Originally Posted by
Pat Barry
How in the world do you make sense of this statement. If they had no honing guides then they did it freehand and if they did it freehand they certainly were not precise about degrees.
First, as Jim K. mentioned, a grinding wheel with a tool rest helps a lot.
Second, even without a grinding wheel, there are all sorts of ways to do this. The method most often mentioned in those old texts--I think it's in Nicholson but I'm too lazy to look--is to make the bevel twice the thickness of the blade. That's a nicely practical way of saying sine 30° = 1/2. If you can measure accurately, you can hit 30° within a degree this way.
Third--assuming we are talking about 17th-19th c. Europeans and Americans, not Neanderthals in caves--they may not have had honing guides, but they had protractors. So you grind, measure, and grind again. Eventually you develop the muscle memory to hit your angles accurately. By the way, if they had wanted honing guides, they certainly could have made them, but they were making tools for professionals, not accessories for amateurs.
Its virtually impossible to get anything other than a convex bevel going freehand. No one is that precise such as to avoid some degree of convexness.
Pat, you have a tendency to assume that difficult for you = virtually impossible. You made some similar comments before about the supposed impossibility of jointing an edge by hand, which is a fundamental, gateway skill in furnituremaking.
In Japan, the normal method of sharpening is a full flat bevel, done freehand, no jigs. So yes, it is possible--they have been doing it for a very long time indeed.
The human mind and body are capable of some pretty amazing things. One of the most fulfilling and addicting things about hand tool work is when you exceed what you thought was possible with your own two hands. But to do that, you have to shed your preconceptions, and most importantly, be willing to fail. Try it some time--you might surprise yourself.
"For me, chairs and chairmaking are a means to an end. My real goal is to spend my days in a quiet, dustless shop doing hand work on an object that is beautiful, useful and fun to make." --Peter Galbert