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I also keep ziplock bags in my workshop.  The problem is magnified 100 times with a wood lathe because the shavings mount up all round the lathe very quickly.  on the floor, on the shelves, on your tools, it's a constant nightmare and their ability to attract every single small thing you ever pick up is of near cosmic proportions!

I kid you not, just last Friday I was turning apples for a club open day in a nearby park when I dropped my Jacobs chuck (with 4.5mm drill in it) which had been in the tailstock to drill the hole to reverse the apple on a screw chuck.  That, what, 6 inch long bulky piece of metal fell in the shavings and it took me 10 minutes to find the dam thing!!!  When you drop a chuck jaw screw....just forget it....go inside and make a cuppa tea :-)

But on that issue I would strongly recommend you buy a water trough for it as well as a regular wheel because diamond will be fantastic for shaping very hard steels and even carbide but just for regular sharpening of an already profiled bowl or spindle gouge, it's complete overkill.

The primary benefit of the Tormek is to use it as it's design intended ie wet, to avoid the heat build up with faster dry grinders.  In missing that prima facie technology, you'll not be taking advantage of a gouge profile that will never change, never have a blued edge and will have so little steel removed at sharpening's that will likely last your lifetime.

So best to understand where different abrasive technologies are positioned against the different steel types ie different hardness's.  The bottom line is that diamond is the goto choice for very very hard exotic alloys like Tungsten Carbide.  So would be good if you have lots of carbide tipped deep hollowing tools or scrapers etc but for regular high speed steel gouges, skews, scrapers etc it is overkill.  Diamond wheels are also very expensive so it's wasteful to deploy them against materials too soft to warrant them.  If I had acquired that machine and it is a beauty, no doubt about that, I would buy a new, regular SG wheel (not the SB) and get a water trough.  I would then only use the diamond stone for shaping of tools (lots of steel removal) or when I was deep hollowing end grain forms like a vase type hollow vessel that warrants carbide tipped tools.

Don't believe his modesty Tim.....Ken is both the font AND fount of all knowledge (although Stickan who is Tormek management is a bit of a whizz too :-))

By the way, just in case you're confused (by my having different names here and on UK Workshop), I am the Random Orbital Bob that referred you here.

Incidentally, I strongly recommend you follow Ken's advice with respect to downloading the pdf format of the manual because it's an absolute sharpening bible.  You're just starting to scratch the surface of the Tormek Universe but that manual will shine a little light on the kind of quality you can expect from this company's output. 

You'll also find that Tormek holds patents on almost all the useful grinding jigs for turning tools.  Many have re-licenced or closely copied them but Tormek have the engineering mind-set that innovated them originally.  The manual will lift the lid on a lot of that thinking.  It also has about the most useful (one page) guide on different grind profiles for bowl and spindle gouges ever written.  That is laminated and sits next to my sharpening station, next to the lathe.

The font of all knowledge regarding Tormek generally in fact, not just older machines :-)

Yes I just bought one of those Costco plug in jobs this last weekend and have suspended it directly over the bed of the lathe.  I absolutely love it :-)

It's also a cool light temperature so less yellowy than the older neon jobs.  I'm going to buy another for my bench now.  Excellent quality.

Excellent all round research Ken.  Very kind of you to go to such effort and cost and then share your findings in this way.  You truly ARE a hero member :-)

Your findings are also very relevant to some of my woodworking activities so its very useful and topical for my situation and helps to extend the value of the Tormek for me.

Thanks again my friend.

LOL....there you are Ken...you're an honourary Scandinavian :-)

You make good points about the nature of the use chaps.  I was thinking of cabinetry rather than 1st or 2nd fix carpentry.  And funnily enough, the chippies that did my house could frequently be seen with an upturned belt sander in a vice, roughing a dinged blade back to a useful state.  Those chisels had no idea what a micro bevel looks like!!

I have also done a fair bit of house carpentry myself having built/renovated 3 houses now.  The first time I did this I was kind of apprenticed to a close friend who was at that time a professional carpenter.  He taught me to hone a micro bevel on a stone with one of the old honing guides.  We used to clamp it to the end of a saw horse and then sit with the saw horse between knees (end on) and hone away.  We only ever did that procedure just before we were about to do careful work on either window frames or other finer pieces, often related to kitchens etc.

I know carpenters that use angle grinders to sharpen their chisels!!  Makes me shudder just thinking about it :-)

While sharpening chisels on the Tormek, a micro bevel won't be needed at all. In the opposite a micro bevel will take away one of the biggest benefits the Tormek offers. It's the ability to do the honing work freehanded by using both edges that the hollow grind produces as registration areas on the flat honing medium. The honing work after the Tormek sharpening is absolutely necessary to get the chisels best performance and the best edge durability. Doing this by using the hollow grind is a quick and foolproof freehanded action.

I'm used to sharpen my chisels for years this way and am rather sure that they perform at their best.

Klaus

In fact, by resting the chisel on a fine stone at the two touch points created by a hollow grind (the edge and the other end of the arc described by hollow grinding) you are in fact honing a very fine micro bevel without realising it!  So it's not the opposite benefit as you've stated, it is in fact a benefit of hollow ground tools in general (not specific to the Tormek, rather specific to any wheel based grinding system that yields a hollow grind).  The benefit is simply that a hollow ground bevel creates two touch points, that in turn means the bevel wont rock when you're moving it on a fine hand stone, in fact it positively registers on those two "high points" and that presentation angle certainty allows a uniform micro or secondary bevel to be created at the very tip of the edge.  This may be so small that you don't see light reflecting off it so it doesn't seem like a micro bevel but that's exactly what it is and if you go steady each time you re-hone it, you can go for months without regrinding the primary bevel.

I strongly recommend this rather than Tormek's manual approach which suggests regrinding the primary bevel every time.  The reason is that with some plane blades (eg Lie Nielsen or Veritas tools) they often have super hardened blades and regrinding the entire bevel is not a simple or quick task.  It's a heck of a long time of finger aching grinding whereas if you'd gone with even a small micro bevel you'd get the job done in no time.

Micro bevels are a good thing on many levels and I'm not surprised your customer is asking for one :-)

Yes I recall the SVS 50 was a bit of a pain to setup, particularly with wider roughing gouges.  If you're doing the heavy lifting on a batch of lamp blanks I can understand why you would want to avoid unnecessary setup time.

I use a v block to keep the 90 degree rake to the grinding medium but that's on a system where the abrasive is travelling towards the edge....no bouncing up problems.

You know what, if it's working, then all power to you :-)

Very ingenious Frank 

In fact, your approach is pretty much a carbon copy of the Wolverine jigging system by Oneway without the elliptical grinding clamp.  Of course you don't need that because a roughing gouge is ground straight across the bevel ie without removal of the wings (though some do that too).

The Tormek jigs can handle roughing gouges and the name of the jig that does it escapes me for the moment but it's the one with a v shaped seat set in a square frame from which the tightening knob comes down onto the top of the flute.  Is it the SVD 50???

You could also improvise a simple 45 degree angle from the flat platform (T-lok) directly against the wheel for roughing gouges.  The beauty is they only need grinding straight across, there is no elliptical aspect to their geometry so you don't actually need the setup you have, just a flat platform set at the right angle.  Your setup would work well for bowl and spindle gouges if you added an elliptical jig like in the wolverine system

I always remember the prophetic words of the master - Jeff Farris - don't be afraid to lean on it a little - you cant hurt it :-)

Apologies if this is going over old ground but i am struggling to get a square edge to chisels and planes. Tried re grinding the stone, checked arm square to stone, tried tightening left to right etc on the jig, but all to no avail. Was wondering if there is a video tutorial or any other way of putting me out of my misery !

Shen, the edge non squarness is a very annoying but quite frequent issue.  To avoid it I align the edge of plane irons and wider chisels to a pencil line drawn on the stone when mounting it into the square edge jig.

It is more precise than an alignment to the jig shoulder which works only for parallel tool sides. The initial edge should be square otherwise you replicate the skew! If the edge is not square make it square before mounting it into the jig. 

Use the marker method and check the sharpening progress frequently!

Good luck!

Jan

There is another method that works really well to keep a square edge too.  If you take a sharpie and a small engineers square and use them to mark the BACK of the chisel.  Do it right up close to the edge.  Once the chisel is mounted (which if you use Jan's method will be square) you can now see your line on the reverse.  As you grind, regularly pull the chisel out of the water interference to examine if your freshly ground edge remains parallel to the sharpie line (or cambered to it depending on the grind you're aiming for).  There is no question that uneven grinding is a common problem and if you think about it, the centre of the blade gets twice as much grinding as the corners if you're sliding it across the stone because with each pass the corners go off the edge of the stone but the middle remains. The net effect over time means the edge will start to describe a concave profile.  The worst of all worlds for a plane blade because you want it either dead square or convex (to stop the corners digging in whilst planing).

So to compensate, one typically leans more heavily or grinds for longer on the high spots ie the corners which in turn starts to throw out the middle.  If you keep that sharpie line on the back you have a visual reference so on pretty much every pass you can keep correcting the high spots until the bevel is complete and the edge describes the profile you're after.

So my recommendation is to combine Jan's line on the wheel with my line on the reverse of the blade (chisel or plane).

Not surgical specifically but unless their geometry/design is fundamentally different from regular scissors then I cant see a problem.  Oddly, I bought the scissor jig myself for the first time just last week and promptly sharpened 10 pairs we had round the house.  What motivated the purchase was the cutting of foam pads that form part of a complex dressing on my sons leg.  He has metal rods going right through the bone and coming out the other side while he is healing from complex surgery.  The pads which are soft a foam, help to deter infection from entering at the pin sites ie where the metal goes through the skin.

The scissors just kept folding round the foam pads so I bought the jig to get those sharp. And it worked a treat, in fact I was so impressed, as I say, I did everything we owned while I had the setup.

The scissors in question are not surgical scissors, they're longer, but if the bevel on the knives of surgical scissors is ground to around 60 degrees or close then I see no reason it shouldn't work.  We do have surgical scissors in some of the dressing packs and the only difference I can see is that they're small.

Thanks Ken

I rather thought you might have had my shaping challenges in mind.  But as you say, particularly with the 80 grit wheel, I can see me having another session with the planar blade jig because there is a hidden benefit.  Not only is the cbn grit far more abrasive (and therefore more efficient at grinding into ultra hard steels like my planar blades) but because it doesn't lose it's shape my jig settings can be maintained.  One of the problems I had when attempting the planar blades with the SB was the only means of getting it to cut the metal was to grade it with the diamond truing tool.  You know how abrasive it becomes after a truing session as it exposes all the new rough surface like no other method.  That procedure got it cutting for a short while before it glazed but in the process of re-truing it it would subtly reduce the wheel diameter which would, in turn, throw out the jig settings (which have to be quite fine for the planar jig).  With a wheel that doesn't require dressing, that problem will never occur.

So you have given me hope my friend :-)

Of course we will conveniently forget to mention that the cost of a cbn wheel would probably pay for 4 or 5 professional sharpening services on my planar blades which may last me a lifetime!!  But the saving justification is the shaping of HSS gouges....nice work fella....you've handled all my objections before I can even ask them :-)