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Chris,

The better steels and steel treatments in newer chisels only increase the time before you need to resharpen.  There are some who believe the older high carbon steel gets sharper.  That's a debate for others.  I believe you gotta dance with the one you're with.

Kind regards,
Rich

Thanks Rich. I've been studying your Sharpening Handbook. What a great resource! There's so much knowledge captured there. It seems sharpening is a nice combination of science and craftsmanship 

Guys, there's some really useful information in this thread and Mike I really appreciate your detailed description of your sharpening method. So I'm going to try the Tormek only method and Mike's method and compare the two. I figure I'm going to get a sharp edge with both but the paper cut test will be the decider.

I really don't know how good my chisels are either. They are very old. I bought most of them second hand about 40 years ago. They could well be 100 years old! They are Sheffield steel mostly I think with good quality wooden handles. So I presume they will be OK? Or do newer (quality) chisels use better steel these days?

Chris B, in the attached drawing you can see that for a thick chisel the heel angle can be by 6 degrees larger than the edge angle grinded by a 250 mm diameter stone.

Jan

Thanks Jan. Yes this what I figured out in my experiments. I was going to try and draw something similar to work it out - but you've already done it! Hence the difficulty in taking say a 30 degree angle from the Tormek and translating it to a 30 degree angle on a manual honing guide. When I tried to do this I ended up just sharpening one edge of the bevel. I guess you could make up jigs if you wanted to combine Tormek with manual sharpening at a very similar angle. Or maybe just use freehand would be a lot easier using the Tormek grind bevel as the guide.

Thanks for all of your very useful comments guys. I clearly need to do some more experimentation to perfect my technique.

This whole sharpening thing can become a bit of an obsession to find that perfect edge. But then I guess a lot of folks on here can identify with that! I don't have a Japanese waterwheel for the Tormek and indeed can't justify the cost or the hassle of changing wheels for my hobbyist situation. (In fact I have already spent far more on sharpening gear than I could ever rationally justify  ). So hence the thought about whether I could use my 6000 grit bench Japanese waterstone to finish off chisels etc and give me that sharper edge.

Yes I have done a lot of reading and see that there are many opinions on how to best sharpen! I need to do some more experimentation to see what works best for me in my situation. Mike I was thinking of doing just what you say. But spending all that money on a sharpener only to use it to grind the primary bevel is hard to justify to myself! I need more practice with the Tormek. What I haven't been doing very well is resetting the wheel grit from coarse to fine to finish off the edge. Also, I've been using the honing wheel freehand which may have rounded off the edge somewhat.

I do like the idea of the blocks/jigs Ken. Great to have a way of setting a repeatable edge angle. I have done something similar for my manual sharpening setup to give me the correct honing angles for chisels and plane irons. I have downloaded your very informative and useful notes on the Kenjig and am intending to make something up. I have also read the excellent paper from Dutchman on how to work out the jig dimensions needed for various angles. Both of these are very useful resources.

So thanks again all for your help. Now to keep practicing my technique!

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?