Crowned smoothing plane blades

[John Edwards]

Recently there was a thread on adding a small crown to a smoothers blade. The idea being to minamize the ridges that form when a board is planned.
My question is..
How does one make this crowned blade ?
I have tried freehand sharping but just cant get the hang of keeping the bevel flat. Now use the Vertias roller w/Norton waterstones. Would adding a small amount of pressue to the outside edges of the blade during the final sharping phase give the required crown ??
Thanks

[John Wadsworth]

Leonard Lee of Lee Valley has a sharpening video; if memory serves me, that's what he does--i.e., just extra pressure on one corner, then the other, while honing. This seems to work even with a guide, but maybe others can confirm-I'm mostly a freehand guy myself.

(By the way, you're only looking for a tiny amount of curvature--maybe 10 to 15 thousandths).

[Terry Stapleton]

After watching Jim Kingshott in his Bench Planes video do that, I finally have had some success with my smoothers. He just leans a little harder on each each side of the blade for a dozen or so passes on the stone. Seemed to do the trick for me.