Introduction to Woodcarving - Sharpening and Honing Part 1
Woodcarving is one of those special hobbies where you have multiple other hobbies and toolsets to support. One of these is sharpening. Sharp is paramount when it comes to your carving tools. As your tools dull, they will become more and more dangerous; this is due to the simple fact that they will need more effort to cut through the wood grains. Not all of the cuts I received from woodcarving were from dull tools, but the vast majority were. If a dull tool slips while you bear down on it, you add the risk that the blunt tool will glance off the wood and head right into you, your walls, or anything else nearby. Plus, a sharp tool is so much more enjoyable to use.
Pictured above is my very well used strop. An excellent tool that makes carving so much more enjoyable.
There are quite a few steps to sharpening, but where you start depends on the condition of your tool. For example, if you have a chipped blade, you would start with a much more aggressive tool than if you had an edge that wasn't cutting as well as it was. So where you start on this path depends on your edge. Everyone loves a flowchart.
Before we dive into the steps, let's talk about some tools. I love talking about tools. There are powered sharpening systems and hand-powered sharpening systems. The powered sharpening systems range in price from relatively inexpensive for a used bench grinder to very expensive for a water-cooled grinder. There is some variation among the manual sharpening systems, but the gap is generally much smaller. For example, getting a few diamond stones and a hone could range anywhere from low prices (like $20-30 depending on what you can make instead of buy) to a few hundred dollars depending on sales, used, and which brands you are looking for.
First, I recommend purchasing some inexpensive diamond stones; I will link to the ones I use below and you can either buy or make a hone. When you sharpen your tools by hand, you will better understand your tools and the shape of their edge. It is much harder to take off too much metal when your forearms are burning from running the gouge over the sharpening stone over and over. Additionally, when using a powered bench grinder, especially one that is more inexpensive and not water-cooled, you can overheat the edge of your tool and ruin the temper of the steel. (I highly recommend researching tempering. My understanding is that after being worked and hardened, the crystalline structure of the molecules that make up the steel can form in either tiny, tight crystals or big crystals. Small, tightly packed crystals result in the toughest steel.) That is a pain to fix, so we avoid it as much as possible.
This is my 600 grit diamond stone. There are several options for purchasing different grits, and the 600 second-most rough diamond grit that I own, as a part of the inexpensive 4 stone set linked below.
So, for the rest of the article, I will pretend you are using a whetstone or a diamond stone rather than a powered sharpening system. The process changes, but it will still be going slowly and testing your edge periodically, so feel free to pick up whichever you want or have access to. Now onto the actual process!
Regrinding the Bevel
Regrinding the bevel, as I and presumably others call it, is reserved for drawing back the edge to remove large chips or damage to the blade or grinding a new bevel angle. (This can help you when cutting soft or hardwood.) This is where you take your roughest grit tool and work the tool back and forth over the stone. Here is where things start to get tricky, particularly for gouges. There are some simple tools and tricks to maintaining a consistent bevel edge for straight-edged tools, i.e., chisels and knives. Still, for a gouge, you need to be able to rotate the tool on one axis while grinding the edge on the stone, so this makes it significantly more challenging to maintain a very steady angle. Practice is what it comes down to for sharpening gouges.
This is where a sharpening system called Scary Sharp, a method using sandpaper, has an advantage aside from being ridiculously inexpensive. You can set up a tool for sharpening that matches the shape of your blade, giving you a much more predictable angle. This would be most easily done by getting a board of basswood or another such softwood and taking successive small cuts with the gouge in question until it matches the shape of the blade.
The easiest method I have seen for sharpening gouges is usually best done standing. Standing gives you an additional axis to move along so you can lock your shoulder and only use your abdomen and wrist to move the gouge along the sharpening stone. This sounds weird, but I will link to a video below demonstrating. It comes down to the fact that some joints are better at specific movements than others. Want to draw a long line? Use your shoulder joint to move the pencil.
Want to sharpen a knife? Use your elbow to pivot the edge along the sharpening surface. Want to sharpen a gouge? Use your wrist to rotate the gouge along the sweep, ensuring that every part of the gouge runs over the sharpening stone perfectly and evenly. Then you can use another joint, such as your elbow, shoulder, or hips, to create a long sweeping motion that allows you to keep the gouge more steady than if you were simply using your wrist to drag the edge along the sharpening tool while rotating with the sweep.
That is about 90% of sharpening, but it is a skill that you will need years to hone (ha) to get it just right. I have been frequently sharpening knives and gouges for years, and I am pretty good at getting things sharp. Still, tools and techniques are available to help you both as a starting sharpener and an experienced one.
Sharpening tools!
The first sharpening tool that I recommend anybody buy is a strop. Generally, a strop is a piece of leather glued to a rigid backing, most often a wooden one. You take a honing compound, rub it on the leather, and then, with a light hand, run the edge of the blade against the leather. This allows the honing compound to remove minute pieces of steel from the blade, making it incredibly sharp. This is the best way to get your gouges or knife sharp enough to take thin shavings from the wood and to provide the cleanest surface and cut possible.
A strop will let you repair the damage done to your tool by carving. Every cut you make will dull the edge, so now and then, you need to take your tool and sharpen it. This process takes little time, although it will, of course, take longer at the start. This is another skill that will get easier and better over practice. You will learn when your tools need sharpening by how they feel slicing through wood, and you will know when they are sharp by the same metric.
First, I suggest a few tests to check whether your tool is sharp enough or dull. You can test it by attempting to shave a portion of your arm, leg, hand, etc., to test the sharpness. The problem with this test is that we are not shaving with these tools, so why would I test to see if it can shave? First, it's pretty fun. Second, it is an excellent, easy test to check if your edge is keen. Unfortunately, especially with harder woods, an edge that can shave hair might be too fragile for use on a piece of purpleheart, for example. So I recommend carving some end grain for the wood you are cutting.
This is easier once you begin collecting scrap pieces, but if you can get a clean cut over the end grain with no damage to the edge of your tool, you will know two things. 1 - Your tool is sharp enough to carve the material you are working with, particularly the hardest, most stubborn part of the material. 2 - The edge is still robust enough to survive carving the end grain without damage. I will usually test the edge on my arm hair as I sharpen as a quicker and easier gauge of the actual sharpness of my tool, but the end grain test will tell me if I need to take it back to the diamond stones for a better edge, or if I need to spend more time stropping.
There are a ton of options for a strop. I purchased the Flexcut strop and had a few reasons for this. It was easy and inexpensive. But also, I had the Flexcut gouges, and if any strop would make sharpening them easier, Flexcut's would. I was right. Flexcut's strop comes with several handy shapes on one side to help sharpen the inside bevel of your gouges (if you have an inside bevel, otherwise, it can help remove the burr. Either way, crazy helpful.) But, if you have a piece of wood and a scrap piece of leather, there is no reason you couldn't make one yourself. If you took your time, you could make the helpful shapes that Flexcut provides.
There are many other options and companies that offer strops as well, so go with whatever you can find readily available. You can use dowels and other pieces of wood to mimic the specialized strop for the different shapes. Fortunately, you don't need a honing or stropping compound for your strop, but it makes it even more effective. Using just the raw leather will sharpen and hone the edge, but honing with the compound will make that process significantly faster and polish the edge. This may seem like an aesthetic choice, but a finely polished tool faces less resistance, even if it is minor, and more easily lets you identify a freshly honed tool versus one fresh off the stones.
Sharpening Stones
When buying a tool, advertisements and claims from different companies can distract you from what you are looking for. We have already established what a strop is, but what if you need to repair an edge? Grind a new level? You need a rough surface. Preferably, a relatively uniform rough surface and, even better, a selection of consistent rough surfaces that go from very coarse to extremely fine. That's the basic description of sharpening tools for taking a tool from dull to sharp. In reality, a lot more goes into it. You need a uniform, rough surface that can withstand hardened steel, and preferably one that can withstand it for a very long time.
Most of us are familiar with whetstones or oil stones. These stones, whether natural or synthetic, have a uniform surface that is excellent for sharpening. These have some fantastic benefits and some unfortunate drawbacks. One of the best benefits is that whetstones are usually inexpensive, and you can often find sets that offer multiple sides, reducing the bulk of your sharpening setup. These are fantastic ways for people to get started with sharpening.
This is my Arkansas stone. These are hard stones that can be used to sharpen the inside bevel for different gouges. You can purchase different sizes and sweeps for all of your different gouges types.
There are some downsides. Quality control can be an issue, just as with other massively manufactured items that different sellers provide. This hasn't been the case in my experience, but purchasing a whetstone from an FBA business that bought the cheapest can lead to you getting mislabelled stones or stones that can break. However, the biggest drawback to whetstones is that they need to be wet. Usually, these must soak in water for 15-30 minutes, sometimes longer. They need to be wet throughout the sharpening process, and even so, the steel will wear the stone down, so you need to keep an eye on the stone and make sure you are using the whole surface to wear it down evenly or surface it now and then.
None of these are big deals, but I found that I would often use a dull tool rather than going through the effort of soaking the whetstone, sharpening the tool, spraying it down, and cleaning up my workspace until I had a few dull tools to sharpen. This wasn't ideal, and so I wanted a better solution. Particularly a solution that was light, easy to move, and quick to use. This immediately knocked most of the power tool options out and left one obvious winner. Diamond stones.
Diamond stones are fantastic tools, and with some recent advances in the technology to make them, they are getting much cheaper than they used to be, but it can be complicated to figure out a cheap one that is good and will still last for years to come. Since this post has already gotten a little long, we will cover diamond stones and other sharpening options in next week's post. Hope to see you there! (But not like actually seeing you.)
Rex Kreuger Video on cheap Diamond Stones
Diamond stones (Talked about in the video above and the diamond stones that I use. I’ve been using these for over a year to sharpen chisels, gouges, carving knives, pocket knives, and kitchen knives and they are still as effective as when I purchased them.)
Paul Sellers on Sharpening a Gouge
Doug Linker and Alec LaCasse talk sharpening (This video talks about an incredible tool for sharpening your gouges. I don’t have any first hand experience with the WorkSharp tool, but it is definitely on my list for future upgrades.
Alec LaCasse on Sharpening
Mary May talks Sharpening (This is a fantastic video and video series that shows some excellent tips and techniques.)
The Crystalline Structure of Steel (This page goes more in depth on what is actually happening in the atomic structure of the metal.)
