Review – Sharpening Class

I just got back from Northwest Woodworking Studio attending a one-day Sharpening Class taught by Jeff Zens.

Jeff covered flattening the back of a blade, hollow grinding the front of the blade, honing the bevel and finished with a quick overview of scraper sharpening.

The first part was a mini lecture on what makes a sharp blade and why certain angles work for certain tasks but not for all, why certain angles are more durable than others.  Before we got into flattening the back of the blade, we covered different techniques which included sand paper (dry and wet), water stones (with brief mention of oil stones).  I got two important bits of information from this.  First, flattening a new blade (even a good one) can take a half a day.  Second, a simple bench hook jig for holding the stone while sharping (the secret are a series of relief grooves in the back to help it stay flat even with all the water).  We spent the morning on this.

The afternoon, we discussed the benefit of hollow grown.  The main benefit is that you can get a definite register of flatness with a hollow grown blade where as a flat ground does not give a definitive flat  registration (this may mean I need to buy a grinder of some kind).  The reason you need to have this definite registration of flatness is so that you can free hand the honing process giving you greater efficiency and control.  This was very important to my goals as I’ve found jigs of any sort to be very time consuming.

I tried only dry grinding since I expected to buy a wet grinder.  I did this in case I wanted to change my mind.  After my experience where I overheated the blade (blue’d the blade) which is very bad, I decided the dry path wasn’t for me.  This is very difficult to do with a wet grinder.  I still got the sense of what needs to be done though the results on my trial chisel where not good.  Once a hollow grind is done, the honing process is very quick, unlike the flattening process.

The last bit of the afternoon was about scrapers.  I’m not sure I learned anything new here but it was good to see it up close.

All in all, I found this class to be very useful even with all the knowledge I had from books and training videos.  Jeff was a thorough and knowledgable teacher and I would definitely recommend a class from the school and/or the instructor.

P.S.  The school is set up with many individual benches, an instructor bench, sharpening benches, and a power tool room.