Is my Veritas MKII mis-adjusted

[Bob Cooper]

i just pulled my sharpening guide out of a drawer after a long time of no use...my wife gave it to me a couple years ago, i did some sharpening but stopped as i had other power tool oriented stuff to do. i'm now ready to get into this and get adept at sharpening...so expect a bunch of stupid questions.

So i flattened all the backs and then started to work on the front of this chisel and notice that the new grind is at an angle. At first i'm thinking the original polish was off but finally stop when i hit the end and sure enough the grind/hone is not square. i could visually see it was off so i pulled out a small square to verify it. I verified that the tool is well seated and i repeated the process on this mortising chisel and the angle did not change. Just to verify that it was the guide i grabbed another chisel i was reconditioning (back is nice...front looks terrible) and honed it just enough to see that it too had an angle.

See pictures

I'll call Veritas but has anyone else seen this? i'm sure it was not this way when i bought it. BTW i'm using a 700 grit water stone and i verified that the stone was flat. Note i blackened the face of the first chisel and ran it a few strokes so that it was easier to see the angle.

Not sure why these pictures are turned 90 degrees.

IMG_9425.jpgIMG_9426.jpgIMG_9427.jpgIMG_9428.jpg

[Stephen Rosenthal]

I noticed the same thing on some chisels, especially those 3/8” and under. The worst two were 1/4”, a Lie Nielsen and a Stanley. I’ve never been particularly happy with the Mark II, but I purchased it and all the accessories before Lie Nielsen came out with their sharpening jig.

[Rob Luter]

Are the side of your chisels parallel? Is this only occurring on the narrow jaw setup? I used to have the whole MKII kit and found it held the chisels well enough.

[Derek Cohen]

Bob, the most likely issue is that the blade is not lying flat, and is canted sightly to one side. The question is what is causing this? It could be human error - not positioning the blade well. It could be machine error - the sides of the jaws are not square. Or it could be the chisel - the sides/lands of the chisel blade are doing this. You need to check all these possibilities.

One other thing: you look like you are honing a full bevel. Honing guides excel at home micro bevels. That's what makes it possible to recreate another edge the next time, since the angle does not have to be exact, and the new one will replace the old.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Sanford Imhoff]

Make sure to apply equal pressure to the knobs that are tightening the blade holder.

[J. Greg Jones]

Make sure to apply equal pressure to the knobs that are tightening the blade holder.

Good advice for the standard blade holder, the narrow blade head pictured only has one tightening knob.

[Bob Cooper]

One other thing: you look like you are honing a full bevel. Honing guides excel at home micro bevels. That's what makes it possible to recreate another edge the next time, since the angle does not have to be exact, and the new one will replace the old.

Yes that makes perfect sense...but figured i'd hone the entire surface the first time while i'm getting my feet wet.

[Bob Cooper]

thanks everyone...i'll go back out and make sure nothing's under the blade and that if there are two knobs that i apply pressure evenly. I do believe this is user error as originally this worked fine so i just need to debug it. Also given that the symptoms occurred on 2 separate chisels that i think this should rule out the possibility that that sides of the chisel are not parallel.

[Andrew Pitonyak]

It has been so long since I have used my Veritas guide that I cannot be really really helpful, but hopefully I can be "somewhat" helpful.

The first question is, how can you test the edges to make sure that they are parallel?

Use a square against a piece of wood or paper.
Set the chisel against the square and draw line against the other side of the chisel. Do this for both sides. You can tell if one side or another is not parallel to the square when set against it, which would mean that it is tapered. .

Or, using your square, mark a straight line across your chisel from both sides. You should have one line if they are parallel.

When I use my Tormek, I check to make sure that blade is coming out square from the blade holder. If the sides are not parallel, then I just made sure that the front edge will be parallel to only one side. In that case, I try to split the difference. I do not know if you can check to see if that chisel is coming straight out from the guide.

If you cannot use a small square ON the guide, can you push the guide up against a piece of wood or paper? Related, have you seen how you check a square for square? Position the square, draw a line, flip the square and draw another. Are the lines parallel? Do something similar but look at the two sides of the chisel for drawing your lines placing the lines close together (so you move the guide).

If you cannot make it square for multiple chisels that seem to be parallel, then the problem could be the guide.

[Will Blick]

I hate to ever say anything neg about LV products. Just love the company, the great customer service, the CEO reaches out to us, can not ask for a better maker / vendor than LV.
But maybe my comments might be helpful to help better the MKII sharpening jig.

I have had the same problem as the OP with the MKII. I have wasted countless hours getting to the bottom of the issue. I use the MKII setting jig, and the edge is still not square. There is several issues. The MKII is casted, one reason it has limited accuracy. The alignment of the holder is not perfectly square, tolerance not tight enough. And the biggest wild card is.. when you tighten down on the blade, it can slightly move the blade... only a tiny bit, but the edge is far away from where its being held, magnifying the error at the edge.

LV Customer service did not seem to be up to speed on this problem...they were nice enough to send me replacement...but same issue with the replacement.
I tried putting a tough rubber on the two clamp faces, so it bites better, and slower, it helped a bit. I also tighten the thumb nuts by alternating, to creep up on tight. In addition, the thumb nuts are not wide enough diam to hand tightened enough to assure blade remains taught. A 1/4 turn with pliers helps. Bottom line, its finicky.

The entire MKII system is brilliant, like all LV tools. Its priced very fairly considering its vast capability. The design just falls a bit short on the main jig and the alignment jig. Its possible, some people have better luck with them, could be hit or miss.

My suggestion to LV... offer a higher end jig holder and alignment jig, maybe machined. Make it compatible with all the accessories. A sharpening jig we use forever, many of us would be willing to pay a LOT more for better accuracy... square edges is very desirable.

I purchased the Woodpeckers sharpening jig, which machined from scratch... the design of the holding jig and setting jig is much better design and better build quality to hold square, but it could use a few very minor refinements. But overall, the WP is now my GO TO jig for plane blades as its robust and my edges are much more square with virtually no fuss. Of course, the cost of the WP is like 5x that of the MKII. So its not an apples to apples comparison. Hope this helps...

[Brandon Speaks]

Mine works alright but you do have to be careful during alignment. Also it is very sensitive to pressure while sharpening. Just a little more pressure on one side will do this also. You can add camber on corners with a few passespressing down just a bit unevenly.

[David Carroll]

I have the original honing guide, the one with the big brass finger screw on it. I struggled with this same issue since I got it decades ago. It affected every blade and iron the same way. Sharpening the blade slightly skewed. At first I figured I was just applying more pressure to the right side as I sharpened. (I used to use scary sharp, now I use diamond plates, so the media is flat). I could correct the problem by putting all force to the left as I sharpen. Sometimes canting the blade offsets the cut and corrects it allowing a square edge.

What I've determined is that the bed of the guide is not parallel with the roller axis. I've checked the roller and it is not tapered. I found if I take a snip of a business card and shim under one side of the iron I can get it square. One of these days I'll epoxy a brass shim and correct it, but so far the business card trick works well enough.

[James Pallas]

I’ve posted about this before. I’m including some photos here. The mark II is a good tool. All guides are reasonable tools to maintain working edges. Most of the time I freehand. The chisel pictured was ground on a regular 6” grinder some time ago.
all chisels are not created equal. This one varies in width top to edge about .008. The depth at the top of the lands varies about .006. My freehand sharpening has it out of square about .008. If put into the mark II and set on a diamond hone you can see it does not lay flat across the edge. All it takes is light pressure to flatten the edge to the hone. If I do that it will remain out of square. You can use a coarser hone and light pressure on the mark II body, not on the chisel edge. Let the hone do its job and straighten the edge starting with the long side.

[Winston Chang]

I had the same problem with my Mk II honing guide -- it put a skew in my blades. It took some back and forth with Lee Valley customer support, but they eventually replaced it. Their first response was to send me what I assume is a stock email telling me all the things that I could be doing wrong with the honing guide, and I replied with a bunch of pictures to convince them that the problem really was the honing guide itself.


This is a brand-new Veritas chisel that was given a skew by the honing guide.

honing-guide-1.jpg honing-guide-2.jpg

Here's what it looks like with a wider blade, resting on a granite countertop. You can see that the blade does not rest flat on the surface. The sides of the blade were square to the cutting edge, and I had not actually sharpened this blade with the Veritas honing guide.

honing-guide-4.jpg

Finally, here's the same blade with the replacement honing guide they sent me. With this one, the blade rests flat on the surface.

honing-guide-5.jpg

So if yours has a skew like this, you should ask them to replace it. Note that these pictures were taken with the flat roller. With the cambered roller, it is easy to compensate for the skew by changing how you apply pressure, but with the flat roller, it's impossible.