Sharpening – in-person class (Maine Coast workshop)

Set a carving gouge bevel by how long it runs, not by what angle it reads. Sight along the steel, tip to heel. Ten millimeters, 3/8 in, is the working number on most tools. Grind it shorter and the gouge stands up, pushes hard, and hands the whole job to your shoulder.

Does your hand lift off the board when you push? Is your shoulder aching by the second hour? And is the tool shaving paper thin while it still argues with the grain? The edge is not your problem then. The wedge behind it is.

I taught a room of carvers on the Maine coast, and we began right here, not with brands and not with stones, but with one number and the reason under it. By the end of this you will know what length to grind, why that second small bevel is never optional, and which machine leaves your steel alone.

What decides whether the wood fights you

• Bevel length, around 10 mm on most carving tools, heel to working point.
• A second small bevel on the hollow side, no exceptions.
• A flat grinding surface, because a round one scoops steel out from under the very tip.
• Heat. A dry grinder pulls the temper and you never see it.
• Rotation. Outward, or the loose grit crawls back across the bevel and chews away everything you just built.

Why does a sharp gouge still fight the wood?

Resistance comes from the wedge, not the edge. A bevel is a wedge, and a wedge parts fibers by force. Stand that wedge up steep and the fibers push back along its whole face. You feel it as work.

Lay the same wedge down long and low and the fibers part without any shoving. My skew carries a big long bevel, and it does no fighting inside the fibers at all. The whole trick is right there. Nothing more.

How long should the bevel be?

Ten millimeters, 3/8 in, read along the grind from the heel forward. Half that, 5 mm or 3/16 in, sits far too high. A few of mine run out to 20 mm, 3/4 in, and those are the ones that feel like nothing in the hand.

Ask me what degree I grind and I will shrug. I eyeball it by where my hand sits. Every maker rolls different steel thicknesses, so a number in degrees means less than it sounds. Length you can see. A pen mark and a rule will settle it in five seconds.

What does a steep bevel do to your shoulder?

Pain, and sooner than you think. In something soft like basswood you notice it fastest. A brand new tool arrives with a high factory bevel, so to make it engage you raise your hand. Raise the hand and the elbow follows. The elbow lifts the shoulder. Carve like that all afternoon and you will pay for it.

Drop the bevel and your knuckles ride almost against the surface. Two problems die at once. The arm stops working overtime, and the fibers stop pushing back. You can carve all day.

The makers are not being careless. They grind high on purpose, in case you reach for a mallet, or your hand is thick and wants room under the handle. Two Cherries is the only maker I have found who ships a little lower, and even their later batches came up.

What is the micro bevel for?

Two jobs, and both matter. Grind a bevel that long and the very point turns thin and weak, especially in oak or anything hard. A small second bevel on the inside puts strength back at the tip.

Job two is the one people miss. Sometimes you turn a gouge over and work upside down. Lacking that inside bevel, the tool digs straight in and you cannot escape. So it goes on every tool I own, spoon gouges included.

A ceramic slip around 4000 grit does it. Begin at the left, sweep across, keep it small. The wire edge you raise is better let go on its own than forced back and forth until it snaps off.

Can you get a flat bevel by hand?

Masters did it for centuries, so of course you can. A stone will do, or plain sandpaper, same abrasive idea either way, and nothing else is needed. My own teacher taught me on stones and nothing more.

When I was six years old I was quite sure I already understood how to carve wood. He handed me paper and a pencil. Design, he said, and then he walked off and left me to it. I spent all day on an acanthus leaf. I was very proud of that leaf. He came back, looked at the paper, and said one word. Think. Think how you will carve it. Paper is not wood. What tools do you own, and how many of them?

Another time I came to him complaining, loudly, that he had given me a bad board. There is no such thing as bad wood, he said. There are dull tools. I have never once found him wrong about that.

My honest problem with hand work, though, is one I have never been able to argue past. I have never seen a flat bevel come off a stone. Look along one and it arches. It rolls. You can carve with it, and plenty of good people do, but that roll piles resistance on top of the resistance you already have. Some patient soul out there gets close to perfect. I could not.

What does a bench grinder do to the edge?

Two kinds of damage. A grinder is a wheel, and a wheel leaves a hollow. Scooping there thins a point that was already thin.

Heat is the other kind, and heat is what actually kills a tool for good. Dry wheels cook the steel at its weak spot. You will often see no blue at all. You find out weeks later, when the point snaps and the whole thing has to be ground back. On short bevels, like turning tools, a hollow does no harm and may even help. On a carving gouge it does harm.

Way to grind	What it leaves on the steel	Cost
Bench stone by hand	A bevel that slowly rolls over into an arch you can see	Hours
Dry bench grinder	A hollow right where the steel is thinnest, and heat driven hard into that very same spot	Sometimes the temper itself
Water cooled wheel	Cool steel, still a hollow, two grits	Your patience
Flat disc and a jig	Flat, the whole way down, and the same on every grit	Two minutes

Did the water cooled wheel solve it?

Half of it. When Tormek arrived in the States I bought the machine and every jig and attachment they made, including an axe rig I have never touched. Slow and wet, so the heat problem was gone. I still own it. A diamond stone runs on it now and the water sits unused.

The curve is what it did not fix. Bigger wheel, gentler hollow, still a hollow. On a bevel of 18 mm, 5/8 in, that difference is real. And it handed me a third problem: grits. You get coarse, or coarser. They call one of them fine and it is still coarse. Two grits, when a polished bevel wants six.

Why a flat disc instead of a wheel?

Flat gives a flat bevel, which a bench stone gives and a wheel never can. I found the machine at a woodworking store for about two hundred dollars, Chinese made. I switched it on and it wobbled. I asked myself whether there was room in my shop for a cheap tool, and I walked away. Then back. Then away again. Buying it took me a very long time.

The idea underneath was too good to leave. A flat face, turning slow enough that you can lay a finger on it and come away unhurt. Try that on a grinder. Steel never cooks here.

Grit changes in about a second, and that second is what pays my bills. Sharpening is not my trade. Carving is. Every hour I spend on a stone is an hour nobody paid me for.

I run sandpaper discs, diamond discs, and CBN wheels. CBN costs around three hundred dollars and is not worth it. Diamond does the job for twelve. Sandpaper does the job for less, and outlasts anything you would guess. I ran the same 6000 grit sheet for five years.

Holding the angle by hand on a spinning disc is a different matter altogether. The tool jumps. Getting a true bevel freehand there is close to impossible, which is exactly why the bar and jig setup exists at all.

The SVS jig is the one I reach for first. Notch on the handle side, tool in, screw centered in the flute. One limit comes with it: a deep U shape like a number 11 veiner will knock its knob against the bar. The bigger round jig has no such limit and handles every tool, and if you own only one, own that one.

Which grit comes after which?

Start coarse enough to reshape, then climb. I begin at 100, and drop to 60 only when a tool has been really abused. Then 180 or 220, then 320, then 600, then 1000. Water has no place here, and neither does oil. And no pressure, because pressure is how people burn the very edge they are trying to save.

Each grit takes seconds to swap, and the bevel does not move while you climb, which is the whole point of using a jig.

Work up to the edge slowly. On the coarse discs I stay well back. Every grit after that brings me closer, until the last passes sit right on the edge and nothing is left to see, no marks and no wobble anywhere.

A brand new tool I simply use until it goes dull, two or three days, and I never touch it before that. Dull is when reshaping starts.

Follow the sweep of the tool as you go. Near the middle it bites gently. Out at the rim it will take metal off fast enough to surprise you. Same disc, different speed under the steel.

So: one number, one small inside bevel, one flat surface, and a ladder of grits that takes about two minutes. All of it fits in a paragraph, and the sharpening course walks it through tool by tool. Shall we carve?

Which way should the disc turn?

Outward, away from your body. Two reasons, and the first is plain safety of the edge. Rotate toward yourself on leather or felt and the tool digs straight in.

Reason two you cannot see with your eyes. We call it the saw tooth effect. Turning the wrong way, those tiny abrasive stones climb up over the bevel instead of running off it, and they damage what you just built. Outward, they leave.

What goes on the leather, and what on the felt?

Leather is for stropping, felt is for honing, and each wants its own paste. Green Koch paste belongs on the leather. The blue one, harder and finer, suits the felt, and the maker claims it cools the steel while it works.

My secret weapon is not sold for tools at all. Trend makes a mirror paste, meant for polishing mirrors, and it is the best thing I have ever put on leather. Watch it go black and you are watching metal come off. Flexcut does red, yellow and green. They all work. Some just work better, and some fling paste across the whole shop, which is the real reason I changed.

Leather scraps are free, by the way. Walk into a leather shop and ask for offcuts. Most of them keep a box set aside for exactly that, because otherwise the stuff goes in the bin. MDF discs work too, sawn out of 10 mm stock and stacked on the same screw.

How do you sharpen a V-tool?

Treat it as three tools, not one. Two chisels, one on each wall, and a gouge along the bottom. Work the gouge first and let that side run a little longer, then change the angle and bring each chisel side across to meet it.

Machine made tools are not consistent. Look along the walls of yours and the thickness changes as you come near the edge. So you wiggle. Tiny movements, side to side, checking as you go, never rocking about like you are dancing.

Left hand on the blade, right hand steering, and follow the edge. People call this the hardest tool in the roll. Once you see it as chisel, chisel, gouge, the fear goes out of it. A whole lesson covers the V-tool, and another covers the notch that shows up in so many of them straight from the factory.

What about spoon gouges, back bents and the big ones?

Same jigs. Only the height changes. Raise the bar for a short bend, lower it for a back bent, and that covers the whole difference. Back bents are brutal on a stone by hand and easy here.

For the monsters, a bigger jig. Three inches and an eighth fits, and no carving tool is wider than that, because past it no human arm can push. One warning with the big jig: pull on it and the bevel moves. Thumb holds it down, second finger on the blade so you feel the pressure.

Small tools go the same way on micro tools, and the large gouge and straight gouge lessons take it slower than I can here. Diamond discs and the fingernail gouge have their own as well.

Does a wavy bevel mean you failed?

Waviness on the back of a bevel bothers me not at all. I know where it comes from. Sometimes I press harder to reach the edge, sometimes lighter, and the steel keeps a record of both.

Plenty of woodworkers look at that and say the work is not professional. Carving wood is my business, not polishing a straight line onto steel. Reach the edge, stay consistent at the edge, make it frighteningly sharp, and the rest is decoration.

I can do surgery with my tools. And I have watched men with perfectly straight bevels fail to dig into wood at all, because the bevel was rubbing the whole way down. The tool looked wonderful. It could not work.