Grinding a Chisel with Paul Anthony

woodcraft magazine making woodworking more enjoyable for woodworkers around the world Hi, I'm Paul Anthony's senior editor at wood craft magazine in issue 68. I wrote an article called

chisel

rescue in which I show how to restore a beater

chisel

like this one with the nicked spitting rust. poorly ground edges and bevel on a finely cutting specimen like this with its polished flat back, very well ground bevel and perfectly sharpened edge. Now restoring a chisel involves three basic steps: the first is to flatten and polish the back and that is done with whetstones, the second. is to shape the bevel on a grinder and the third is to sharpen that bevel with sharpening stones.

Now in this video I'm going to show you how to shape the bevel on a grinder for the entire operation, including sharpening the back and the bevel. check out the article now,

grinding

a bevel involves a few tools here, the first of which is a low speed grinder of about 1725 rpm fitted with a solid tool rest. Now you'll also need a handful of other small tools, including a diamond

grinding

wheel like This other very useful tool is a bevel gauge which will help you set the angle of your bevel as you grind it. You will also want a small machinist's square to help you grind the end of the chisel sideways.

It is very important to get a magnifying glass so you can see what you are doing. The 10 power magnifier is almost perfect. Lastly, you need a way to cool the steel while grinding it instead of cooling the metal in water, which can fracture a thin edge. I like it. to use a heatsink I took from an old computer. Now I'm going to provide sources for all of these tools at the end of this video so let's start the demonstration here by showing you how to grind the end of the square chisel for its sides now normally keep in mind that you would do this after you have flattened and polished the back of the chisel, but for the purposes of this demonstration, I'm just going to skip that and use this old beater chisel, so I'm going to use this diamond face. dresser to clean the face of this wheel while shaping a slight crown on the rim.

Now this is a 120 grit soft bond wheel. It will cut much more cleanly and with Coulee than the typical vitrified gray wheel which should do just fine, so now I'm going to polish the end of the chisel a little to square it up to the sides and remove any notch in the end or this end, in this case remove the rolled edge now to guide the chisel as I grind it. I'm going to register the second joint of my index finger against the front edge of the tool holder and move it back and forth so that this is smooth and cleans any dirt off the tool holder and the top of your chisel to that moves relatively free of friction now I'm going to check this with a square.

I'm pretty good and I've created a little flat on the end here. I have removed the rolled edge. and the Knicks next I'm going to polish the bevel, so I'm going to polish the bevel just like that before I pinch the tool between my fingers here with the second joint of my index finger serving as a fence against the front edge of the guide now the shape to indicate how to aim your bevel because you want the tool to land right in the center of the bevel. What I do is I use a marker here to mark the end and now I'm going to zoom in to where I think this should be and I have the bevel against the wheel.

I think it's okay. Alright. It's pretty good. I'm near the center of the bezel. Now I'm going to feed him back and forth. This is producing a nice bevel. starting to warm up a little. I'm going to cool this down quickly by leaning it against my heat sink. Now it's very important, don't lose control as you continue to grind, so I have what appears to be a nice nice bevel here, however, I'm going to examine it with my loop and I can see that yes, I have a very nice edge on this, it is just a hair and it's beautiful, the bevel itself is nice and even across the entire face and this chisel is already ready for the whetstones so there you have it, that's the basic process of honing a chisel so good ol' good luck with yours and remember that practice makes you perfect.