Unable to sharpen plane iron, sharpening equipment suggestions needed

[Patrick Chase]

+1 about sharpening using a Tormek.

I haven't found it laborious or time consuming to sharpen a plane iron on a Tormek. A week or so ago I had an new/old smoother iron I needed to regrind and sharpen. I spent a couple of minutes on a high speed wheel getting it square and partially creating the bevel. I left about a 1/16" of thickness at the cutting edge. It's really pretty hard to get a blade so hot that it ruins the temper if you are holding to with your bare hands. Think about it, if you touch a 400 degree oven pan, you get an immediate burn. Your fingertips will tell you long before it ever even gets remotely close to that.

Once complete, just use the standard jig to complete the hollow grind. When you grade the stone with the coarse side of the dressing stone, it cuts very fast. When you draw a wire edge, remove from the jig and flatten the back. You can finish by buffing the back and cutting edge with the leather strop, or put a nice secondary bevel on the blade with your favorite high grit waterstone. The entire process took me about 15 minutes. Once it's sharp, it is super easy to regrind the bevel when it dulls.

The tormek is expensive, but it really is worth it. All that jazz about various stones, flattening techniques, paper types, just forget about it. Sharpening on the Tormek is fun instead of a chore. It's really that good. The best part is the machine comes with a dressing jig to get your stone round again if you dish the center or want to expose a fresh surface after repeated use.

It's awesome.

I have and love the Tormek. It's sort of like the old Jobo rotary fim processors (also a fine product of Sweden) in that there doesn't seem to be all that much there for the money, but once you start using it you realize that it's all been thought out to the Nth degree and Just Works. I particularly like their drill-sharpening jig.

With that said I think that it's important to distinguish as you did between sharpening and grinding. The Tormek is great for sharpening, but a bit slow if you need to remove a bunch of material to repair chipping or something like that. As you describe, that's best done on a conventional grinder. Most of the complaints I see are from people trying to use it to hog off steel, and then imprecisely describing that as "sharpening".

w.r.t. it being hard to burn an iron while holding it by hand, that depends on the tip geometry. If you first grind the edge at 90 deg and then shape the bevel as you described then the tip has plenty of cross-sectional area, and can't get much warmer than the body of the iron. In that case what you say is true. If on the other hand you try to grind the bevel all the way to a wire edge then you end up with a lot of heat being dumped into a very fine/thin tip (high thermal resistance path to the body of the iron). In that case you can get drastic local heating sufficient to burn the edge without making the entire iron hot or even warm to the touch.