 So welcome back everyone. I just told me to comb my hair before I turn on the camera and I forgot to. Welcome back to the Homestead Woodshop. Today we're going to address something that I, it comes up in the comments all the time and there's a lot of frustration out there from you guys that are getting into woodworking and having trouble sharpening your chisels. Even trouble maintaining that perfect 25 or 30 degree angle. Today I'm going to show you something that I think is going to change all of that and give all of us their perfect results with no practice at all. So what is a sharpening miracle going to drop on you? Well, it's not a miracle. It's a honing guide. Now this is an old, old design. I believe if I remember right, this style of honing guide was invented a long, long time ago. So the sharpeners, you know, from the dawn of time, you know, is something that man has struggled with is trying to get a, what's the right angle. And most people agree with timber framing chisels or regular chisels or playing irons at somewhere between 25 and 30 degrees. You know, that's kind of what we aspire to. And doing that freehand is really difficult. So all manner of devices have been invented to try to help assist in maintaining that perfect angle. And this is pretty much the zenith or the high point of the design. Now this was originally manufactured by high quality in England, I believe as I said back in the day. And this is a reproduction. And this is a reasonably low quality reproduction, but it's inexpensive. You can get these here for around the $12, $13 range and there are lots of companies making things similar, but it is a good design. And with just a few modifications, we can bring this thing up to stuff and make it so we get perfect results. So if you haven't seen these already, if you're wondering what we're looking at, so this is a guide. You can see that it's got two jaws on there. We've got a jaw for the top. Now this is going to be four larger tools, planar irons for example, or timber framing chisels right there. And then of course, underneath here we're going to have a smaller, much smaller set of jaws right there that's going to work for our smaller chisels. These are woodworking chisels there so you can see that they hold in there like that. See how that works. So very versatile, very good tool. So the problem with this thing that we're running into and I have others have spoke to this and I can see it is indeed a problem is the low quality of the machining and the way it grabs the tool which is not very good. Problem we have right there is we have kind of a what do we call this a convex kind of a dome shape. If you think about a soccer ball, the top of a soccer ball, we have that round. And so what we get is we get a little teeter-totter action going on in that. We want to make contact here and here. And also if you look and see when you're making contact on things and you want a stable platform, you want three points of contact. If you look closely, you'll see the radius on there. I can drop my sharpie to highlight this. Do you see how it exaggerated there? See on that one side we have that and the same thing right here. Well the reason for that, that's by design, is we have three points of contact. One, two, three. And the reason why we want three is for stability. It's like a four-legged stool will wobble, right? And a three-legged stool will not wobble and that's the principle right there. So keep that in mind as we're doing a modification. So the first thing we need to do is we need to figure out how do we get, so we touch here, here, here and not anywhere else in there. And the problem we have is that when we tighten this up, this thing, because of the casting, it's just a low quality tool, has that convex in it. And so we're touching here and here and messing it up our whole system. So what we're going to do is we're going to remove material here and here. Let's go about it. And the machine is vise is better than a carpenter's vise. You know I harp all the time about the importance of having, even if you have a dedicated wood shop to have a small machinist or mechanics vise for just little things like this. So to get this machining sorted out, we're going to need a standard mill bastard file, eight-inch mill bastard file. If you're only going to have one, that's the one you want. So what we want to do here is we want to remove material on the outside of that arc right there because that's where the high point is. That's what's touching our tool. I don't know what type of metal this is. Is it aluminum? It kind of has a look of aluminum. Now there are aluminum specific files which don't load up as bad as a regular one, but use what you have. So we're going to try to stay those, keep those lines. We just want to lower. Yeah, that's probably aluminum. That's really low. See how it loads up there in the file? And a lot of that is the paint. We've got the paint off of there. This is a file card. When you buy a file, make sure you get a file card as well. That way you can keep your file clean. If you don't have a file card, you can run it backwards on your pants too. That works pretty well. With the left side done, we can work on the right side here. It's a nice file. It's a USA, it's vintage. USA made nickels file, sadly. No longer available. The thing of the past, once they're gone, they're gone. Now I think I've got enough material removed. There's one last thing we can check it here. There's a simple way to check that we have. We'll do it here. Remember that, that convex shape that we have right there. I can see right there that it's inconsistent. It's a little bit lower on this side. We've got some imperfections. Let's just clean that up a little bit. Just make that more uniform and consistent. Leave the middle alone. I just want to just kind of make those match. We do have that round shape there. To check it, we'll put our chisel in there. If you don't have a big framing chisel like this, just use your planing iron. It does the same thing. We're going to tighten this down. It's important to tighten it down really tight. Because when the flexing comes into play, it isn't when it's under pressure. It doesn't need to be very tight. You use a screwdriver. Just put a little force on it. Make sure that you're seated. Now what we're shooting for is to be sure that we can see a little bit of daylight here and here. I mean, we want to be making contact only on the edges like that. The best way we can do that is to put some light behind it. Let's put it on the lamp and see if we can see daylight coming underneath there. It's not going to be much, just a sliver is enough. This is another reason why I'm such a big advocate of having a lamp like this on your sharpening station. I just use it all the time for things like this. So I'm just siding down there and indeed I can see daylight on the chisel so that machining is done well. Now we're not quite done yet with our machining. We've got to look to the jaws of the inside. What I have found on these is that they're pretty inconsistent as well. Meaning they don't hold the smaller chisels inside very well. They've got some low quality machining in there or some casting actually and build up. We're going to take a file and we're going to save a file. That means saving a file means the edge. We don't want to take this edge away. It's pretty thin, pretty delicate. It's got to hold the chisel in there. We do want to file the bottom piece right there to make that a little bit more prominent. By saving a file is just simply putting a piece of masking tape on the areas that we don't want it to cut. For example, I've got it backwards here but as you can see like this, we'll put it right there. We're not going to cut on the backside of the file. We're going to leave that material. We only want to cut on the bottom. You might be thinking, it's an awful lot of work to go through. I don't, you just buy one that is better quality than this and you can buy one from Lee Nielsen's got one that's really nice. It's $150. Precision machining. That's what it costs. That's what it costs for a US made, Canadian made, where they're made quality machine item. This is $12. It is totally serviceable. I want you only have to do this once. Again, you're going to have a really wonderful tool. It's really helpful to you. Now you should be able to see from the cross section there that these jaws are much more pronounced, much sharper and they're going to hold the chisel better. We can try it out here. Before, when I put the chisel in to the jaws and clamped it down with finger pressure, it would move about. I could rock it back and forth because it wasn't making contact properly. Now just doing that, just finger tight, it's rock solid and it's holding in there much more secure. Of course, I can tighten it up a little bit and even more so. Now we have a $12 tool with a little bit of machining from the file and filing that should work nearly as good as a high dollar one. Now that the machining is done, so how is it that we can use the tool? It's to be completely consistent every time. So, the good folks, whoever manufactured this, they've put on the sides some very important numbers here. We have chisel projection and we have planer iron projection. What that means is that's giving us the distance that this chisel or planer iron needs to project out the front of the tool. They've given us those dimensions. So the planer iron projection right there, the bottom one is referring to the projection from this top. That's where it's the wide ones. We're going to put your planer blades. The chisel projection is going to be different because it's lower. Those angles are going to be changing. It's going to be the lower set of jaws. Now being that this is a big timber framing chisel, we're going to use the top and so therefore we're going to use the planer projection. Right? We clamp that on there. So how do we consistently measure this point to the end every time? So it's exactly the same. You know, we're going to take our little tape measure on there every time and we're getting down to 64 inches or millimeters there and try to guess that. No, of course not. It's going to be different every time. That's not going to be reliable. So how do we do that? Well, I'll show you. So the fine folks that built this little guide have been kind enough to put the chisel or iron projection on the casting. However, it's in millimeters, which doesn't do us any good at all. So we're going to have to go to the Google and find out what that conversion is in inches. And as our old friend in Felimenza put it, President George Bush, we're going to use the Google to do this conversion because the Google is going to help us here. All right. So the projection for our planer iron here says we've got, if we want a 30 degree bevel, it's 38 millimeters. So if we put 38 millimeters in here and we try to Google on, all right, inch and a half. That's pretty easy. So inch and a half is going to give us our 30 degrees. Now if we want to do our 25 degree, which some people do, we'll put, we're 50. So we'll put our 50 in here. And that's going to be, now that's getting, that's getting more difficult. There one in 31, 30 seconds of an inch equals 50 millimeters. So how do we figure that out? So how in the world do we figure out what one in 31, 30 seconds is when obviously our tape measure and all of our measuring instruments are in 16ths of an inch? Well, I mean, the obvious way to do it would be to have a metric tape measure in millimeters and forget all of this nonsense, but I've talked so much trash in the metric system. You know, I burnt that bridge. I can't have a metric, a tape measure in the house, and we might see it. So this is one of those tools that you might use, you don't use very often, but boy, when you need it, you need it. This is an ink rule, super precise measuring deal. And it's got 64 and 30 seconds on it. So I'm going to go up to edge of my bench here, and this is definitely a long work around. A metric tape measure ruler would be better. And I'm going to go, I'm looking for 30 seconds. So this has a little hash cut in it. So 1 and 31 and 30 second. What is it? 1, 31, 30 seconds of an inch. I'm going to put a mark right there. Okay? There's my mark. And now I'm going to take my combination square, or your combination square. One of you guys, I've already set it there. Right there, and I'm going to split that mark. This is important. We only have to do this one time right there, and then I register that. So there is my 1 and 31 seconds of an inch. So this cabinet here, as you know, is my dedicated sharpening system. This is where everything that I own for sharpening is going to be. So I want everything here. And so this is something that I've kind of been playing with here that's temporary that may turn into permanent, but I'm just not sure. Sometimes I need to use something for a while to see if it's really going to work before I do the full on permanent method. But I'll show you what we're going to try out here. Since this is where I come to sharpen, and I'm going to stand right here, and I'm going to have my stones, and I go back and forth, and kind of what's worked out really good for me, I want all of this stuff here close by. So what I've done is I've glued temporarily a little block here at the set distance. So to explain, let me bring in close here and show you what that means. The reason for this block is reference. Now we saw that our 30 degrees, or 25 degrees, was an inch and a half, and I've already done this. This is representing of 30 degrees. Now, what I'll have to do now is I have a straight edge here, I go to nice square edge from plywood, is when I want to use my jig, I'll simply put it on the chisel, put it up here, index it against the edge, slide it up until it touches that block, tighten it, and now I'm completely consistent every time. Now, when I want, for example, if I want to do one at 25 degrees, and we'll do one right here, we're going to set this block at our second measurement. I can simply loosen this, bring my chisel up, come in until I touch, let's not glue down there until I touch, tighten that up, and now I have complete consistency every time, every chisel that I have, and as time goes on, they're going to be more and more consistent. Because I've been filing chisels by hand, don't drop that, please. I've been filing chisels by hand, and because I do it freehand, they're all over the board. Of course, we shoot for 30 degrees, but what do you actually get? Now, if I use a chisel guide, I'll have consistency. Every single time it doesn't matter what tool. Now, this is for the planer irons or the timber framing chisels, we'll do the same thing on the other side for the small chisels. Let's go ahead and put our 25 degree block on here together. Now, again, this is temper, I just don't know if it's going to be in my way, I don't think so, but we'll just do it temporarily here. So I'm just going to use a little super glue, and then if I do, indeed, find that this works out fine, we can put a couple of brass screws on there, super is. This is probably a hole forever. This is gorilla super glue, no joke, until you know joke at all. Okay. So now that we've got our straight edge here, we've already set that, right? This is going to be our 25 degrees or whatever, one in 31, 30 seconds or so. Don't put that leading edge, it's going to hold it square. Set that down there. Okay. Press it on, we can put a clamp on it. To hold that while we're doing our thing. And there'll be a 25 degree indexed. So let's try the file guide on our inch and a half Robert Sorby timber framing chisel, which is in bad need of sharpening. Ooh, man, I have only freehand sharpen this and I was looking at it close and it needs some work, it needs some consistency. So we're going to be sharpening this at 30 degrees, which is kind of what I want for timber framing chisel. You know, where's the argument? It's 25, 30 degrees, which is better. I don't know, I don't know what makes any difference. I would imagine 25 degrees is going to be a little bit more little sharper. You know, maybe, maybe bite a little bit better, 30 degrees, maybe a little bit more durable. That's kind of wiggle, wiggle wobbling in there, isn't it? So it seems to me that for a chisel that needs to be very durable, like a timber framing chisel that gets abuse, 30 degrees is pretty good. All right, so let's see. So just going off, just initial impressions, it works really good. It's easy to use. I have exact, have real precision, consistency. And I can use portions of the stone, the edges that don't often get used. Now, because the wheel is only going to allow us to get the jig to use half of the stone, that's all right. You know, from time to time, maybe every time we sharpen it, we can just flip it over, right? And so we, we wear our diamond stones equally. Let's step back from the sharpening for just a minute. The glue is dry on that. And I just wanted to demonstrate here. So here we go. So this is our planer iron side. Of course, you know, we have the different reference points. So this is the 25 degree. And, you know, we can put the P on there for the, that's the planer, P, L, A, and all right. So we can remember that now, depending on what you want, you know, maybe some will be different than others. But I can very simply here, if I want to set this to 25, all I do is slide up there, tighten my jig. There is my setting for 25. Now, if I want my 30, slide it up here, same every time, very, very consistent, regardless of the tool, doesn't make any difference. If I want to do a different one, for example, let's say I want to do a planer iron, grab a planer iron here, we're going to sharpen a planer. And we want that planer for our number four Stanley at 30 degrees, right? You get it. You see what's going on here, right? We just slide that forward. Doesn't make any difference. Very, very useful this very universal. If we want to go to the, and I made these so I could fit, you know, all my tools in there. So if I want 25, simply slide the 25 in there. Now I've got my setting for my 25. Let's take a look at our work here. See how well the chisel guide worked or how well it, what the results are. Proof is in the eating of the pudding here, right? So we can see right there, see that that was the 25 degree. And then I tried the 30 degree and we are up there. So what that tells me is that my hand sharpening over the years on this chisel, I have somewhere ended up just kind of naturally somewhere right in the middle between the two. So these were roughly around 27 degrees or so is kind of what I was getting with them, which is probably just fine. You see a little bit of inconsistency here. See it's deeper here than here. You know, that might be telling me that, you know, maybe I've put a little bit too much pressure on this side or on the other. It's hard to say maybe I had been grinding it crookedly before. And this is just bringing everything, evening it out. But this is really interesting to see that. Now, because that I have, you know, three, two different bevels right there, I'm not worried about that. Over time, and I will consistently use this, this is, I do not think this is a gimmick. I think it's a very useful tool. Over time, that I will eventually get that back to the 25 degrees that I wanted. But there's no reason to get excited and try to get it all in one bite. You know, it doesn't matter. We've got long as we've got a good cutting edge across there. And I can tell you, it is indeed sharp and has probably never been sharper. So is the chisel sharp? You know, that's what I always want to know. You know, is it? Do we have results? And let's take a look here. So I got the butcher paper. And this, you know, this is, this is a big piece of steel. This is really a big piece of tool steel. It's thick. It's got a pretty sharp angle on it. That's a lot of material. And to get something like this, that's heavy. Sharp enough to slice paper is pretty impressive for me. You know, especially someone who's really struggled with sharpening tools. It's, it's really good. So what's my take on the chisel guide? That chisel is ready for use. So, you know, it's sort of something. The cutting test that we did on that, that was on the, the coarse stone. I didn't go through the medium and the fine. So that paper cutting, I thought it was like, could have done a little bit better. That was a, that was a pretty coarse, coarse stone on there. So I'll go back and finish up on the fine. It'll do much better. Nor did I stop it. So that's pretty good for a coarse, that's really good actually. So what's my take on this guide? So, you know, I was, I did a little bit of looking around when I was kind of putting together this video. And I saw comments from, from several people, several guys that were very experienced wood, wood, woodworkers. And some of them were, were had disparaging comments about saying, oh, you don't need that. And that's a, that's kind of a crutch or you need to learn to sharpen your chisels by hand. And, and, and of course, it's nice to be able to sharpen your chisels from hand and take the step out of it and not have to deal with this thing. But, yeah, that's fine. If you, if you're a retired guy and you have nothing but time on your hands and, and you can work for weeks or months or years to perfect your method and get your chisels and your planning irons perfect, good for you. I think that that's wonderful. I haven't achieved it. I, I would like to hope that I could someday. But for the rest of us, the common guys, we still need to have sharp tools. We still need to have consistency with our planning irons and tools. And for $12 and a little bit of work with a file, you know, maybe half hour or so to have something like this that produces such good results and gives us consistency. I, I think it's really, really good, really wonderful. And I mean, does a guy want to invest in the $150 version of this, Liam Neilsen is going to be more precise and you're not, not going to have to do the machining on? Now, that's up to you. You know, it's your call, but you can have 10 of these for the price of one of those. And I'm, I'm not saying that it doesn't have a place. I would love to have one. Don't get me wrong. But would I buy one knowing that how much I like this guide and how useful it is after having this one? No, I don't think so. I can't speak for the future. But for now, I think I would be completely happy with this. It works really good. So if you're having problem getting your chisel sharpened, planning irons, $12, I'm going to put this in my Amazon store, WranglerMart.com. It'll be at Amazon Affiliate link. I think it's like 12 and change, free shipping. I would recommend you get one of these. It, it, it seems to be very good, pretty well put together. And once you do that initial little cleaning up, it's a, it's a great tool. So that's it. Hope you enjoyed this. I hope it was helpful to you. And we'll see you guys on the next video.