Alexander Grabovetskiy, woodcarver, School of Woodcarving · Published 2017
How do you sharpen wood carving tools?
Quick answer: Sharpening a wood carving tool has three stages rather than one. You reshape the factory bevel into a long low one, you bring the edge back on rising grits, and you strop it. The first job happens when the tool is new and the last one happens every day you carve.
Sharpening a carving tool is three separate jobs, whether you work by hand or on a machine. You reshape the factory bevel long and low, once. You sharpen the edge through rising grits. Then you strop it, and that last one I do every day.
Ever fight a board all morning and blame the board? A brand new gouge on basswood makes you raise your hand really high before the edge even bites. My teacher gave me one knife and would not hand me a gouge until I had mastered that knife, and I have thought about why for thirty seven years.
What actually makes an edge cut
- A factory bevel comes too short and far too upright, and it has to be reshaped.
- Long and low beats high and stubby on every wood except where a mallet needs clearance.
- All my tools get a micro bevel inside.
- Hand sharpening works, but without a jig it rarely gives you a flat bevel.
- A dry grinder does two bad things at once, it hollows the bevel and it burns the steel.
- Stropping does round an edge, and stropping both sides cancels most of it.
- A V tool is three tools in one, so sharpen the keel first.
Is it the wood or the tool?
Almost always the tool. I brought my teacher a board once and told him it was bad wood, and he told me there is no such thing as bad wood, only dull tools. Sharp steel does beautiful work on the worst board in the pile. That one sentence has cost me a great many excuses since.
Sharpening also splits into three stages, and they are not equal in how often you do them. Reshaping a new tool happens once. Putting the edge back happens when the tool asks for it. Stropping happens daily and takes seconds. You still have to do that first stage, because the bevel on a new tool is really short and really high, and that is just not acceptable to me.
Why does a brand new gouge fight you?
Factory bevels come short and steep. Take a new tool to a board and you can lift the handle four inches with the edge still grabbing nothing. It takes five inches before it bites. Your elbow and your shoulder pay for that all day. Every brand does it, a Schaaf set and a French Auriou alike, and I was genuinely surprised how good the steel is in the cheap ones. BeaverCraft out of Ukraine gave me a tool I had no complaint about except the bevel.
How long should the bevel be?
Long enough that your knuckles nearly brush the wood as the edge bites. That is my test, and a good rule is at least 3/8 of an inch, about 10 mm, measured edge to heel. A bevel is a wedge, and a steep wedge fights the fibers while a long one slides. Some of mine run five eighths of an inch, about 18 mm. The exception is the mallet. Its head needs room to swing without striking the surface, so a mallet tool sits a little steeper.
Every tool of mine carries a micro bevel on the inside as well. Two things come of that. The tip is no longer weak at the very edge, and the tool will work upside down without digging in and trapping itself. On a very low main bevel that second bevel is what keeps the point alive at all.
Why did I give up sharpening by hand?
Hand work never gave me a flat bevel. Look along the bevel of an old second hand gouge and you will see it arching, every single time, and those men were not careless. Your wrist moves on the stone whether you want it to or not. You can still carve with such a tool, but you will feel a lot of resistance.
The other half of it is arithmetic. I hold about half a thousand tools and I carve for a living, so the question is whether I am paid to sharpen or paid to carve. If you own twenty tools, buy a jig and a stone and enjoy yourself, because hand work with a jig genuinely does the job. My teacher taught me on a stone. Without a stone, take sandpaper on a flat bench, because it is still an abrasive and you can get the same result.
What does a grinder do to the steel?
Two bad things, and both weaken the point. A wheel leaves the bevel hollow, which thins the metal right behind the edge, and a dry wheel heats that thinnest part until the temper is gone. You often cannot see it happen, because the steel does not always turn blue. Then the point breaks really quickly, and you have to regrind it.
Tormek fixed the heat with water and a slow wheel, and I bought the whole system when it reached the United States. Jigs for everything, including an axe attachment I have never once used. The hollow stayed, though, and on an 18 mm bevel a hollow is not a detail. Two grits then, coarse and slightly less coarse than coarse, and that was the end of it for me. Mine still runs, with a diamond wheel on it and the water tray dry.
| How you sharpen | What it does to the bevel shape | Real cost |
|---|---|---|
| A stone or sandpaper by hand | Bevel arches slightly | Slow, and some stones are really expensive |
| Dry grinder | Hollow bevel and a burnt temper | Cheap, and risky |
| Tormek with water and its own jigs | No burning | Still hollow, and only two grits |
| Flat glass wheel | Flat bevel, any grit from 80 up | Fairly cheap |
What I wanted was a stone that ran on steroids. I found it in a machine at Woodcraft that felt so cheap I walked back and forth a few times before buying it. The wheel is flat glass, so the bevel comes out flat. It turns slowly and never burns anything, and the grit changes in one second, so I can run 80 to 6,000 and sharpen a tool in two minutes.
My own wheels are not all paper now. There are diamond discs on the shelf and boron nitride ones as well, and the diamond ones are cheap. Chinese made, and I have not had to replace a single one yet.
Is a cheap machine safe for a good tool?
Safer than the grinder it replaces, and not foolproof. Put a finger on that wheel while it turns and nothing happens, which tells you how little heat there is in it. Try that on a bench grinder once and you will never do it twice.
All the same, I saw a guy kill a tool on this machine, and I told one of my in-person classes about him. He bought it brand new and full size, and by Friday it was dead.
The one catch on the machine itself is the bar that held the Tormek jigs, and in late 2017 we found out Work Sharp doesn't make it anymore. I attached a Tormek grinder jig to a scrap dovetailed block instead, and now it clamps to any bench I like, which turned out better than the original.
The jigs are the part worth paying for, whatever machine they sit on. The people at Tormek are genius about those jigs, and on my own bar I can take them to the Work Sharp, the Koch machine or another grinder. Other options exist if you can't get a Work Sharp where you live. All you really need is a flat surface.
How fine you go is up to you. I usually take an edge to 6,000 because I like the mirror finish, though the wheels will run to 8,000 and past it if you want them to.
Does stropping round the edge?
Rounding is real. A carver in my chat told me he had quit stropping for exactly that reason, and he was not wrong about the physics. Your hand rocks a little on every pass, so the leather rolls the very edge over and you feel it as resistance going into the fibers.
Strop both sides and most of it cancels. My grandfather shaved with a straight razor and stropped it on a hide pretty much every day, and that razor was the thing in his toolbox I was most afraid of. His own grandfather taught him. I strop daily, on a Butz block that is twenty years old, and on two leather wheels I mounted on a cheap grinder turned to run away from me.
The green bar most carvers use is chromium oxide. I like the green paste by Koch, and when the leather turns black, that is metal coming off the tool. My two wheels are different thicknesses, one about 10 mm and one about 20. One is for gouges, and the other is a flat wheel for the outside bevel.
A piece of leather from a leather supply costs almost nothing and works as well as any block sold for the purpose. MDF also strops, and so does a plain block of basswood.
Why does a V tool give everyone trouble?
Manufacturing, and it is not your fault. When you sharpen one you sometimes hit a notch on a wing, and the reason is that the two wings are almost never the same thickness. A cutter bores the inside of a steel bar and sits a hair off centre, so one wall comes out thicker. Cheap Chinese, hand forged, Swiss Pfeil, the most expensive machine in the world, they all do it.
Sharpen it as three tools rather than one. The bottom is a tiny gouge with real curvature, the keel, and the two sides are chisels. Work the keel first. Then bring each wing down to meet the notch, slowly, and stop when they blend rather than trying to grind the notch out of existence.
The V tool was barely in a European carver's kit before the nineteenth century, and some carvers have never used one at all. Knowing that helped me stop treating it as a test of my own skill.
How do you sharpen a knife on a flat wheel?
Flat on the disc, one side then the other. A knife needs almost nothing done to it compared with a gouge, so I usually skip the jig entirely and hold it. Lay it on the wheel, work the edge, then flip it and work the other face.
There are two small tricks worth having. The wheel turns only one way, and you can either rewire it or buy a plug with a reversing switch, no problem. And the arbor hole is 10 mm, so a plain 10 mm nut drops in and holds a wheel pretty much in position when you have lost the bushings, which I always do.
What I would buy first
Leather and sandpaper. When I filmed myself carving grapes with a Schaaf set straight out of the box, the only thing I did to those tools was strop them, and they carved. Stones are where the money goes, and one stone for a single grit can be really expensive. The German Koch machine on my bench is not cheap either, and I use it for honing, but nobody needs it to begin.
A flat bench, a sheet of sandpaper and a piece of leather will get you started. When my teacher taught me, it was all by hand, the way masters did it for centuries. Pick a project and design it around the tools you have.
The same man handed me a sheet of paper and a pencil on my very first day and said design. He came back after I spent all day on it, looked at my acanthus leaf and said think. He meant think how you are going to carve it and how many tools you have, because a piece of paper is not a piece of wood. I call them an army. Every tool is a soldier with one job, and the bigger the army the more ground you can take.
Design comes first, then sharpening, and carving is the most important of the three, which is his order and not mine. Sharpening sits in the middle because nothing above it works without it. If you want somebody at your shoulder while you learn to put an edge on your own tools, that is what we do inside the school.
How it's done
- Read the wings before you touch a wheel. Sight down the tool from the end and compare how thick each wing is. One will be heavier than the other, and that tells you where a notch is going to show up.
- Treat it as three separate tools. That rounded bottom edge behaves like a small gouge, and the two flanks behave like chisels. Sharpen all three as separate jobs living in one handle.
- Start underneath, at the keel. Establish the bevel underneath before you go anywhere near the flanks. Start on the sides instead and you can end up with a kind of channel, and the tool looks weird.
- Blend the flanks upward. Shave one flank at a time until it runs level with that raised point, rather than grinding the point away. Take very little per pass and keep looking.
- Hone the inside, then strop both faces. Take the burr off the inside with a small slip stone, moving only out. Then hone the inside on a leather strop, one side and then the other.
Frequently asked questions
Can you sharpen carving tools with sandpaper instead of stones?
Sandpaper works. Lay a sheet on a flat bench and use it exactly as a stone. It is not expensive at all, you just throw it away when it wears out, and some stones cost a lot for just one grit.
How long should a carving tool bevel be?
Low and prolonged, far enough that your knuckles nearly touch the wood while the edge starts to bite. Some of mine run five eighths of an inch, about 18 mm. Raise it slightly only if you swing a mallet, because the head needs room to clear the surface.
Should you put a micro bevel on every tool?
Mine all have one. A very shallow main bevel leaves the tip weak, and a small secondary grind inside puts that strength back. The second reason matters just as much, because a tool without one digs in and traps itself the moment you turn it over.
What to carve next