On this topic, a very experienced and skilled member of my wood turning club has offered to teach me how to properlly use a Tormek to sharpen wood lathe tools at his workshop this Thursday. Unless there is substantial objection by @lathetechs or @woodtechs or other woodturners, I propose to remove one of each type of tool (bowl gouge, spindle gouge, scraper, roughing gouge etc.) from the Makerspace on Wednesday afternoon, and return them Thursday night in pristine, sharpened condition. Then I will pass on the knowledge (and possibly video if he will let me shoot it) to other makerspace members at a time to be arranged in future. This will be specific to wood lathe tools only. He has graciously agreed to to this for me for free on a one-time only basis. I have to go to him (with tools) because he is understandably unwilling to travel quite a distance to the MakerSpace (I did try to persuade him). Perhaps I can pass on some of this knowledge during the proposed Tool Sharpening Meetup on 7/12.
Is there anything else we still need for Tuesday? I’m going to try and bring along this granite ‘surface plate’ that I picked up. Has anyone used something like this - with some sort of abrasive material stuck to the surface - to flatten the soles of planes? Any ideas for what kind of abrasive surface to stick to it? These guys recommend this: https://www.woodcraft.com/blog_entries/tips-tricks-issue-95-flattening-a-plane-sole. I was also taking a look at some of the hand-held electric planers - looks like the knives on these could use some honing. Those and the knives on the Wadkin jointer-planer too. I’ve never sharpened those though so will defer to others…
I’ve seen diamond sheets (I think they were diamond) stuck onto a plate of glass. There’s one in the workshop, @Giles run a sharpening session last year, he knows everything!
Have you thought about running another sharpening induction, this time having someone writing it all down so people follow the same technique as you are?