Worksharp 3000, keeping things straight?

[Dan Karachio]

With chisels or plane blades I almost always get a little skewing. It seems that when the sharpening port is tight enough to hold the tool to prevent skewing or any movement relative to the disk it is also too tight to move the darn chisel up and down to engage the disk! I am very frustrated by this. This is not rocket science so what might be going on?

[Casey Gooding]

I have a similar problem. I leave just enough room to move the blade easily. My real problem is that the bed keeps moving out of square to the spinning disk. It needs frequent adjustment to keep things square. Very frustrating.

[Jeremy Dorn]

Now that I've gotten about a year of use, and god only knows how many plane irons under my belt I'd echo what the last poster said about the accessory "table" that goes on the top of the worksharp. Mine constantly is slightly out of perfectly level with the disc.

I have found though that its often times easier to simply adjust the amount of pressure I'm holding the iron down with with either my left or right hand (which ever is the side that's out of square on the iron) and its pretty easy to free hand sharpen a "perpendicular enough" bevel on a plane iron. Sometimes to aid in the grinding I'll use a sharpie and a square and scribe a line on the back of the plane iron, that way I can see which corner is out, and adjust my pressure accordingly.

Like anything hand tool related its pretty rarely necessary that you're dead straight, the exceptions being rabbeting, or shoulder plane iron type things and they typically have smaller irons so grinding evenly free hand is quite doable.

JD

[Orlando Gonzalez]

What Casey said. You have to look at the skew cam adjustment lever and set screw (bottom of p. 13) http://www.worksharptools.com/ftproot/WSN_20UG_Eng_PP0002046_Rev1_v9.pdf and keep playing with it until it gets squared.

Good sharpening system if you don't like waterstones. I sold mine because I prefer waterstones.

Here is a site where I bought my abrasive disks from 60g to 12000g. I bought the 6" No Hole PSA ones. All you have to do is cut out the center hole.

60g-1200g
http://www.sisweb.com/micromesh/mmx_discs.htm#6_0_psa

1500g-12000g
http://www.sisweb.com/micromesh/mmr_discs.htm#6_0_psa

HTH

[glenn bradley]

I leave the "guide" wide open. I just rest the tool against one edge or the other of the port as a reference edge. I did have to fiddle with the screw cam a few times to get it set but have never changed it since.

[Bob Noles]

What glenn said + 1

[Dan Karachio]

Wow, great tips (adjustments, source of disks, free hand-one edge technique..). I thought I was the only one and would find posts of, "Gee, mine works perfect..." I do have water stones and used them yesterday. I'm still sorting out what works best for me here. I have the table top and accessories for wider blades on the WS3000, but for my larger plane irons I am sticking with the water stones. Don't want to risk skewing those babies.

Thanks.

[Andrew Pitonyak]

I did a bunch of sharpening with the system and I found it very difficult to obtain square results... Sufficiently difficult that I purchased a Tormek T-7, which has provided better results faster (only used the Tormek a few times).

The sharpie is your friend here. Mark the blade and check to make sure you are square.

When I purchased the flat top extension, it came with an angle jig. I found that I needed to use extreme care when setting my blade into the jig (because it would be slightly skewed in the jig). If you get that piece, watch for this.

I never did set the top to be flat with no skew, because it appeared to be dead on with the wide surface that I added. Making everything dead on was a chore in itself...

I own a chisel that is 1-1/4 inch wide and rather short. I was able to deal with that chisel much more easily on the work sharp than on the Tormek (with what I have tried).

I was able to purchase adhesive backed sandpaper with the correct diameter at a big box store, and then I manually cut a hole in the center. This provided some supper rough grit that worked very well when I had a bunch of material to remove.