Messages

Thanks for the tip on the scissors jig.  I'll give that a try.

I ran into an issue with a skew chisel that a friend brought over to be sharpened.  His skew chisel certainly had more life in it, but the length of the skew chisel was short enough that the SVS-50 couldn't be used.  One other thing that I noticed was that his skew chisel had a curved edge, but it was much more convex than what I have on my skew chisel, and that the amount of curving probably couldn't be achieved with the SVS-50.

What would have worked really well is a short platform tool rest, on the scale of what typically comes on a dry wheel grinder, like this.


And then I would freehand the curved edge.

The SVD-110 is too long to serve this purpose, and the SVS-32 can't do a skew chisel.  Has Tormek considered coming out with a short version of the SVD-110?  Or maybe I should get another SVD-110 and just cut down the size of the platform?

I know this is a stupid little thing, but I had to reset my password for this forum, and the text on that page suggested to use a password of 6 characters or more.  I picked out a 6 character password, which got rejected because this forum really wants to use an 8 character password.

If this could be fixed, that would be nice.  Thanks!

I've read up on the honing wheel, and how you are supposed to use mineral oil to break it in, but I haven't seen anything like what I am dealing with.

I use my Tormek almost only for turning tools.  I admit that I don't use the leather honing wheel anywhere to the extent that I use the waterstone wheel, mainly because the waterstone wheel gives me a good enough edge after the fine side of the grading stone.

When I first got my Tormek, I just started putting the honing compound on without the mineral oil conditioning, because I didn't know to do that.  Since then I have added mineral oil to the wheel on occasion (actually, I use baby oil, which is the same thing but smells really nice  ), and then add the honing compound. 

What seems to happen is that as soon as I start honing, the honing compound seems to flake off the leather wheel all at once, to the point that it seems that I have bare leather exposed, as if I never put any honing compound on in the first place.  It does seem to be doing some additional sharpening of the tool edge, but I haven't seen this behavior mentioned before.  I have seen the Tormek demoed live at woodworking shows, and my wheel doesn't look anything like the well-worn almost black look that I see at the demos.

One other thing: my wheel originally had a fuzzy consistency to the leather, like the non-smooth side of a piece of leather.  In the time that I have been using it, a lot of the leather fuzz has flaked off.

Am I doing anything wrong here?  Have I trashed my honing wheel?