Doug Berch

On the bench are three planes that have been getting quite the workout lately. They started complaining that they were overdue for a sharpening. I have come to trust their feedback so I took them seriously. Here they are minus their blades. They feel empty and lonely without their blades but this situation will not last long.

I move a few things around and the workbench becomes a sharpening station. If I still subscribed to woodworking magazines I would know I am supposed to have a dedicated sharpening station with running water and a bidet. I do the best I can with what I have. It works just fine.

When I turned my head for a moment a stinkbug decided to visit the stone in the center. I turned my head again and the stinkbug was gone. Few know that stinkbugs have developed teleportation. Now you too are among the few who know this.

After honing the blades on the stones they each get a few strokes on a strop and are once again ready to rejoin their planes. Everyone is happy. I assume the stinkbug is happy too.

A few years ago I had written about my adventures in sharpening.

Not much has changed since then. I have thankfully acquired enough sharpening paraphernalia to keep my tools sharp, shiny, and happy for many years to come.

This does not mean I am not occasionally tempted to get my hands on new sharpening toys but I really do not need anything else in order to keep all my tools sharp.

In the past few years I have learned the following:

1) Diamond bench stones may not be as flat as advertised. Check a diamond stone with a straight edge before assuming it is flat enough to flatten the back of a plane blade accurately. Yes, there is a painful story here.

2) Glass makes a wonderful flat substrate for abrasive papers but don’t drop it! There is a story here too but thankfully it was not physically painful.

3) Getting tools as sharp as possible can become an end unto itself. These days I get a tool sharp enough to work well and then get back to work!

I still use a grinder to hollow-grind some of my tools and I still hone my hollow-ground tools freehand. A few occasional seconds of stropping and I can go weeks before needing to hone the edge again.

Sometimes I will use a honing guide to reestablish the bevel on a blade rather than hollow grind it again. It usually depends on how much metal needs to be removed or the mood I am in. 

For plane blades with high back bevels I usually use a honing guide. I used to think that after being able to sharpen freehand going back to using a honing guide was backsliding. I am over that bias now. I do what works.

I work in a small shop and everything happens on the bench. This old bench hook holds a fine grit and flat (I checked!) diamond stone, a 4000 grit waterstone, a nagura stone for creating a slurry on the waterstone, a spray bottle of water, one of the honing guides I sometimes use and some other sharpening paraphernalia. This is the stuff I reach for 90% of the time when the need arises to hone an edge.

When it is time to hone some tools I take this bench hook off the shelf and put it on the bench and I am ready to go.

For a strop i use a piece of an old leather guitar strap charged with compound. I lay the strop down on a flat surface for stropping straight edges and use my hand to hold the strop in various shapes as needed for gouges, etc.. 

If and when I need to create radically different bevel angle I usually go to the grinder or use a coarse diamond stone to save time

When an edge becomes so bad I that I am ready to give up i wait for this guy to come around.