Originally Posted by
John Sincerbeaux
Knowing how to sharpen your own tools is NOT a measure of your craftsmanship. I see nothing wrong with sending out your chisels or gouges to be professionally sharpened. Who sharpens their own saw blades, jointer or planer knives? It boils down to time and how much you are actually using those tools.
The difference is that things like jointer, planer, or saw blades do not need to be sharpened very often. Saw blades, for example, are carbide and last a long time.
But when you're working with a chisel or plane blade - even ones with the best quality steel - you need to hone them fairly often. For example, if you were to use a chisel to chop out a dovetail, you'd surely have to touch up that chisel after doing a few of the dovetail elements. You can keep going - beating a rounded edge into the wood - but your work won't be very good, nor will you get much satisfaction from the work.
Carving tools are even worse. You have to hone them very often because you're pushing the tool with your hand, and a degraded edge shows up in the work as fine white lines. It's a truism in carving that "if you can't sharpen, you can't carve." And I think that's true in bench chisels and plane blades also.
Mike
Last edited by Mike Henderson; 09-27-2016 at 7:59 PM.
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