Free-hand radius skew grinding is NOWHERE!! near as easy as it looks... :P

[Joshua Dinerstein]

Well I finally got the time this morning to try sharpening my skews. I sharpened the straight one with an add-on I created for my Darrell Feltmate designed homemade wood sharpening center. This skew add-on is made to kind of match the images I have seen online of the PSI and Wolverine skew attachments. (I will take a few pictures and post them up as soon as I can locate my camera in this mess I call an office.)

Anyway it worked nicely to put an edge on my HF straight 1" skew. Then I honed it and I must have done something a little wrong because I managed to make it feel a little more dull on the edge. So I am going to:
1- try it as is and see what it is like.
2- then sharpen it just on the grinder and try it.
3- and then sharpen and hone as the last stage to see if I can really feel much of a difference at this stage.

Then I decided that worked well enough I would get truly creative! I took one of my cheap (8 tools for $9) HF carbon steel tools the spear scraper and turn it into a small 1/2" radius edge skew. After all I figure I am out $1.12 if I screw it up and will just keep going until it is way to sort trying to make it work. This of course rather than wasting the much more expensive steel of a HSS tool.

It started out well enough. Following Alan Lacers demonstration I ground it down to the radius I thought looked right and then started sharpening it. I used the same jig I mentioned ebove and slowly started removing metal. I managed with constant cooling in water to get no blue spots and to start getting it down.

However I ran into a rather interesting moment at the very end. As it start to get down to an actual edge rather than a flat glinting surface I started to lose the radius. It makes a certain amount of sense to me as I was grinding like I had before on the straight edge so I was remove more metal at the high point of the radius and removing that high point.

So I went truly free-hand. And WOW! Is that HARD TO DO RIGHT! So I abandoned the idea for now and I need to re-watch the dvd on the freehand grinding and thought I would come and ask if anyone here had a technique for using that jig for doing a radius? Anyone?

Or is freehand or a veritas jig really the only help available?

One thing I can say is that I am really glad I started with a cheap tool and have it to practice on!

Thanks,
Joshua

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Joshua,

It took me a couple of hours of practice until I could get my Lacer radius skews ground correctly. I use a stand for my Wolverine jig that looks similar to what Lacer uses in his video. Now, it's just a couple of minutes to do the same thing. Takes a light touch and in the beginning some patience to learn but you can do it.

One thing you might try....this will sound crazy.

It sounds like you built a Wolverine jig knock off. If that is so....take the skew jig portion off. Set the skew into the arm that the skew jig and the gouge jig sit in....and grind. I tried that on my skew way back when and it doing so ground a radius on the skew. Try it on your cheap HF skew.

[Joshua Dinerstein]

One thing you might try....this will sound crazy.

It sounds like you built a Wolverine jig knock off. If that is so....take the skew jig portion off. Set the skew into the arm that the skew jig and the gouge jig sit in....and grind. I tried that on my skew way back when and it doing so ground a radius on the skew. Try it on your cheap HF skew.
Hummm. Interesting. I will give it a whirl and see what I can get to happen!

Thanks for the suggestion Ken.

Joshua