 In a recent video I made this right here, this is known as an impossible dog tail. I call this one the more impossible dog tail because it has six faces as opposed to the usual which we'd have four. It's called that because a lot of people can't figure out how it goes together and it's a sliding joint and I show that in the video. What this is about though is I had a few people ask me how I got my chisels so sharp, you know, sharp enough to cut this so cleanly. And I use a jig that I made a few years ago and that does a good job of making my chisels sharp. In the meantime though, I've been thinking about a way to change it to position a stone lengthwise rather than side to side. A lot of people commented on that actually when I first came out with the jig, why is the stone sideways like that? To be honest at the time I was just basing it on the jig that I already made for sharpening planer blades that worked in the same way. So I've decided it in the meantime to change it and I finally got around to that recently. The plans are available on my website just like the old ones were same price. The old ones are still there if you prefer to have the side to side one. But I think for most people this is going to be you know a little bit more traditional back and forth type thing. The first thing I did was I printed the plans so that I have everything on hand when I came out here to build it. Then I cut out all the parts, drilled all the holes and made them ready to assemble. And that's what I'll be doing in this video. The first step in the assembly is to prepare the base by adding strips to it and that will first of all hold the stone in place. And also be a stop for the tool holder as it slides back and forth. Although you can use plywood for the base and finish it with your thing to waterproof it. I recommend using melamine. It's already got the finish applied that's very tough, slippery, it's also very resistant to oil and water and won't break down if it starts to get wet. I'm mind I took the time to band the edge of the melamine with solid wood. I just reduced the size of the base by half inch and then added the quarter inch strips all the way around. After the base is done the next assembly step is to fasten B1 and B2 to part C. And I'm just using regular wool working glue and 1 1 1 1 2 1st to hold it on there. Next I'm going to attach part D which is a piece of slippery plastic. Although you can use hardwood for this as well. After that's done I can start working on part A. I want to put the locking bar parts in. In the plans I recommend securing the machine screws onto the locking bar itself with epoxy. But another way to do it is to use nuts and then counter bore on the back of part A so that the nuts will sink in. With that part assembled I can slip part A between part B1 and B2 and drive the one half inch screws in. I'm going to drive these all the way in and then I'm going to back them out a little bit so that part A is free to rotate up and down to change the angle. Then all I need to do is slip the threaded rod in and I'm going to put a little bit of glue in there to hold that in place. It really doesn't need a lot. It's just to keep it so that it doesn't move. Ideally you'd use epoxy for that but wood glue will work just as well. You've got to make sure that you have the same amount sticking out on both sides when you put the threaded rod in. Then you can slip on the quarter inch fender washers and thread on the wing nuts. And at this point the jig is finished to not a whole lot to it. The next thing up is to set it up and use it but really you need to wait until the glue dries on that threaded rod first before you do that. To set up the jig I've cut a couple of blocks that are the same height as part D on the end there. What they'll do is they'll hold the jig up off the base by the same amount making it parallel to the stone. Then I made an angled stick here. This has got a 25 degree angle on here. I'll be able to set up the tool holder with that strip just by placing it on top of the stone and then angling the tool holder up to match. I've probably got the tool holder set in position. It's going to make marks here so that this is the only time I'll have to set it up for this angle. The 25 degrees is the standard angle for sharpening chisels. I grind my primary bevel at that on the coarse side. Then I increase the angle up to around 27, 28 degrees. Flip the stone over to the fine side and then do the final honing on there. That's about all I'll do with it. I really don't see the need of taking it any further than this stone will go. I'll show that a little bit later how sharp you can get with just one stone and doing it this way. I set it back down on my blocks here. Slide the chisel in until it contacts the stone. Make sure that the chisel is square to the tool holder. The easy way to make sure it's square is to have some lines drawn on the back of part A. It should be a quick reference. You can just line up the edge of the chisel with those. Make small adjustments here in your hand back and forth. It really won't pull it in or out any further. After I'm happy with how that looks, I'll tighten the clamping bar so that it can't move. Now I'm ready to sharpen. This is an oil stone but I'm using water with it. In the spray bottle I have mostly water, a little bit of dishwashing soap and some methyl hydrate to keep it from freezing. Although the heat is always on out here in the shop, so probably not really needed at this point. I'm going to spray a little bit onto the stone and then rub the chisel back and forth until I've established that primary bevel. If your chisel is in good shape, like mine is because I've been using this type of jig all along. This won't take long. You basically have to do this again after you've sharpened it or honed it on the fine side a few times. And the secondary bevel is getting a bit too wide. It will take a little bit too long to sharpen it. Now on my primary bevel, I only go to the core stone. I don't bother with the fine. I'm going to change the angle now on the jig to 30 degrees, which is what I use as the secondary bevel on my block plane blades, which I'm going to sharpen next. Then I'm going to divide the difference between those two and that will be my secondary bevel for the chisel. I changed the angle to that bevel that's in between there. I put the chisel in, lined it up with the stone. I have a good way to check to make sure that you're grinding evenly across the tip is to just do a little bit of a rub and then have a close look at it. And it will be even across and then you'll know you're good. So I'm ready to go ahead. Now this is not going to take long at all. I actually take like seconds to establish that secondary bevel. I'm just going to put a little bit of water on the stone, rub it in my finger, give the chisel a few strokes back and forth and have a look. And I can see that I'm there already. Now what that does is it raises a burr, so I'm going to take it out of the jig again. And I'm going to flip the chisel over and I'm going to do the back just a couple of strokes forward like this. And now we'll get rid of that burr. Alright, I'm over here at my messy workbench. I've got a piece of hard maple clapped in the vise. This is the same maple that I made the puzzle with and I'm going to try out my chisel now. Now remember this has just been sharpened on the fine side of the stone. I haven't done anything else with it. I haven't strapped it. I haven't taken it up to a finer grit or anything like that. I find that usually for most of the things that I do, that's going to be sharpened off. A lot of people say that cutting across and grain on softwood is probably harder to get a clean cut with because it is soft. It does bend over more easily. So I've got a piece of spruce put in my vise here and we'll try that. Okay, you know what? Not bad. Real nice and thin. It's kind of cleanly. Like I say, if you're, you know, if you want to, you can bring it even further by buffing it or whatever. But like I say, 99% of the time when I got some chiseling to do, that's going to make it sharp enough. As you can see, it is pretty sharp. Now I've got the blade from my low angle block plane here, set up in my jig. I've changed the angle back down to 25 degrees because that's what I sharpened. The primary belt one on these two, then I raise it up to 30 degrees and do the final sharpening. Okay, it looks really good. I had a little bit extra to do here because at some point I just took it out of the plane and did it by hand. Which if you have a jig like this, it's really not a good idea because you just wind up making more work. It takes seconds to get it set up in the jig. It would take literally seconds to reestablish a perfect cutting edge. So it was always better to do that. So once again, I'm just going to flip it over and rub it across the back of the blade to remove the burr. I've got the blade put back on my plane. I've got the 2x4 that I was chiseling on earlier. I cut the end off so it's nice and clean. And I'm going to try to shave off some of the end grain on that. Once again, pretty tough, but as you can see, it can shave off very fine pieces. That's end grain. End grain is difficult to play under all circumstances. I got some long grain here and I'll try plating that. I'm pretty sure this is a piece of curly maple too because the shavings are coming off a little kinky. So as you can see, pretty good result is just coming from the fine side of the stone. Cutting this curly maple, I got nice thin even shavings. Like I said in the opening, the plans for this jig are available on my website for those of you that would like to make one. As you can see, the jig is easy to build. It really doesn't require anything special. Very common hardware scraps of wood, actually you could make it out of. Usually if you have a workshop that you do things in, you'll have enough material on hand to build one of these in less than an afternoon. Actually, it took very little time to put this together. Well that's it for this one. I hope you enjoyed it and it was informative and I'll see you next time.