try using the freehand manual approach. Is this the best way of touching up my blades rather than setting up the Tormek each time?