It’s been about five years since I got back into woodworking. I remember the first workshop I went to. Not having a project to work on, I suggested that I could do some sharpening. The guy teaching couldn’t find the sharpening
stone. I thought this was very odd, then I thought it must be a wind up. How could a woodworker not know where the sharpening stone was kept.
Well, it wasn’t a wind up and over the next couple of years I discovered that virtually every single woodworker I met couldn’t sharpen their tools adequately.
I have always considered sharpening to be the first job in any woodworking endeavor. It’s the core skill of core skills. The very first thing I did when I started woodworking was to provide myself a means of preparing and maintaining my blades. I started with wet and dry paper on a sheet of glass, I could shave with every blade I sharpened, most importantly my tools actually functioned correctly and in a predictable way. In the photos you will see I have three different options of diamond. The cheap flat plate in the middle of the three would have done just as good a job as the expensive diamond plate in this particular instance. Sharp tools deliver better outcomes and in this instance I saved money and time.
I needed to do some routing recently. The only bits I own which would do the job were a cheap set of pattern bits. After considerable use the bits had become so blunt that I had previously been unable to make a very shallow cut. I was thinking of getting a new set but it would mean waiting for delivery.
I wasn’t sure if I could restore the edges because they were very degraded. I removed the bearings, coloured the edge with sharpie and felt for the bevel on a thousand grit diamond plate. The bevel is smaller on cheap router bits because they use as little tungsten as possible but I was able to register the bevel and, keep the bevel flat. Diamond works superbly with tungsten and I could see large amounts of swarf on the diamond plate as soon as I started sharpening.
I lapped the back of the blades afterwards, I wasn’t looking to get a textbook result here. I was happy if I ground all the way to the edge on the majority of the edge. The backs of the blades are pretty sketchy but it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to do a good job producing a nice new flat bevel. It took me less than ten minutes to sharpen all three blades. I used two of the newly sharpened bits and they CUT LIKE NEW. I can’t notice any issues regarding the blades and the bearings not aligning. Once again, sharpening does the business.
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