What do you use to "grind" primary bevel on plane blades?

[Zach Dillinger]

High speed Baldor electric grinder I inherited from my dad. I used to use a hand-cranked grinder, but I prefer being able to grind with both hands. I use a very coarse wheel that cuts very quickly and I almost never blue the tool.

[Zach England]

I want one of these:

[James Owen]

That's NICE!!!

[Gary Curtis]

A Veritas MK II powered sharpener. It is messy, but fast. I'm trolling around for a big motor to power a 10" wheel so I can create some hollow grinds.

[Charlie MacGregor]

So is the hollow created by a 6" wheel easier to register on a waterstone than say an 8" or 10" wheel, or is the geometry insignificant in this regard?
Thanks

[John Dykes]

Certainly a good question, and a thread that I'll continue closely.

Some years ago, I started on Scary Sharp and a granite plate. Seemed to cut fast enough, but the cost of the sandpaper added up quickly.

Next step: I "splurged" and went to a coarse \ x-tra coarse Duo-sharp that I used to flatten backs, flatten plane soles, establish primary bevels, and even flatten my Shaptons. And yes, it seemed to wear out quickly (no wonder!) - and as I increased my knowledge base - I wasn't fully confident of the flattness.

Further down the road, I moved to a Woodcraft slow speed grinder and a LV rest; it was quite a boon. Not a big fan of the hollow grind it produces, but the speed and flexibility that offers was worth it.

If I had my druthers, I'd go for the Derek Cohen approach using a belt sander inverted... But that'll have to wait.

Fast forward a year or three more, and I'm preparing to ship out to Afghanistan with my Platoon of Combat Engineers. I'm trying to assemble the most bare bones woodworking toolkit I can manage. I think about the best I can do downrange is to try the Dia-Sharp plates they have now (perhaps the x-tra, x-tra coarse).

- jbd in Bamberg

[David Weaver]

So is the hollow created by a 6" wheel easier to register on a waterstone than say an 8" or 10" wheel, or is the geometry insignificant in this regard?
Thanks

When they're fresh (the grinds, that is), it makes no difference. The hollow is just deeper coming off of a 6" grinder than it is on a tormek or some 10" wheel grinder kind of thing.

The advantage to that being that you might get an extra hone out of a given grind vs. a tormek (it's been too long since I used my tormek to hollow grind something on a regular basis, I can't remember how many times I'd hone a chisel before it had to go back to it).

For the amount of metal you remove (not a lot each time you re-establish the hollow) and the total time spent sharpening, I can't imagine that there is anything faster than a 6" grinder. A belt grinder will certainly remove material faster for the same level of temperature, but you don't get the hollow, and it's not quite as precise (which doesn't make much difference if you don't work all the way to the edge with a grinder).

The number of times anyone will burn something with a grinder will be too minimal for it to matter working with tools. My chisels and plane irons on a re-do of the bevel don't get hot enough that I can't cool them off just with my hand (instead of a dip cup).

[Bryan Schwerer]

To establish a primary bevel, I use a basic high speed Grizzly 6" grinder. I have removed the stock tool rests and wheel guards and use Ian Kirby's tool rest here.
http://books.google.com/books?id=tvY...20rest&f=false

You can make a set of jigs to hold your blade and if you experiment a bit you can make a line on a scrap board for all of the bevel angles to show you how far to extend the blade from the jig. Most of the time I just eyeball it.

It takes a bit of practice, but I keep getting better and better results.

[Michael Peet]

I use a 6" grinder with a homemade tool rest similar to the one referenced just above. It is far and away faster than my old method of coarse sandpaper on plate glass. Be careful not to catch a corner...

Mike

[john brenton]

You'll want a grinder, especially if you're going to be refurbishing any old tools. It's one thing to do some light shaping and maintenance, but if your refurbing old tools you'll eat your stones up.

[Mike Allen1010]

Thanks Lot guys. Your experience and feedback is very helpful. A couple clarifying (I hope) questions:

1) electric grinder- seems like the fastest way to go. Part of my hesitation is I have bad memories of using the grinder growing up and ending up with bevels not even close to 90 degrees; do I need a jig? How hard is it to learn to grind a straight edge (or intnetkonL camber)?

2) I have limited space in my shop for grinder- for the granite/sandpaper guys- how long does it take to put primary bevel on 2" wide plane blade? ( are we talking 10' or half hour?). Do you use regular silcon carbide sheet paper, belt sander paper or some of the more specialized 3M abrasive films?

Thanks a lot. I really appreciate the time/$ your collective experience is saving me.

All the best, Mike

[Mike Allen1010]

"I acquired the HF slow wet grinder at one of their sales. I don't think they carry this model anymore.

Zahid, I have a wet wheel horizontal "grinder" too. It's by Makita and about 25 years old. So have Ny suggestions bout where I could get a coarse wheel? What grit is your wheel and how long does it take you to grind a primary bevel on a 2" plane blade? I must be doing some thing wrong b/c it takes me 30".

Thanks, Mike

BTW- I really enjoy the interviews and FAQ info you out together- thanks!

[David Weaver]

1) you only have to rough grind close to square one time. the rest of the time, you're just grinding to an edge that's already in use. Same goes for camber - if you want to do coarse camber on a grinder, scribe the line into the back of the iron after you color it with dykem or magic marker or something and just grind to it.

If you have a very bad iron and you just want to get to a good starting line, then scribe the square line on the iron/chisel back from the edge just a tad and grind to your scribed line.

After that, maintenance grinding really doesn't involve a lot of that- your squareness will be determined by honing, so it can only get out little bits.

Very easy to check with a small square, even a shop made one out of wood since it's not critical measurement.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

I haven't had too much of a problem grinding out of the shape that I want, be it square, skewed or cambered. Using the electric grinder, if something is out of whack enough, (like a filletster plane that's honed at the wrong skew angle, or I want to make a different amount of camber on my jack plane iron) I'll scribe the back of the iron with the line of the desired edge using a marker or layout fluid with a line scribed, and then grind the blade square to that shape. That line gets set just a hair back from the current edge - I'm not grinding off all the bevel that's there or anything - just blunting off the tip a bit. Then I set the toolrest to whatever angle I'm grinding at, get things set well and start working at it. As I start grinding, once the grind marks begin to eat into the squared off portion of the bevel, I can start looking at that glint of light from where I squared it off first, and see how things look - is that squared off edge still thicker on the left hand side than the right? Maybe the middle's a little thicker. If the squared off edge is perfectly the profile I want, then if I can make the whole thing dissapear perfectly, and at the same time in the grinding, then I've kept whatever shape I wanted. Hopefully this makes sense....

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

FWIW, for anyone interested in grinding w/an electric dry grinder who has a bit of trepidation on the subject - besides just suggesting jumping in, (after crowning your wheels) it's not that scary, two sources that might be helpful are by Joel Moskowitz's (of Tools For Working Wood) article from FWW 198, and Chris Schwarz's recent "Grind, Hone, get back to work" Video from popular woodworking.