Hello folks!
So my new HSS Harbor Freight lathe tools arrived and I sharpened them up. I found sharpening the 1/4" spindle gouge to 25* to be very challenging. I'm embarrassed to tell you that - sigh - I ground more than half inch off that tool before I got the hang of it and could produce a single, fairly continuous bevel across its width. (I was using a CBN on a low speed grinder.)
Is it normal for a spindle gouge to be harder to learn to sharpen than other tools? Or was this perhaps harder because it's a small gouge - that is, would it have been easier to learn on a 1/2" than a 1/4"? I ask that because it was pretty straightforward to grind the wide roughing gouges even though they had the curved "American" cutting edge.
Local turning club meets soon so I'll get some hands on with a skilled turner. But it's still fun to try and figure it out myself. (Dang good thing that's an inexpensive spindle gouge though. )
Thank you!
Fred