Sharpening Hand Tools

Course Overview

How would you like your tools to be that sharp? I think sharpening is one of the most important aspects to hand tool woodworking. As my tools become dull, I've found that the quality of my work also goes down. So, therefore, it is extremely important that your tools are razor sharp. In this video series, we're going to go over sharpening all edge tools, including chisels, planes, scrapers. We're also going to go over how to sharpen a crosscut saw, a rip saw. We're going to talk about the different stones that are used from water stones, oil stones, diamond stones, and which one I prefer. We'll recondition tools. We'll talk about how to restore a chisel, a saw, and a plane. We'll even talk about getting a tool fresh out of the box and how to get it working just like this. So I hope you can join us for this video series on sharpening.

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Choosing Your Sharpening Stones

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hi. My name is Frank Strazza, with the Heritage School of Woodworking. And in this video, I'm going to talk about choosing your sharpening stones. It may be confusing when trying to choose which sharpening stone system to use. And I want to try to clarify some of the confusion, there, and try to simplify the process for you. I'd like to talk about water stones. I've got some water stones, here, and we've got oil stones, and I've got some diamond stones. Those are the three main systems that are available to you. There are some other systems as well, including sandpaper, here, to granite, or glass-- [MUSIC ENDS] --and even ceramic stones. But these are the primary systems that you're going to encounter when choosing your sharpening stones. The water stones-- I'll talk about the pros and cons of each one of these stones. The water stones are actually very friable; that is, that they break down quickly, always exposing a fresh sharpening surface. So when you're sharpening, they sharpen quickly, but they often tend to hollow out rapidly, because you're constantly breaking down the surface. So they need to be flattened; they need to be flattened about after every sharpening. They also take water, so that can sometimes be a little messy, when you're sharpening. You've got to have the stone soaking in water, like this one is, here. And you've got to always constantly check to make sure that it is flat. The different stones that you'll encounter-- the different grits-- are-- let's see. I've got, here, a 220-grit Norton stone, and it's combined with a 1,000 grit, again made by Norton. Here we've got a 4,000/8,000 combination. There's some other manufacturers that are available, including these. This is a 10,000 and a 3,000. If you were going to use the water stones, you really don't need but just a couple. I would get a coarse one, maybe the 220-grit--- 220, 1,000, and the 4,000/8,000 is going to be just fine. Again, I personally don't use the water stones, because they're time-consuming, messy, and I've got to flatten them after every use. So how do you flatten them? Well, you usually use a diamond flattener. You could use a diamond stone. Norton makes their own type of flattener. And there's other brands that aren't as soft as these water stones. Shapton makes one that's a little bit harder. But again, you still have the issue of needing to flatten it, oftentimes quite frequently. On to oil stones. There's many different type of oil stones available, from man-made to natural oil stones. This here is an India bench stone. It's a coarse stone. They also do wear out. They're harder, obviously, than the water stones, but they also wear out, and they do need to be flattened. Being that they're harder, they take longer to flatten. So we've got coarse, a medium. This one, here, is-- let's see. We've got a combination oil stone, here. We've got a soft and a hard. We've got a bigger one, here. I've actually used oil stones for a number of years. This one is a combination coarse and medium or so. Again, though, you've got to make sure that they're flat. They can be a little messy, because you're dealing with oil, as opposed to water, so you've got the oil to contend with, and making sure that you don't have oil residue on your hands when you're dealing with your work. This is the hard translucent oil stone, which is the finest oil stone that's made. There's also a black-- a hard black-- that's also a natural stone. But the hard translucent is actually the finest-- one of the finest of the oil stones. And it cuts very well, too. So I'll show you. I actually use that frequently. The diamond stones come in different grits. One thing to keep in mind, with all of these type of stones, is that the Japanese grit system is different than the American grit system. So when I talk about an 8,000-grit water stone, it's different than a 1,200-grit diamond stone. The best way to differentiate between the grits is with microns. But that's getting a bit technical. Here, with the diamond stones, we've got what I refer to as coarse, medium, and fine. The manufacturer refers to it as coarse, fine, and extra fine. And this one being about a 300-grit. We've got 600-grit for the medium one, this middle one, and then fine-- or extra fine-- is 1,200-grit. I prefer the diamond stones that are a metal plate with the diamonds on the surface, here, over the whole, entire surface, as opposed to the kind that you can buy with the little holes in them. The substrate to that is usually rubber, and it's not perfectly flat. The advantage of the diamond stones is that they are flat. They stay flat; you don't ever have to flatten them. That's a big advantage for me. So when I'm sharpening, I don't ever have to worry about flattening my stones. I can just go from my work on the bench-- go right over and sharpen and chisel in two or three minutes, and get right back to work, as opposed to, if I used the water stones, I would have to flatten the stone, I'd have to sharpen the chisel, I'd have the mess, and all of that. So the downside to the diamond stones is that they don't refresh themselves. So when you sharpen, you're actually wearing away the diamonds. So after several years, the diamond stones will wear out, and you pretty much have to throw them away. They will last, though, for several years-- especially one person using them in the shop, they'll last a while. The other downside that I've found with the diamond stones is that the grit doesn't go as high as I'd like it to go. As I mentioned, this goes to 1,200-grit, which I believe is equivalent about nine microns. From this, there are some manufacturers that sell an 8,000-grit diamond stone. I haven't really been very happy with that one, in using it. So what I've opted to do is to use a hard translucent oil stone after this 1,200-grit diamond stone. And the reason why I've chosen this is because it's hard, it's fine, and it cuts fast. After this, I then go on to a strop, which is essentially a leather strop adhered-- this is leather-- adhered to a block of wood-- flat piece of wood. The leather is adhered to it with the rough slide up, and it's charged with a bit of chromium oxide, which is just a buffing compound. And the leather actually works to hold-- suspend the compound. And as you'll see in our other videos in this series, how we actually use these stones. One thing that I want to talk about, in regards to sharpening-- and again, we're going to cover this more in depth in our next video on this-- and that is, if you're flattening the back of a tool, or sharpening a tool, if you're using a soft stone, such as a water stone, the stone is actually going to give to the inconsistencies of the tool. If you're using a diamond stone, the tool is going to have to give to the diamond stone, because the diamond stone is very hard, and it's going to remain flat. And if there's any slight inconsistency in the tool, the tool is going to have to give to the diamond stone. And we'll discuss this more in depth when we go over our chisel sharpening. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC ENDS]

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How to Sharpen a Chisel

[MUSIC PLAYING] In a disposable world, essential items of lasting beauty are increasing in worth. Experience the fulfillment of creating heirlooms for succeeding generations with your own hands. Hi. My name is Frank Strazza. I'm with the Heritage School of Woodworking. In this video, I'm going to show you how to sharpen a chisel. The same techniques that I show you in sharpening a chisel are the same techniques that you'll use in sharpening a plane, a spokeshave, and other tools. And in upcoming videos, you will see, more in depth, some of the different things to encounter. The first thing I'd like to talk about is what defines sharp. And the way I usually defined sharp-- [MUSIC ENDS] --is having two highly polished surfaces coming and meeting to infinity. If we take one of those aspects out of the equation, then we won't have a sharp tool. In other words, if we take one surface, and we polish only one surface, and we don't polish the other surface, then we won't have a sharp tool. You have to have both surfaces meeting to infinity; both have to be highly polished. I'm going to show you the technique that I use. I use diamond stones. And again, we'll talk about some of the other stones, and their pros and cons, in some of the other videos. But I use diamond stones, here. I have a coarse, medium, and fine. I then go on to a hard translucent oil stone and a leather strop. So the coarse stone is about a 300-grit. We've got a medium, also referred to as a fine stone; that's 600-grit. And then a extra fine, which is 1,200-grit. The hard translucent-- they don't give that a grit size, because it's a quarried stone; it's a natural stone. Let's begin here. One of the things to be concerned about, here, is the angle, but 25 to 35 degrees is fairly standard. I use-- I just do it by eye. I'm going to start by putting a little bit of water on the stone. So the water-- what the water does is, it helps float away the particles. I added a couple drops of soap, there, to help break the surface tension of the water. The first thing that I'm going to do, here, is I'm going to start by working on the bevel. That's this part of the tool, right here. And I'm going to start on the coarse stone. What we're going to do is bring my hand down close to the bevel and feel the bevel. You can rock the chisel back and forth. You can even see the water coming out, right at the edge, there, and you know that you've got the angle. So now I've got this, and I'm just going to work it back and forth. Now, there are several ways to do this. We could work in a circle; we can go straight back and forth, like this; you can do it in a figure eight, if you want to get fancy. The main thing is, you want to maintain a consistent bevel. OK? So how do I know that I've maintained the bevel? Well, let's check our progress. You can see a scratch pattern, right there. See that scratch pattern? There's some of the old polish, right there, from the previous sharpening. I'm doing the whole, entire bevel so I can see the scratch pattern, and I can see that I'm maintaining the same bevel that's there, on the chisel. So again, back, like this. What I'm not doing, I'm not holding it up here. If I was holding it up here, the chisel would move back and forth, like this, and it would tend to put a round in the chisel, which I don't want to do. So I'm going to hold as close as I can. My left hand comes in, here, for stability. And we work it back and forth, work in a circular motion, just like this. Again, maintaining a consistent bevel, here. So let's look at it again. Seems like we're making some progress. So let's work on it a little bit more. Now how do I know that I've gone enough on one particular stone? That's the question. How do we know we've gone enough? Well, as I mentioned earlier, what defines sharp is having two surfaces meeting. So you have one surface meeting the other surface. Now what we're doing here, on this bevel, is we're removing metal. So we're taking metal away from the bevel to the back. So when that happens, when the bevel has met the back, we're going to feel a burr. Now this is the secret to sharpening. You've got to get the burr. So you can feel-- sometimes even see-- but unfortunately, you can't feel the burr in the video. But you can feel it, here, now. I'm feeling it right here, right there, and right there. I feel a little bit heavier, right there, but I want to make sure that I feel a burr all the way across that edge. Because what we have, here, is we've got this bevel meeting the back. I want to get a little heavier burr. So if I'm not getting a burr, that means that I either, one, haven't gone enough on this bevel-- I haven't sharpened this bevel enough-- or two, I'm not at the right angle. I could be a little bit too low. That would be one reason I'm not getting a burr. Simply turn it over; look at that scratch pattern. If your scratch pattern is back here, but not up towards the bevel, well, you need to increase the bevel. Now, I've got a burr all the way across, feeling it there, there, and there. We've got the burr. That means that the bevel has met the back. Now that burr, for me, is a tactile indicator that I've gone enough on this stone. I'm ready to move on to the next stone. But what I'm going to do is, I'm going to take that burr off. OK? So I'm going to come over to the fine stone-- the ultra fine stone, here-- and I've got the stone flush with the edge, here, in this little holder. And I'm going to take the chisel like this. It's very important that the chisel is held perfectly flat. So you'll see we're just going to take the burr off on the back of the chisel. Now I sharpen these chisels every day, so the back of this is already polished. In subsequent videos, I'm going to show you some of the problems that you can encounter by sharpening a used tool-- or even a new tool-- and what you will have to do to get this type of polish on the back of your tool. So now the burr is gone. In fact, the burr is on the bevel side. So now we'll go to the medium stone and-- same way. I felt the angle, and we're going to work it back and forth. I like to work in a circular motion, because it helps maintain that bevel. So here we are. We're just going to work this, back and forth, like this. Again, feel the burr. I want to feel right there, right there. And I'm just going to go a little bit more, until I get a nice, consistent burr. Then we'll move on. Again, I'm going to take the burr off on the back. Now you'll notice what I'm doing here. I've got pressure, right here, and loose pressure with my right hand, right here, guiding the chisel. What I don't want to do is, I don't want to put my fingertip underneath here, lifting the chisel up. If you lift the chisel up, you'll round the back. Another thing I'm not doing is, I'm not coming in like this, to where the chisel could ride up on this beveled part, right there, again, lifting the chisel up. So I've got it like this. Pressure, here; loose grip, here. Work it back and forth until that burr is gone. And we're going to come over here. We're going to maintain that bevel and just work it. Again, you can hear the difference from the coarse to the fine. It's a finer grit; it's taking off less material, but it's also polishing that edge. Again, work it until I feel that burr. Let's take that burr off. OK. So now I'm going to go to the oil stone. As I mentioned, this is a hard translucent oil stone. These are quarried in Arkansas. It's a natural stone. And I've chosen to use an oil stone, because it's finer than this-- than this diamond stone. On this oil stone, I'm going to use just a little three in one oil, and that helps keep the stone from getting clogged up with metal shavings-- metal particles. Again, feel that bevel. Use the whole stone. The advantage, here, of doing this freehand, without the use of a guide, is that I can use the whole stone. So I don't have to worry about the stone wearing unevenly. You'll notice, here, I'm using this corner over here, over here; use the whole, entire stone, and feel the burr. Every time, you'll notice, I feel that burr. I've got a burr there, there, and there. OK? We're going to flip this over. Work the back. Again, you can't even hear it cutting, but it is; it's polishing it. Now sometimes I'll work this, again, on the bevel, maybe applying a little lighter pressure-- less pressure, here-- so the burr is much finer. It's there; very subtle. OK. Last, but not least, I am going to strop this chisel. And what I've got, here, is I've got a leather strop-- a piece of leather adhered to a block of wood with some buffing rouge-- chromium oxide. And I'll just rub that on here. You don't have to rub it on every time you sharpen. This'll last me a couple weeks. And we'll just set this right over here. Now with this, we're going to pull the chisel. If I push, the chisel will cut into the leather. So I'm going to maintain the bevel and just go a couple times. One of the things I don't want to do, here, is I don't want to round this over. Of course, it's going to round it slightly, but if I polish it too much, here, we could round that edge, which-- there's nothing really wrong with it, other than it makes it harder when you go back to resharpen, because you've got to take that round off. But you'll notice-- look at that polish. That chromium oxide is actually about 0.5 micron-- is the smallest particle size, which is very fine. It's actually abrading the edge, polishing the edge, making a super-sharp tool. There we have it. There's the polished tool. There's a couple ways to test our sharpening job, here. One way is to test it on your fingernail. If I hold the chisel up, like this, as close as I can, and then test it right on my thumbnail-- just touch it to my thumbnail, like this. If it catches it, I know it's sharp. Now I'm not testing it up like this; I'm not carving away my thumbnail. I'm just touching it to my thumbnail. And if it catches, like that, I know it's sharp. Of course, you can do the paper test, as well, where we'll take it and it cuts through. That concludes this video for sharpening. Please check back for more in-depth sharpening techniques in our next video series. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC ENDS]

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Sharpening a Hand Plane

Hi, my name is Frank Strazza with the Heritage School of Woodworking, and in this video, I'm going to show you how to sharpen a plane. I highly recommend that you refer to our other videos on how to sharpen a chisel and how to choose a sharpening stone. We go over in-depth the different types of stones. Essentially a plane is a holder for a chisel. So if you can sharpen a chisel, you can sharpen a plane. There are, however, a few differences between the types of planes and how the blade is configured. Let me show you here. We've got a rabbet plane. This is a rabbet block plane. The blade extends all the way out to the edge. I'm going to sharpen this different than I would sharpen my smoothing plane. I have here a plane that I use as a scrub plane. And you can see the blade is very rounded as opposed to this one that is perfectly straight across. That's the biggest difference. The jointing plane here, I would sharpen it as well straight across. Let me show you a few of the different ways that you can sharpen the plane iron, the different configuration of the blades, on the whiteboard. OK, so you can sharpen your plane iron either perfectly straight like that, which is the way I would sharpen a rabbet block plane, where the blade extends all the way out to the edge. The problem with sharpening a smoothing plane like that is that the edge right here, the ends can dig into the work. So I typically sharpen my smoothing plane with a slight camber and even nicking off the edges, just taking the edges off like that. The edges on a smoothing plane there, the corners rather, are not of much use for me for a smoothing plane. And I don't want those corners to dig into the work when I'm working. The jointing plane here, I typically sharpen straight across like that. The scrub plane I'm going to sharpen with a large camber. Very convex shape like this. For this video, I'm going to show you how I sharpen a smoothing plane, which has this very slight camber, and then I take these corners off. Again, don't sharpen your rabbet plane like you would sharpen a smoothing plane. The rabbet plane is going to be sharpened just like you would sharpen a chisel. I'm taking apart the plane. And we discussed in some other videos that we've done on plane restoration tuning up a plane, using a plane. Please check those videos for that process. Right now we're going to focus on sharpening the plane iron. Again, we're going to have a very, very subtle camber with the corners nicked off right there, taken off. I'm going to start on the course diamond stone, putting a little bit of water to help float away the metal particles. And again, I highly recommend that you watch the chisel sharpening video because we talked in depth about the importance of having the back perfectly flat. The same thing applies with a plane. We're going to start here on the bevel. One thing I want to do is maintain a bevel of about 25 to 30 degrees. If I start creeping up too high on my angle, it can mess with my planing. And I'll explain that here in a minute. So I want to maintain about 25 to 30 degrees. Well how do I know that that's the angle? Well most planes come already ground to about 25 degrees. You can always check it with a protractor. Check your angle. Just take a protractor like this, put it on here, and check to see what the angle is. In this case, we are right about-- oh, we're sneaking up to 35 degrees. So I'm pushing the limit a little bit but it should be fine. 35 degrees should be fine. Feel the angle and we're going to start working the plane back and forth here, actually in a circular motion on the stone. Now how do I get the cambered affect that I want? Well the way I do that-- and this is very, very subtle-- what I do is I put a little bit of pressure right here. So the pressure is right here. And then I'm going to change the pressure over here. You can actually hear it slightly as I change the pressure. Some alternating pressure from this side of the iron to that side of the iron. And that's what does the camber. How do we know that we've gone enough? Well when this surface meets this surface, we'll feel a burr on the backside. I don't feel a burr. So I want to keep working until I feel that burr. One thing that can tell you a lot is the scratch pattern. If you view the scratch pattern, you can see if you're putting too much pressure on one side and if you're at the right angle. A guide wouldn't really help you here, because with a guide the main purpose of the guide is to keep it in the line like this other than rocking the guide. So really the only way to effectively put a camber in your iron is free hand. It does take practice, though, to be able to put pressure, to be able to put that camber on evenly. So I'm going to start by just putting pressure here, then we're going to rock it over there. Here the difference? And we're going to rock it back. And back like this, working in a circular motion. The reason why I work in that circular motion is to maintain flatness on this bevel. Let's feel. Now we're starting to get a burr. Now I'm feeling that burr right there, right there, right there. The burr can also tell you how even your camber is. If you're starting out with an iron that's perfectly straight, you're of course going to get a bigger burr out here on the edges because we're taking more off on those edges and less of a burr right there in the middle. This iron is already cambered so in this case, I'm getting an even burr all the way across. Now I'm going to go over to the fine stone and very carefully take that burr off. As I mentioned, the back of this plane is already perfectly flat so I don't have to worry about that. Again refer to the video on restoring a chisel an in depth sharpening of a chisel where we talk about the importance of having the back perfectly flat. Now let's go to the medium stone here. And we're going to work again following the same bevel putting pressure right here. Then alternating that pressure back over there, back and forth, very slight. Let's feel the burr. OK we've got a burr again. Let's take the burr off. Now we're going to come over here, again alternating that back and forth just like this. I feel a little bit of a burr here but not so much there so let's just work it a little bit more. Now I've got a burr. Let's take that off. Let's now go to the oil stone. The oil stone we want to be sure that we use oil no water on the stone. This is a hard translucent Arkansas stone. This is a natural quarried stone. Does not have a grit designation because it is a natural stone. But I would say if you were going to compare it to, say, a Japanese water stone it would be comparable to 6,000 grit. I'm working the back here. Now we're going to work the bevel. Again altering that pressure. It just takes practice as most of these things do but don't be afraid to try. And the burr can tell you a lot. You'll feel that burr. Much finer stone. There now I've got a nice burr on there. Work it like that. No burr. And now I'm going to go to the strop, which is essentially just a piece of leather adhered to a block of wood, charged with some rouge. You don't have to put the rouge on every time you sharpen. I usually put it on once every week or a couple weeks. Let's just move this over and with the strop, I only can pull the iron. I only can pull the iron if I push the iron like this, then we're going to cut into the leather, which we don't want to do. So what I'm going to do is start by putting pressure here. So there's a lot of pressure there, and then work it. And as I work this, now the pressure is over here. So it's kind of like this, I'm working it a long. Pressure here then even it in the middle, then pressure over here. So work it just like so. Just a couple strokes, doesn't take much. And you'll see there's a nice polish on there. And then we'll work the back of it-- few strokes, doesn't take much. And then we'll test it. Let's just test it. I like to test it on my thumbnail. It feels nice and sharp. Can also test it on a piece of paper. And it should just cut right through just like that. One problem with sharpening the iron too steep like this-- in other words, if I have to great an angle right here, the iron still could be sharp. It actually could be razor sharp. But if the angle is too steep, when you fit this in over the frog right here, this frog is bedded at 45 degrees. So if we have this angle greater than 45 degrees, it's going to hit on the bevel before it contacts the wood. And it will not cut. Let me show you on a whiteboard to help illustrate my point. OK so let's draw the angle of the plane, which is 45 degrees. So here's the surface that we're planing or even the plane soul right there. We've got the angle of the plane, the frog angle of 45 degrees, The surface that we're planing. And let's add our blade in. So now let's put the blade in here. Now if I put an angle that's greater than 45 degrees even if I rounded the iron accidentally like this and I put that in like this, what's going to happen it doesn't matter how sharp the iron is, the iron could be razor sharp, but if that angle is greater than 45 degrees, it's going to hit right there and it will not plane. A common problem there is when your sharpening along what happens is you tend to round that iron just slightly like this. Again it may be razor sharp, may cut perfectly through a piece of paper. Even like a chisel would. But if it's rounded like this, the angles going to be greater. So if the angle is greater than 45 degrees, it just will not be able to plane in the wood. That's why as I showed earlier, I think 35 degrees is about the maximum. If it starts getting higher than 35 degrees, I would probably want to go back and grind it back a little bit just to get it down. OK let's put this plane back together and we'll try it out. OK let's try it out. I think that's sharp. That's how you sharpen a smoothing plane. Please check out our other videos for more in depth sharpening tips and techniques, and also our video on how to set up a plane and how to use a plane.

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Chisels - In Depth

Hi, my name is Frank Strazza with the Heritage School of Woodworking. And in this video, I'm going to go over choosing a chisel and how to sharpen a chisel, whether it be a new chisel right out of the box. We're going to talk about how to get a chisel right out of the box, how you sharpen it, things to look for, as well as repairing a chisel that's damaged. So if you get a used chisel, an old chisel, and it's got a nick in the end, we're going to talk about how to repair that chisel. A lot of times in these videos, it's often not addressed some of the problems that you may have with your sharpening. And I want to talk about that. But first of all, let's talk about the definition of sharp. The way I like to define sharp is to have two highly polished surfaces coming together to infinity. And we're talking about chisels, but this essentially applies to planes, spokeshaves, all type of edge tools. Let me do a couple diagrams on the board to help illustrate my point. I'm going to draw a chisel. So we've got the back of a chisel and the bevel of the chisel like this. OK, so our goal here is for this surface, the bevel, and this surface to both be highly polished. And both of these surfaces have got to meet. If we take one of those things out of this equation. If I take and I just polish this bevel right here, and I don't polish the back, when these two meet the edge is going to be serrated depending on how bad the back of the chisel is. If I took and I polished both surfaces but they don't meet, in other words, if we had something like this. And we polish the back of this, and we polish the bevel. But it doesn't meet, that polish doesn't meet right there, then we're not going to have a sharp tool. So we've got to have both surfaces highly polished, and they both have to meet. So the next thing is the angle. So let's draw a couple different angles here. We've got, let's see, we'll draw one at 85 degrees, and another one at 25 degrees, and another one at maybe 10 degrees. So we've got all of these different angles here. I often ask my students, which of these three will be sharper? Well, it depends. And they often say, well, usually they say that it's the 10 degree one. The truth of it is following this earlier diagram here where both of these surfaces coming together to infinity if both of them are highly polished, then it doesn't matter what the angle is all of three should be the same degree of sharpness. The truth of it is, though, is the 10 degree one is going to slice through the fibers much easier than the 85 degree one. Because the 85 degree is going to encounter resistance as you're working through the material. The first hard knot or first hard grain that we come to with the 10 degree edge, the edge is simply going to break off. Whereas the 85 degree, we're going to have much longer edge life on this one. But it's not going to cut through the wood. So we've got to find a happy medium something in between 25 to 35 degrees is fairly standard. And we can lower the angle if we want more of a pairing cut, but we're going to have a weaker edge. We can raise the angle 35 degrees we'll have a stronger edge, the edge will last longer, but it'll be harder to pair through the wood. So if your chopping mortises or something, you might want to have higher angle, 30 degrees 35 degrees. Another option with the angle is to put a secondary bevel. So if we have a 25 degree angle as what we call our primary angle, we can come back and put a secondary bevel raising it up a few degrees. That essentially enables us to just sharpen the edge, but now we have a stronger bevel. Let me talk about some of the different types of chisels and different brands. And as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for. And it depends how much you spend on a chisel will determine how much work you're going to have to put into that chisel before you use it. I would say 95% of chisels that you buy, well, maybe we should raise it up a little bit more, maybe 98% of chisels that you buy are not sharp, ready to go. But if you spend $60 per chisel, well, you're not going to have to put too much work into that tool. There are some of the makers Lie-Nielsen is one that's a tool that's almost ready to go to work. Barr Tools, they're a hand forged chisel. They're also almost ready to go to work. But you pay for that. You take a set of tools like this one from Woodcraft. You might pay $60 for the whole set of chisels. But I want to talk about some of the problems that you'll encounter when sharpening these chisels and things to look for. Don't expect the chisels to work right out of the box. You're going to have to work on them and get them to perform how you want them to. So we can spend time working on an expensive set like this. I can show you what problems we'll encounter with a less expensive. And then also we have a chisel, well, that's never been sharpened. This is actually a used chisel, but it's never been sharpened, an old English Marples. You can actually see some of the scratch patterns, the original milling marks, that are in that chisel. Compare that one with say a Lie-Nielsen chisel. You can see the polish difference there between the two. Now, if you'll notice, I'm looking at the back of the tool. The back is just as important as the bevel. Again, if you go back to what we previously talked about, you must have both surfaces have got to be highly polished, and they have to meet. Let's talk about the stones that we're going to used to sharpen the tools. I have here diamond stones. And if you've watched some of my previous videos on this, I talk about the difference between some of the different stones. I like to use diamond stones. Because they're hard, they are low maintenance, and they stay flat. We're obviously trying to get a flat surface. Now, I'm not measuring this surface with some sort of a micro means of measuring. I am just trying to get this surface, the back and the bevel, to the consistency of this diamond stone. So I have here a course medium fine. I like to then go to an oil stone, a hard translucent oil stone. And then after the oil stone, I'll go to a strop, which is a piece of leather adhered to a block of wood. Simple. So let me talk about these stones and some of the different things that we're going to encounter when sharpening. Let's take a look at this tool versus this tool. Now, you can see, and I think I've got one more here yes, this one here, you can see some of the different problems here. This one obviously is polished all the way across. You can see that it's polished all the way. This one, on the other hand, has a hollow in the center right there. But it's polished right there and right there. This one is polished right here, but then it trails off at the edge. So the first thing that I do when I get a new chisel is I start by working the back. Because the back is what's got to be flat and polished. Obviously, the bevel does too, but I want the back to be flat and polished. Let's take this one, never been worked on the stone before, and let's start. I'll show you the process that I use, if I was to buy a new set of chisels how I would start. You can see the mill marks on there. And we'll start on the fine stone on the back. I'm going to put a little water on the stone to help float away the metal particles. It's extremely important that we hold the chisel perfectly flat on the stone. I do not want to lift up in any way. If I lift up just the slightest bit, I can cause much more work than I want to spend on this tool. In fact, I could even ruin the chisel or cause me to have to grind it back down to a new, past this part that is rounded. So I want to make sure that it's perfectly flat here. Some of the common mistakes are if you put your hands underneath here, your knuckles can actually lift this up off of the edge. And you'll have a little gap in there. Again, the slightest little bit can cause a problem. If you come in here with a chisel like this, this is another common problem, don't do this. But you'll see what happens here. If I work this in like this, I'm raising up the back of it right there on this beveled part, we're raising up the back. That will also round the back causing you not to have a flat surface. Again, that surface will not meet the bevel, it will have a rounded surface. So I've got the chisel here across like this. You'll also notice that my fine stone is flush with my holder here. And I'll just put this on like this, pressure down right here and a loose grip with my right hand. We're just going to work this back and forth. Now, this is going to tell us here in a few strokes how much work we're going to have to spend on this chisel. I'm going to work this back and forth putting a fair amount of pressure with my left hand down on the stone. Now, we can see what's going on. So you can see that we have a polish here, here, and right there. There's ever so slightly right there in the corner. It's not important that the center part is polished. In other words, we don't need this whole entire surface polished. Although over time it will become polished. What's important is that this polish right here runs off the edge right there, and it will generally hit right back in here. You can see when I put it on the stone, it's hitting right at this point and this point. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to work it until that polish is right here and then right back in there. Let's work it back and forth. Now this one's coming down pretty quickly. You can see the polish is starting to grow. We've got the polish there, running around right around there. But I want a little bit more. Let's keep working that on the fine stone. You can see that now it's working right there, right there, right there. This polish is now meeting this bevel. I can see it trailing off the edge. See that polish? The light will tell you everything. You can take your chisel, you can actually roll it in the light. And if you see an even reflection coming right off the edge, you know that that's flat. Let's show you this chisel right over here. Let's roll it in the light. Can you see that? Now we have this part here, which is trailing off. But then there's a light reflection difference right here. I'll draw it on there with a pen so you can see it. See right along there there's a light reflection difference between that and that. That's telling me that that part is lower. Let's work this just a little bit more. Depending on how much money you spend on the chisel will determine how much time you have to spend on the back and how flat the back is. This set of chisels from Woodcraft actually took quite a bit of time to get flat. And I don't even know if all of these are flat. We can look at some of these and some of the common problems here. I actually prefer there to be a slight hollow in the center. Because it's touching at this point and touching all out there. What I don't like to see is where it's touching only in the middle and we've got to bring the whole middle part down to where it then touches on the outside. One thing you can do is you can put a marker here. And I'm going to show you what I mean here. Let's just take this mark this maker like that. And we'll go on to the stone. And you'll see can see it hitting at this point, and this point, and there's still a little bit there. So there's still a little bit of the marker. So, in fact, this one is slightly hollowed right in there. So that's actually not bad. But we still want that polish to run all the way off the edge. So we've got to work on that a little bit more. So what I'm trying to show you here are some of the different common problems that you'll encounter when you buy a set of tools. As I mentioned earlier, the Lie-Nielsen tools, you spend $60 per chisel, the backs are almost perfectly flat. About the only thing you can do to the back of a Lie-Nielsen chisel is mess it up. So they are perfectly flat. So you can see now, we're working this down. We can see the scratch pattern coming there, right there, and right there. This is harder steel, so it's taking a little bit longer than this previous chisel that we were working. Very important that the back is perfectly flat. One thing I want to talk about is the consistency. I often talk about flat. But as I mentioned earlier, we're not measuring this flatness to some means of a micrometer or something. We are essentially trying to get it consistent. Now, this stone is a diamond stone. It's very hard. So when I work the chisel on this stone, the chisel has to give to the diamond stone. If I was working with a water stone, the water stone's soft enough that the water stone is going to give to the inconsistency of the chisel. In other words, if I took this chisel, as you can see this is one of those problem chisels here. It's high right there. This whole part's gotta come down and meet that. That's going to be a lot of work. But if I took this chisel over to a water stone and I took it right on the water stone, the chisel would polish right out. Because the stone is going to give to the consistency of the chisel, because the stone is softer than the chisel. The problem with that though is I don't like to use water stones, because they're high maintenance. You've got to flatten them every time you use them. They don't stay flat. So they're messier, they're higher maintenance. So I would prefer to spend the time initially getting the back of my tool perfectly flat, as flat as I can at least to the flatness consistency of this diamond stone. That way every time I sharpen, I never have to worry about it. I just go right over to this stone, and I touch the tool to the stone once It's flat, and I get that polish all the way across. This is what a chisel looks like after being used and sharpened every day. You can see the light reflection is the same all the way across the surface. And this is from just simply putting it on the stone day after day, and the back is perfectly flat. Let's go back to sharpening this initial chisel that I've got that had never been sharpened before. As you saw earlier, we saw the grinding marks in it. So we've started working on the back. I've got a nice polish right along that edge. And again, I'm not going to worry about this middle part, because it's touching at this point and this point. So for me that's essentially flat. Let's go over to the coarse stone here. I want to maintain the bevel that's on this chisel. Usually they come from the factory ground at 25 degrees. We're going to maintain that bevel, holding it at that angle. I can feel the angle. In fact, you can see the water kind of push out at the edge. You can also feel it too. You can feel that angle. My hand is low close to the edge of the chisel. And we're going to work back and forth. Now, I can work it back and forth like this. I can work in a circular motion. I can even go in a figure eight. Whichever method I use, I want to try to maintain the bevel flat on the stone, very important here. What I don't want to do, you'll notice I'm not holding the chisel like this. So if I was holding the chisel like this, I'd have the tendency to rock the chisel back and forth creating a round on the bevel. Well, what's the problem with that? We can go back to our drawing board here and we can see. If I round the bevel of the chisel what it would essentially look like is this. Again, not necessarily a problem. In fact, as long as this bevel is meeting the back, we should be fine. What that does though by rounding the bevel is that increases the angle offering more resistance to the chisel. So what may have intended to be a 30 degree angle or a 25 degree angle, has now become a much steeper angle giving the chisel more resistance. By standing at the stone like this, I'm standing straight at the stone. I bring this hand over here like this and this hand like this. You'll notice that the chisel is at an angle to the stone. Again, we're not like this working back and forth. But it's like this at an angle. It's more natural, but it also increases the surface area of the bevel to the stone. So it increases a service area helping me maintain a more consistent and flat bevel. By working back and forth in a straight motion, I've found that I can tend to put more pressure on this edge. Because I'm right handed, I tend to put more pressure on that forward stroke. By working in a circular motion, you can help even out that pressure. Let's look at our progress here. One thing we can do is we can look at the scratch pattern that the stone is putting on to the edge of the tool. You can see that scratch pattern, and it's fairly consistent. So we're maintaining a fairly even scratch pattern over the surface. If, when your sharpening, you find that the scratch pattern is maybe more back here or a little bit higher, you can change that. In other words, if the scratch pattern was down, just right down in here, that would mean that I was too low with the bevel. Now, how do I know that I've gone enough on this particular stone? How do I know that I've gone enough on this particular stone? Well, if this bevel meets the back, we're removing metal, we're taking metal off of the bevel of this tool, and it's got to meet the back. When we remove metal from here, we're going to feel a slight little burr on this backside. On the coarse stone the burr will be a little bit heavier than it will be on the subsequent stones. But the key here is we want to feel that burr. That burr is a tactile indicator that we've gone enough on a particular grit. That is the secret to sharpening, find the burr, feel the burr. Now, one thing that I'm very conscious of when I'm sharpening here is I want to make sure that I feel the burr here, here, here, there, feeling it all along. Sometimes you can see the burr, but I don't really worry about seeing it. I feel it more. Now, what I want to do is I want to take that burr off. This will be the true test to see how flat the back of this tool is. We've got the burr on there. I'm going to go now to the fine stone and work the back. And there's no burr. So now what the burr has done, you can feel it, it's now on the bevel side. Now, that is proof that the back is meeting the bevel and the bevel is meeting the back. Now, we can move to the next grit that is the medium 600 grit. And again, feeling the bevel work it like this. Let me go over my hand hold. The way I'm holding this is I put right hand just like this, I'm holding it just like that, thumb on the side. The first finger as far as I can close to the edge, my other fingers are wrapped around here. I'm holding it at that angle. Then this hand comes in and helps stabilize the chisel on the stone. Work it. How do we know that we've gone enough on this stone? Well, feel the burr. We've got a burr there. Now, again, I'm going to take that burr off. Really the only reason for taking the burr off every time is because I want to remove that so that when I put the burr on on the next stone I can feel for a new, fresh burr. Because I've gotta get a burr on every single stone. Let's go over to this next one here. Work it a circular motion here. And feel the burr. We've got a burr, take the burr off. Now we can move on to the oil stone. And I've got the hard translucent oil stone right here, one of my favorite stones. This is actually a natural quarried stone, quarried in Arkansas. It's the finest of the oil stones, a hard translucent. And it also cuts very well. I've never had to flatten this. Although I may have to at some point. It seems to stay flat. And one of the reasons why it stays flat is because when I use the stone I use the whole entire stone, as opposed to just one part of it where I could wear it out. What I put on here is a little bit of 3-IN-ONE oil. You've got to use oil on the stone. And the oil helps keep the stone from clogging and floats away the particles. Let's go to the bevel, same thing. Work it in a circular motion. Use the whole entire stone just like this. Feel the burr. You'll even get a burr on the oil stone. Work the burr off. And I'll sometimes go a couple times on this. We'll go back. There we go. Now, you can start to see we're starting to build up a nice polish. Last but not least, we'll go to the strop, which is essentially a piece of leather adhered to a block of wood with some chromium oxide applied to it, basically buffing compound. The smallest particle size of that buffing compound is 0.5 micron, which is very, very fine. With the leather strop, if I push the chisel into the strop, it's going to cut the leather. So I have to pull it. And I'm only going to do it a few times. I'm maintaining the same bevel. I don't want to round the edge. Again, if I round the edge, it's not a big problem. It just makes it more difficult when you go back to resharpen, because you have to bring that bevel down flat and even again on the stone. So maintaining that bevel as consistently as I can. And you can see we've got here a nice polish. Let's do the back of it. You'll see I'm dragging it to the side like this just a few times. If you do it too much, again, it's going to round it. This is a nice sharp chisel. Now, there's two ways to test this, actually a few different ways to test this. One, I usually test it on my thumbnail. Take it like this, hold it up as close as you can. Don't hold it back here. You don't have as much control. Hold it as close as you can here, your thumb is flat, the chisel is flat. Just test the chisel on your thumbnail. And you can see it's catching it. Now, watch this. Right at the end it slipping right there. So I didn't get it sharp all the way up to the edge. Sure enough, there's a little bit of the factory scratch pattern right there. Not a huge problem, but I really should go back and maybe resharpen it to that point. Because we're just losing a little bit of it right there. But you can see it's catching right there. Let's try it on a piece of paper. That cuts nicely. Another way to test it is on a piece of engrained pine. If it leaves a nice shiny surface with no striations in the surface, then we know that it's sharp. And you can see as it cuts through it just takes off a nice even. Again, this is engrained pine and it's cutting very nicely across there. And it's fairly smooth. I want to talk about restoring a tool. If you find your tool maybe was once used as a paint can opener or got dropped on the concrete it may have some nicks in it like this here. So how do we work that out? I could work it out by hand. And with those nicks I probably could work it out. It may take a little bit of time. But I want to show you a couple things using a grinder. I'm not a big proponent of using power methods for sharpening. Some of the problems with using power methods is that when you introduce grinding power method of sharpening you can introduce heat which will ruin the steel if it gets too hot. So there's a couple precautions that we've got to take here when we're sharpening with power methods. Of course, you can spend a lot of money and you can buy these water cooled grinders. But for the few times that we use a grinder to refurbish a tool, I don't recommend that. The grinder works well. And the first thing we want to do, well, let me do a little illustration on the board to show you. So looking at this top view, what we have here is we've got kind of a serrated edge. We've got a nick in it. So what I want to do is I want to actually take and I want to grind that out flat like this. So when you look at the side view of this, it's going to actually look like this. So it's going to be perfectly flat like that. The next step is to grind it like this. Now, this is referred to as hollow grinding. So we're going to grind this just like this. We're still going to leave a little tiny, tiny, tiny flat right there. But you'll see we'll grind this off and then we'll go back to hand sharpening. I actually kind of like sharpening a hollow ground tool. Because when the tool is hollow ground, and again when I'm referring to hollow grinding, let's just draw a picture of a wheel here. If we take the chisel on that wheel, you can see the chisel is actually formed, the hollow is formed, from the wheel. The advantage when sharpening by hand after hollow grinding is the stone just hits at this point and this point. So there's a lot less metal to remove when working on the sharpening stone. Depending on how bad the edge is, generally I'll either go to the stone flat like this and work it flat like this, now this seems quite contrary to what you would do to sharpen a chisel. So what we're doing is we're trying to bring it to where you'll see there's a nice flat right along that edge. Another way to do it if the nick was real bad, let's suppose that the nick was deep into the tool like this. What I would do is I would take a square and I would mark across the tool just like this right at the base of that nick. Then I would grind to that perfectly flat. Now, we can see here there's another problem that I didn't notice until I put the square on this. But that is that this edge is not perfectly flat. Not a huge problem. Let's go ahead and square that up while we're at it. I'm over here at my grinder. And I want to talk a little bit about this grinder that I've got. First of all, you want to use safety glasses. And it's a slow speed grinder, but the most important part about this grinder is this wheel. This is a Norton 3X grinding wheel. And this is a very friable wheel. So it breaks down fast. So when you're grinding the wheel breaks down pretty fast, so it's less likely to heat up the steel. Now, it still will heat the steel up, so we've got to be careful. Another important part to this grinder is this diamond dressing wheel. It's very important that this is flat. You can see I've ground something curved in there. So we're going to go ahead and flatten this out here. I'm going to just take this and flatten this out. And that's pretty close. We'll work it just a little bit more. Now, I'm going to come straight in just like this very lightly. I don't want to apply too much pressure, very light pressure. This grinder is going about 1700 RPMs. And I'm feeling it all the while. I don't want to build up too much heat. It's very cool right now, so we're fine. So I'm going to work it right to that line, very light pressure. And you can see we've ground it flat right here. You can see we've got it flat all along there. And it's nice and straight. We've ground past our nicks. You can see the light reflecting off of this part right there. Let's now go back to the grinder and hollow grind it, removing that metal. We're still going to see a little bit of light reflecting along that edge. And we're going to remove it as close as we can. I've got this grinding wheel's grinding guide set to about 25 degrees or so. Let's check it. Yeah, it's about 25. I'm going to raise it's just a hair. What I usually do is I grind a little bit and then check it. Actually that's a little bit lower than I'd like. You can see the scratch pattern there. It's a little bit lower. So I'm going to actually raise it up just a little bit. And again, with the grinder you can feel the angles. The key here is don't press hard. You can see the scratch pattern. But I'm also watching this top edge right along here to make sure that I don't go past and I still see a little white line. Let's go back to here. Light pressure, I'm barely pressing at all and I'm watching. I can see the scratch pattern and it's fairly even all the way across looking, catch it just right in the light. Sometimes it's helpful to even turn the light off so I can catch it in the light and just see how it's looking. So I see that I need to take a little bit more off in this corner. Again, all while feeling the tool. You can even take a cup of water. I usually have a cup of water and just stick it in there to cool it. But if it's getting that hot, it's really too hot. Again, very light pressure. And I can feel it, and it's cool to the touch. So we're fine. That's pretty close. Now that we've ground this tool here, I'm going to work on the back of it. The back of this tool needs to be polished up. So I'm over to the fine stone working the back of this tool. This chisel was actually an eBay find. And it had never been sharpened. And it did have some nicks in it, but it also had never been flattened on the back just like that other one that we did. So you can see we're starting to bring the polish right there, right there. I'm going to add a little bit more water on the stone which will help it cut. But it will also, you can also see right there the polish is gone right there. It ends right there and then it's picked up right there. So there's a little divot right there. We've got to bring that to where we at least get a polish all the way across. You can see it's also hitting back in there. I'm putting a fair amount of downward pressure when I work on the back. If the back was really bad, if it was really out of flat, I could simply take this stone, and these just come out, and I could swap it out with this medium stone. I don't like to go to the course one. Because then I'd be putting coarse scratches in the back of the chisel which I have to then get off, work through the grit. So if the chisel's really bad and needs a lot taken off of, again, I don't mind going to the medium stone and work the back of it. But if at all possible, I'll stick with the fine grit. You can see we're working that off fairly quickly. There we have it. So you can see the polish goes there, there, there, and all the way there. Let's just go to the fine stone and we'll ensure that polish. Good. Now, I'm going to go to the coarse stone and work the bevel. Remember the bevel is what we ground. You can still see the grinding marks here. There's probably a little bit of a white spot left from grinding. You might leave a little bit more of a white spot than I've left there. It would probably be good to leave just a little bit more which is essentially just going to mean more work on this coarse stone. But it's very important we maintain the bevel here, but it's also very important that we get the burr. If there's one thing that you can remember in this whole video, you've got to feel the burr. So I don't feel the burr yet, although you can see the scratch pattern. You can see right there there's still a little bit of that grinder mark left right there in the center right there. And this part is all grinding way with the coarse stone. Let's continue this until we feel that burr. I've got a little bit of a burr right over here, but not one over there. So let's keep working it. again, a nice heavy burr right in that corner, less of a burr right over there. If I look at the top edge reflection of light, I can still see that there's a little bit of material that needs to be taken off of right over here. I can even counteract the pressure a little bit. I tend to put more pressure on this leading edge. So I can counteract that pressure bringing some pressure back over here. And again, this is tool restoration. When your tool is being used day in and day out, you're not going to need to spend this kind of time sharpening it. You can literally sharpen your chisel in about two minutes using this method. But restoration does take a little bit longer. Now, I've got a burr all the way across that edge. Let's go over here, take the burr off just as we talked about earlier. Now, we'll move on to the next stone, get a burr, work it until we feel that burr. I've got the burr, again feeling there, there, there. Take the burr off. Now on to the fine stone. Feel the burr, burr, burr. I think a sharp tool is one of the most important aspects of hand tool woodworking. I've found that as my tools become dull, so does the quality of my work. I can't stress the importance of having a razor sharp tool. And I've found that there's such a joy in using a razor sharp tool. It's almost like woodworking is brand new again when you use a freshly sharpened tool. It's something that must be maintained though. Your tool will become dull. But if you maintain your tool and sharpen frequently, the process is simple and straightforward. Stropping the chisel, and testing the chisel, nice and sharp. We'll test it on our paper. And, of course, it's not cutting paper, it's cutting wood. Let's test it on a piece of pine. Engrained soft wood makes a great test for your chisel. You can see as we work it along here, if it leaves a nice clean surface right there. Learning how to sharpen is just like learning any other skill, it takes practice, it takes time. And you'll develop a muscle memory with the sharpening technique. You'll learn how to maintain, how to keep that bevel. And you may sharpen at 32 degrees, I may sharpen at 33 degrees. That really doesn't matter. What really matters is that you get this surface, the bevel, meeting the back. Now, some of you may want to start by using a guide. And there's lots of different guides available on the market such as this one. This one here is a little roller guide. You can set the chisel inside there and set it to the angle by moving the chisel back and forth until you find the angle. So you put it in there, you move it until you feel the angle. Once you get the angle how you like it, you tighten it down. And you can even put a little mark on your bench like this. So if I set the guide like this, I can just put a little mark right here. And that tells me that the next chisel I put on there all I've got to do is set it right to that mark, and we've got it set. Now, the guide helps maintain a consistent bevel. I don't like to use a guide, because it takes longer to set up. Plus when using a guide, you're generally using one small part of the stone. So if you're using an oil stone or even the diamond stones, you'll tend to wear away part of that stone. And you could even hollow out an oil stone like this. Again, not a problem if you want to use a guide, but try to learn to do it using the hand methods. I think you'll enjoy the method. You'll find that it works well. And you can sharpen a tool in less than two minutes. I hope you enjoyed this video. And if you have any questions, please comment below. Thank you.

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Rip Saws - In-Depth

[MUSIC PLAYING] Using a sharp saw is such a joy to use. My name is Frank Strazza with the Heritage School of Woodworking. In this video, we're going to talk about how to sharpen, recondition a saw. We're going to talk about the different types of saws. I'm going to show you a saw that most people might be more familiar with. You can both see and here the difference in this saw. I think most woodworkers would be familiar with a saw like this, maybe a saw that's been sitting around in the garage or the attic. One that hasn't been sharpened. The key, though, is they must be sharp. They've got to be razor sharp in order to cut like this. And in this video, I'm going to show you how we recondition and sharpen a saw. I'd like to start by going over some of the different tools that you'll need to sharpen a saw. Any saw be sharpened in either one of two configurations, either a rip configuration, or a cross cut configuration. And I have different saws here, a dovetail saw, a tenon saw. We have a couple different crosscut saws, and rip saws, and such. Again, the only thing that denotes the difference between whether it's a crosscut or a rip is how the teeth are configured, that is how they're sharpened. In order to sharpen a saw, we're going to need some files, triangular type files. Depending on how bad the saw is, we may need a flat file such as this to joint the teeth. We'll go over that in a second. And we'll need a saw set. That I've got two types of saw sets here. I've got one for small teeth, and then one for larger teeth, so two types of saw sets. And then last but not least, we will need a saw vice, something to hold the saw. This vice enables us to hold the saw right up close to the teeth, right up right at the edge of the teeth, which keeps it from vibrating. There are several steps to sharpening a saw, rather, reconditioning a saw. If you're going to recondition a saw, oftentimes you have to start by jointing the top of the teeth, that is, making the teeth level and straight as you look down. If you look down this saw, you can see that the teeth are not perfectly straight. As you can see, there's a high spot here. It might lower a little bit right in there, maybe come up there. So that's the first step, is to joint the teeth. The next step is shaping the teeth after they're jointed. I'll do an illustration here of a whiteboard to show you what I mean. If we have a series of teeth like this. I'm just going to draw some on here, small ones, big ones, the first step, as I mentioned, is to joint the top of teeth. So you've got to go across and bring them all to a consistent, bringing them all down to the lowest point. Sometimes you'll have to do this in multiple steps, as we probably will have to do on this saw. But as you can see now, we've got all of the teeth all level, jointed. So as I mentioned, the next step is to shape the teeth. And that is to bring all the teeth to an even size. So when I file this, I'm going to take off half of this tooth and half of this tooth. So I'm going to bring this down to where this comes even. Then we're going to take half of this tooth. And, obviously, here we're not going to take any off this side. So the shaping process is probably the most difficult process because what you have to do is alter the pressure with your file as you're filing along. Essentially, with this, I would put fairly equal pressure with the file on both sides of the tooth. On this one, I'm going to have to put quite a bit of pressure on this side over here, and no pressure over here, because I want to take off this metal, bringing this down even. Over here on this one, we're going to have to bring this one down. So lots of pressure on this side, but no pressure over here. Again, our goal is to bring the bottom of the gullet. This is the gullet down the bottom. Bringing all of these level, and all of the tops of the teeth all level across. After you shape the teeth, the next step is to set the teeth. And that's where the saw set comes in. Every single saw, whether it's a rip saw or a crosscut saw, has set to the teeth. That is where one tooth is bent one way, and then the other tooth is bent the other way. So, essentially, when you look down the saw, it looks like this. You have teeth bending in alternating directions. Every other tooth is bent in one direction, every other tooth bending back the other way. The purpose for the bend or the set in the teeth is when you're cutting it allows for the back of the saw to go through. It allows for the saw to be able to cut through the wood. If you don't have any set in the teeth, the saw will bind. It depends what kind of wood you're going to be cutting. And what you're doing with the saw will depend on how much set you put in the teeth. If I was cutting green wood, or a soft wood, or a fibrous wood, I want less set. If I'm cutting hardwood, I want less set. If I'm cutting dovetails, where I'm cutting in a hardwood usually, and only cutting down a little ways, I want very, very little set. That's going to give me a finer cut, not as aggressive, not as big. Once we set the teeth, the final step is sharpening, which is almost like the shaping the teeth. But when you sharpen the teeth, what you're doing is you're going an even stroke on every single tooth. For the shaping and the sharpening, we're going to use files. And I have here several different files. Again, these are all triangular-shaped files, 60 degrees, three-sided. And we've got different sizes here from the small all the way up to the largest. I'm going to explain what we have here. We've got a four inch. These are four inch files right here. These are six inch files. And these are seven inch files right in here. The main difference between these two files is one is called a double extra slim. And then one is an extra slim file. So we have double extra slim, extra slim in the four inch. In the six inch, we have a double extra slim and an extra slim in the six inch. And in the seven inch file, we have-- I've got to read on here and see, but I believe this is just an extra slim and what we would refer to as a slim taper file. Obviously, the slim taper seven inch file being the largest, the double extra slim four inch file being some of the smallest. The idea when choosing a file is for the file to fit about one third into the tooth. When you sharpen a saw, you want to be able to use all three sides of this file over multiple sharpenings. In other words, the file is going to dull over time. So I could get maybe three or four sharpenings out of this side of the file, three or four sharpenings out of that side of the file. And turn it, three or four sharpenings out of this side of the file. That is if only one third of the tooth goes into the file. Let me do an illustration on the board to help illustrate that point. So here's the tooth, right like this. Again, that should be approximately 60 degrees. Here's the file setting inside of that tooth. Hopefully we can draw this correctly here. So that's essentially not a perfect triangle. But you get the idea. So what we have here, this is the top of the tooth. This is the top of the tooth here. Obviously another tooth back here this way. But we have one third of the file set inside of the tooth. That way when we're sharpening, we're essentially not dulling all of the file. If I was using too small of a file, say the file came up to here, I would be dulling this part of the file. And I wouldn't get as much use out of the file. I'd like to explain the difference between a crosscut saw and a rip saw. There's a couple different angles. And sometimes these angles can be a little bit confusing when you're looking at a saw, when you're sharpening a saw. The rip saw is probably the least confusing of the two. As you can see, there's a little bit more geometry going on in the crosscut saw. The rip saw has a couple different angles. One is referred to as the rake angle. And that's this angle right here. If you'll follow along right here, you'll see this angle here. That's the angle that leans back towards the handle. That's referred to as the rake angle. I can adjust the rake angle depending on how aggressive I want the saw to cut. So if I want a more aggressive saw, I can raise the rake angle forward like this. That is bringing it up to maybe zero degrees or so. If I want a less aggressive saw, I could actually lower the rake angle down to, in most cases, 10 degrees. I have found, though, that by changing the rake angle by just a couple degrees can really affect how aggressive the saw cuts. So if your saw is kind of cutting too aggressive, you can actually change the rake angle. Bring it down to maybe 12 or 13 degrees. Lower, relax that rake angle down like this. It'll make a smoother cut. This angle here, obviously, will follow this angle because it's essentially 60 degrees right inside here. The other thing with a rip saw is that it's just filed straight across, that is perpendicular to the face of the blade. So it's just 90 degrees straight across like this. So the only thing we really have to worry about here is the rake angle, and then just filing straight across. The crosscut saw also has a rake angle. The rake angle generally on a crosscut saw is a little bit more than a rip saw. It's generally about 15 degrees. So you see here this angle is relaxed back, again, back towards the handle about 15 degrees. The main difference between a crosscut saw and a rip saw is on a crosscut saw you have what we call the fleam angle. Looking down on top of the saw, you can see that there's this angle right here. Instead of it being filed 90 degrees, you have a fleam angle. That's filed at an angle like this. That's generally. That can vary as well. It can vary depending on what kind of wood you're cutting. If you're cutting a hardwood, you don't need as much of a fleam angle. You'd want a little bit less, maybe 10, 15 degrees. If you're cutting a soft wood, you're going to want more of a fleam angle, so maybe 20 degrees or so. Generally 20 degrees is fairly standard for a crosscut saw for the fleam angle. The other thing when filing a crosscut saw is because the teeth are bent in two directions, well, obviously this one's going to be going this way. This one's going to be going back that way, you want to point to be facing out. So in this case, I would want this tooth bent out this way, this tooth bent out that way. So when I file, I'm going to file every other tooth on the crosscut saw. So I'm going to file here, here, and here. We're going to start by reconditioning a rip saw. I think the rip saw is the easiest of the two to start on to show you how to sharpen. And with the ripsaw you actually file every single tooth. And, again, just straight across like that. One thing that you'll find different between each of these saws is the points per inch, that is how many points measure to an inch. Sometimes that information can be found on the saw, right down close to the edge. it's sometimes difficult to see. If you catch it just right in the light, in this case this is a 10 points per inch. There's 10 points per inch. If I took a ruler, put it on there, you would count 10 points. That points per inch will determine what size file I use. And if you look in the Resources tab down below, you will see the specifications for which files to use for points per inch. I usually just do it by eye. You can take a file, and set it in the tooth. And usually you can see it. If you set it right inside there, you can see which size file works well. This might be a little bit large. We might go back to-- and this was the six inch extra slim. But let's find the six inch double extra slim. That looks pretty close. In fact, I'm finding that that's maybe a little bit-- this file might be a little bit too small for this saw. So, in fact, I may actually have to go back to the six inch slim taper file. I would say that for most saws, you'll find that the six inch slim taper and the six inch double extra slim taper files are going to do for most of your sawing. The four inch files come in when you're dealing with much smaller tooth patterns, such as this one here. You might be looking at maybe a 16 teeth per inch. And as you can see, the teeth are much finer. And this is a dovetail saw. So typically a dovetail saw is going to be sharpened for rip. [MUSIC PLAYING] Let's begin by sharpening, or in this case reconditioning, this saw. As I mentioned earlier, the first step is to joint the teeth. Before we joint the teeth here, I want to mark the teeth so I can know which tooth I filed. Some people use a magic marker. I actually like to use the steel blue layout fluid. The nice thing about this is it flows into the tooth so you can tell which tooth you filed as you're working along. You've got to watch. This stuff will stain everything that you're working on. So I like to put it away from the bench so I don't stain my bench blue. And we'll just brush this on. Again, check out the Resources tab below for a list of suppliers where these items can be obtained from. I'm just putting a very little bit on there. And I know it's dying the saw blue. But a little denatured alcohol will take that right off. This really helps in defining which tooth you have filed. It makes a big difference. So let's put this in the saw vice. And we're going to start by jointing the teeth. There's a couple ways to do this. You can simply run a file flat across the top of the teeth like this. But you got to watch because I've often been running the file along, and if my hand falls forward, and the file pushes it in, it can cut your finger. It doesn't feel very good. So there's a couple things to aid in that. You can use a block of wood with the set in it. And that helps in a couple ways. It helps keep it square. Just take a rubber hammer here. Tap it in place. And that helps keep the file square to the edge. And you can run that along just like so. Always push the file. And you'll see here, the file is jointing the teeth. If you look right on top, you can see that there is some flat spots. It's hitting hit there, right there. And this is jointing. There's one right there. It's jointing the teeth. You can see right there. So, ideally, we want there to be a flat spot. We're not going to take the teeth all the way down. But ideally, we would see that the file had touched every single tooth. And we would know that it was perfectly jointed all the way across. This saw is in pretty bad shape. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to probably joint it a little ways because, again, I don't want to take the teeth all the way off. We'll joint it a little ways. And then we'll start shaping it. Then we'll probably joint it again. So let's just joint over here. There's a high spot right up in there. So we're going to come in here like this and just joint this. Sometimes you can find these on the used market. This is actually a saw jointer. Its main purpose was for jointing the top of the saw. It's aluminum, nice little file holder here. And it's designed to keep your hand away from the blade. So we can just run that right along the top. Again, I'm working over here because that's the high spot. We'll just work this right along just like so. I'm going to have to raise this in the vice just a little bit because the jointer is hitting the saw vice. Again, that tooth, we're going to bring that tooth way down. Let's bring that down just a little bit more. Go back to using this guy because I want a little bit bigger file. I prefer to use an eight inch flat file because it's obviously a longer file. This holder will not hold an eight inch file. It just holds a six inch file. So really a homemade saw jointer might be better. We're going to bring this down. And that tooth right there is what's high. Again, working it down. Let's inspect the progress here. We can see flat right there, obviously a higher spot right over here. Let's continue to work it down. Again, let's just work this all the way down like this. sight write down this saw and see what kind of progress we're making. It looks like when I sight down this song you can see that there's a curve right inside there. I don't really like that. Most of the teeth are coming down pretty level, which is nice. But I would prefer there not to be a curve in the saw like that. I'm going to go ahead and shape the teeth now instead of jointing it perfectly flat. The reason why is if I keep on jointing, I'm going to start losing the teeth which, in this case, are my point of reference. And then I'd have to re-tooth the saw. And we'll save that for another video. I'm going to use a six inch double extra slim taper for this saw. This is about 10 to 12 points per inch for this saw. And I've got here a little simple little holder that I made to help me denote the perfect rake angle. All this is is essentially a block of wood with a 10 degree line drawn on this piece. So I've got a 10 degree angle. That's going to point back towards the handle. And all I've got to do is put my file inside there, line up this edge of the file with that 10 degree line, and tap it in. Now, when I file along, this will actually help keep it perfectly flat. As long as I keep this perfectly flat, I know that rake angle is going to remain at 10 degrees. So you can see right here, we filed quite a bit away, almost taking the teeth away. So in this case, I'm going to come in. And I can see a little tiny faint line there. Let's just kind of work there. We'll start by shaping the teeth. Now, when you heard of sharpening a saw, you probably heard, well, you've got to go an even stroke on each tooth. This is true when sharpening a saw. But as I showed earlier in the illustration, when shaping the teeth, we may have to take more than one stroke, oftentimes multiple strokes, on one tooth. And maybe the next tooth, we may not have to take any strokes on. Again, our goal is to take those flats away, getting rid of those flats. I'm going to adjust the pressure of the file based on which flats I'm trying to remove. You can see right here, we have a flat right there and a flat right there. In that case, I'm going to put equal pressure on either side of the file just straight down. And we should be able to remove half of the flat over here, half of the flat over there. There you can see there's a little bit of a flat, little bit of a flat. Let's work this one down just a little bit more. This part right back in here, I'm going to take a flat file and just take it at an angle right it here like this to bring it off. So now you can see we've got that worked down. And we're going to keep on working across these teeth shaping them as we go. This one here, I don't see any flat on the top. But I see a little flat over there. So I'm going to take gentle pressure, putting pressure on this side of the file. Just light pressure, now there's nothing there. This one here, we're going to have to work it because there's a flat on this side, but not on that side. So let's work it a little bit more. Now I'm only taking half of the flat off because I'm looking to move to the next one and take half the flat on this side. Move to the next tooth, and all the way down. You can see, clearly, which teeth I've filed because when you file, it files away that blueing that we put on there, that steel blue fluid. When I'm shaping the teeth, you can see right here there's an even flat on this tooth and an even flat on this tooth. With that, when I file this, I'm going to put equal pressure on both sides and go straight down, essentially only taking off half the flat. Of course, I've already taken off part of the flat on this tooth. So I'm only going to take off half the flat on this one and try to take off the rest of the flat on this one. This next tooth, you'll see we're going to have to file half of this and then half of that. So that's fairly equal. Pressure straight down. Next one, you can see here a little bit of a flat there, more of a flat there. So I'm going to put a little more pressure on that tooth, less pressure on this one. So more forward pressure with my file that way. This tooth here, we're going to put a lot more forward pressure this way because there's not much of a flat on the top there, but more of a flat on the top there. You can see when we topped the top of these teeth, the file didn't hit it all right there, but a little bit right on that one. So, again, we're going to put pressure leading this way and not much back here. And our goal here is to bring all of these teeth down to a consistent height, that is to where they're all leveled out. Sometimes I'll work alternating teeth. I'll work this tooth a little. Then I'll come back to this tooth, especially when there's a large flat on there, because I want to make sure that we bring it down evenly on each side. Putting pressure this way to get rid of that flat. We're almost done with this preliminary shaping. You can see we're just nearing the last few teeth. And then we're going to go back and rejoint it. This last tooth, I want to come back with the flat file and just come along here flat like this. Now we're ready to remark it. We're going to use the layout fluid, remark the teeth, and then joint it again. One thing to keep in mind when hitting a file, make sure you use a rubber mallet. Files are very hard. And they can break. They're brittle. So tap it lightly. Now we'll joint the top of teeth. I've marked it. And we'll joint it. It'll expose which teeth need to be shaped again. There's a little bit of a concavity to the saw. And I want to work that out. So I'm going to focus my attention on either end of the saw. Sight down the saw. That's looking better. We'll work it more over here. I can see quite a bit of flat spots there. And, again, as I mentioned earlier, I don't want to take the teeth all the way out because then I've lost my point of reference with the teeth. So I want to joint it a little ways. And you can see more flat spots here now that we've shaped it and we're getting it flatter. So let's work this down a little bit more over here. Flat, flat, actually we've got a flat on most all the teeth. Let's take a look at it. That's much better. I've done the final jointing. And I'm quite happy with how it looks. It's much straighter now, nice and straight all along the length. And what you'll also see is you'll also see that the flats on the top of the teeth are more even. So they're nice and even. As you look around, you'll see right there all the whites are all the same. So we're going to shape it one more time. The only difference between the shaping process and the sharpening process is with the shaping we're taking each individual tooth down to match the others. In other words, we're trying to take away the flats to bring it equally. So, really, what we're doing is we're taking maybe more strokes on one tooth, less strokes on another tooth, whereas with sharpening we're taking an even stroke on every single tooth. So, essentially, shaping the teeth and sharpening are the same. The key here is to keep the file 90 degrees to the face of the saw. Also, we want to keep the file perfectly flat to the top of the saw as well. You'll want to make sure you use a sharp file when sharpening your saw. The files do wear out may. And they become dull over time. And it's frustrating using a dull files. So make sure that the file is sharp. It'll cut much better. We're on the last few teeth of this shaping process. I'm just going to continue on. And we'll move on to the next step. When you file a saw, you're creating a bur with the file. That means you're pushing a bur. That's when one surface meets the other, you form a little metal bur. I want to take that bur off. But the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to coat the saw again with the layout fluid. And then we're going to take that bur off. I'll show you how that's done. I'm going to go ahead and remove the burr by cutting in a piece of hardwood. It's not going to cut very good because the saw is not sharp. And it's not set. But I'm just basically running it in a piece of scrap hardwood. And a few strokes will remove the burr. In fact, what we'll be able to see is if we sight on top of the saw, we'll be able to see little white reflection right off the top. Right there you can see that. It's a little white reflection. And that means I have not gone all the way down with the file. In other words, we actually have to shape the teeth again. And at this point, depending on how bad those flats are, these flats I might just come back and the flats that are wider, we'll just shape those. And we'll leave the rest for the sharpening process. That actually doesn't look too bad. Now that we've done the final shaping, we're now going to move on to setting the teeth. The reason why we have to reset the teeth is because we filed so much away. The teeth are like this. And we have actually filed it, filed it, filed it down to where we removed most of the set. So I'm going to come back and reset the teeth using a saw set. We've got two types of saw sets. The only difference between these two is the plunger. You can see the little plunger right here. This is a bigger plunger. That's what pushes the tooth. And this one here is a smaller plunger. Right there, that's what pushes the tooth to the side. So let's see which saw set fits this saw. If you look down in here, you can see that the plunger is somewhat larger than the tooth. In that case, I really want to go with a smaller saw set. We can see right there the plunger is a little bit smaller than the tooth. And that will allow me to be able to bend the tooth over. First of all, we got to set the amount of set that we want using the saw set. I'm adjusting the saw set. The saw set is numbered from four all the way up to 12. So we're going to raise this up maybe to around a seven. Those numbers really don't denote a specific teeth per inch necessarily. All that these numbers are suggesting is a size. So, essentially, we're going from large to small. So if you want more set to the teeth, you're going to set it on a four or something like that. If you want less set on the teeth, then you're going to go with maybe a 10 or 12. I'm going to shoot somewhere in the middle. Let's look and see how a seven looks. In this case, on a rip saw, it doesn't really matter which tooth we push to one side or the other. Generally, I try to look at the saw and see if the tooth is already going in one direction. Then I'll just go ahead and follow in that same pattern. We filed this saw so much that we've pretty much lost all the set. So it really doesn't matter which tooth we start on. We just want to do every other tooth. So we'll just begin here and start pushing these teeth to one side. I have had some of these older saws where a tooth will actually break off. And that's always an uncomfortable feeling when you're setting the saw and you hear a little break. That's oftentimes from the saw just being brittle, the teeth being brittle. It's because it's been sitting out, or getting a bit rusty. It'll tend to be more brittle. Now we're ready to set the saw. And I'd like to talk about the difference between these two saw sets. This is a fine saw set. And if you look on the inside, you can see the little plunger difference between the two. There's a little plunger right inside there that pushes the tooth to one side. There's the plunger right there. And that pushes the tooth. And then there's this one. This plunger is just a little bit larger. So there's also numbers on here. These are adjustable. By loosening up this part right there, you can see this wheel right in here turns. And that denotes how much set you'll put into the saw. I believe those numbers run from four all the way up to around 12 or so. All those numbers are is just a grading system. So essentially four is going to be more set. Twelve is going to be much less set. So we're going to go somewhere in between. Let's try both of these and see which one looks best in the saw. If I put the small plunger on there, it works. I could actually get away by setting the saw using this saw set. But on a couple teeth, there may be a problem where you might find that the plunger may actually push to the side of the tooth. So maybe a bigger plunger would be a little bit better, something that covers the whole tooth, as long as it's not too big and doesn't interfere with the other teeth. So I think I'll go with this one just because it's a little bit bigger. And it's going to cover that whole tooth and enable that whole tooth to push to the side, as opposed to the smaller one where it could actually slide off of the tooth maybe. The other thing when you're trying to set this saw is make sure that the pressure is down. Sometimes the saw set wants to ride up a little bit. The plunger inside there is actually angled like this. So what happens is sometimes the saw set wants to ride up like this. Make sure there's pressure down on the saw set. And then, of course, there's a little clamp that engages first. So that little clamp will actually go against the saw. So I'm putting pressure down. Clamp against the saw. And then the plunger then comes and pushes the tooth to the side. Well, we're finishing up this side of the setting of the saw. And we'll now flip it over and set all the teeth, every other tooth going the other way. So when we set it the first time, we set every other tooth going this way. Now we're going to flip the saw around and do every other tooth going the other way. I've set my saw set here on a number eight, which is somewhere in between. It'll actually do-- it's a finer set. And this saw is a nice, fine tooth pattern. So it'll make a nice fine kerf. And I can feel it there. It's a nice, gentle set. It's ideal once you start setting the teeth not to stop. It's easy to go cross-eyed doing this as well. But you don't want to lose your place. I'm nearing the end here of setting the second . Side The last few teeth, and we'll be ready for sharpening. Before I sharpen the saw, I'm going to coat it one more time so I can tell which tooth that I've filed away. So, again, coating it with the layout fluid. Now we're ready to begin sharpening. As I mentioned earlier, the shaping process is much like the sharpening process. The main difference being when sharpening, we want to have an even stroke on every single tooth, even stroke, even pressure, an even number of strokes too. So if I choose to do one stroke, I want to do one stroke on every tooth. If I choose to do two strokes, which, in this case I think I'm going to go ahead and do two strokes because there's still just a little bit of a flat left. And I want to get rid of that. Essentially, if you've watched by other videos on chisel sharpening, you know that what defines a sharp edge is having two highly polished points coming to infinity. In this case, it's not going to be highly polished. It's just the use of a file. But we still want both of those points coming to infinity. So we don't want any flat spot on the top of the tooth. Again, I'm lining up the rake angle with the handle. And we'll do two strokes per tooth. One thing you want to keep in mind when filing the saw is that you want the file to be perpendicular to the face, that is 90 degrees to the face of the saw. Also, we want the file to be level with the top of the saw as well. So I oftentimes look to the side to just make sure that the file is, indeed, level 90 degrees to the saw both in this plane as well as this plane. Don't apply too much pressure. Just allow the file to do the work. OK, we're almost done with the sharpening process, the last few teeth here. I've tried to maintain even pressure, even number of strokes. And if you follow all of that correctly, then the teeth should be all the same size. I'm just going to take a file right on the end here and work this last tooth right there just like that. OK, let's try it out. I think it cuts a lot better than I did before we started. One of the things that some people like to do is they'll sharpen every other tooth from one side, and then every other tooth from the other side. And the reason why is they say that it puts the burr on one side. When you file the saw with the file, you're pushing a burr to one side. So I filed this saw with the handle to my left so it pushed the burr over on this side. And I have to do a few strokes with the saw to wear that burr off. So you may find that the saw may veer a little bit to one side. And if that's the case, it's oftentimes because the burr could be pulling it off. Usually a couple strokes and the burr is gone. I like to work it from one side because as I file from one side going straight, it's easier for me to maintain the angles and such because I'm right handed. I can maintain even pressure on every single tooth. So let's try it again. Let's see if we can get a cut that's a little bit straighter. Now, that saw is working well. This saw was in pretty bad shape before we started. And most saws aren't going to be this bad. This saw probably took about two hours total time to restore it. If you've got a saw that's not that bad, it really shouldn't take too long. The processes are still the same. You just won't have to spend as much time. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to comment below. And I hope you enjoyed the video and that you can sharpen yours saws. And enjoy a sharp tool. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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Sharpening a cross-cut saw

[MUSIC PLAYING] In this video, I'm going to show you how to sharpen a crosscut saw. I highly recommend that you watch the video that I did on sharpening a rip saw, because I cover a lot of the specifics in regards to the files, the setting of the teeth, the jointing, the shaping. So if you want more in-depth information on saw sharpening, you'll find that in the "Restoration of a Rip Saw." The crosscut saw is a little bit different than the rip saw in the geometry and the shape of the teeth. [MUSIC ENDS] We have here the rake angle, which you have, right here. That's the angle that's leaning back towards the handle. In this case, it's about 15 degrees. That's this angle, right here. So from 90, here, let's go back. Again, that's the rake angle. The other thing that's different with this saw-- this goes 15 degrees, versus the rip saw, which goes about 10 on the rake angle. The biggest difference, though, between a crosscut and a rip saw is the fleam angle. That's this angle, right here, on the top. That angle is about 20 degrees, but that can vary, depending on what kind of wood you're doing. If you're working in hardwood, you may want to go a little bit less-- maybe 10 degrees. But you can change that. Pretty standard-- 15 to 20 degrees is fairly standard for the fleam angle. And again, with the crosscut saw, we can't do every single tooth like we did with the rip saw. You're going to have to do every other tooth. What's really important, here, though, is that this point points that way. So as you know, the teeth all have set in them, that is, that this tooth is bent. So this top of the tooth, right there, has gotta be bent that way. This one has gotta be bent towards me; this one, away from me. So let's begin by filing. One thing that's helpful for sharpening a crosscut saw is a little block, here. And this block differs from the rip saw block that we used earlier, in the other video that we did on sharpening a rip saw. The main difference, here, is we still have the rake angle, which you can see, right here. The handle's back, over here. This is the rake angle. In the crosscut saw, this is 15 degrees, right here; on the rip saw, this angle is 10 degrees. So the biggest difference between these two is, you'll see, this is 90 degrees, right here. Right on the top, here, we have two 20-degree cuts that we have cut into there. I just used a little protractor, here, and set it on there and marked it and cut it. I cut it by hand. 20 degrees; 20 degrees, there, and then we have the 15-degree rake angle, there. So what I can do now-- you'll notice I have a little arrow pointing. There's the handle, right there. And what we'll do is, we'll take this file and put it-- and you'll notice that I'm trying to line up this edge of the file with that line. So you can kind of get right on top of it, sight right on top of it, make sure it's in line, and then just tap that in place. Be careful when tapping these files in, because the tip tends to break. The files are very hard, and the tip can break. So just watch that. OK. So now we've got that tapped in. Again, this is in line with the rake angle. I'm using a six-inch slim taper file, here; for the rip saw video, we used a six-inch double extra slim taper, because we were doing 12 teeth per inch. This is a more coarse saw. I didn't count the teeth on this, but I reckon this is about an eight- to 10-teeth. So I'm using the six-inch slim taper file. OK. So we're going to start, here. This is what can be a little bit confusing, but if you can remember, here, this tooth is bending away. That's that tooth right there. Let me point to it. This tooth is bending away; this tooth is bending towards me; this tooth is bending away; this tooth is bending towards me. So I'm going to start by filing the back of the tooth, which I'm calling right there. I'm going to file the back of the tooth that's going away. But at the same time, I'm filing the front of the tooth that's coming towards me. So if I just tell you, file the back of the tooth that's going away, that's all good and fine, but which way do you put the file? Well, look here. I've got the tip of the file pointing towards the handle. OK? I could still file the back of the tooth going away, but if the file was going this way, it'd be going the wrong way. So I've got the tip of the file pointing towards the handle, and I'm filing the back of the tooth-- that's this part, right here, that's going away. Let's begin filing. So you'll notice, here, I'm lining this 20-degree line up, by eye, at about 90 degrees to the face of the saw. Again, if you're a little bit off, don't worry about it. Again, I want to go about-- I want to go perfectly flat across the top. And as long as this is flat, that'll take care of our rake angle. Let's begin. We're going to skip a tooth; skip a tooth. So you can see, I've already, of course, darkened the teeth with my layout fluid. And you can see which teeth I've filed away, right there. Let's continue on, making sure this is 90 degrees. That forms our 20-degree fleam angle. This saw was pretty straight before I started, so I didn't do anything with the jointing of the teeth or the shaping of the teeth. The set is actually pretty good in this saw, as well. If you needed to joint the teeth, keep in mind that you're taking off the tip, right there. So it's a little bit more challenging. You've got to joint the teeth, then shape them, bringing them all down equally, trying to maintain even geometry on each tooth, and then, of course, setting and sharpening. All that can be found on the "Restoring a Rip Saw" video, where I go in-depth on the restoration of the rip saw and the sharpening. So we're finishing up the last of the teeth, here. I'm going to take the flat file and work this last one, just like this. Right on the end, there. I'm now going to start back over, at the handle. I'm not going to flip the saw over and come from the other side, but in fact, what I'm going to do is change the angle. So what I'll do is, I'll start by working this way, and I'm going to do the other tooth, the one that I didn't file. So what I'm doing now is, I'm filing the back of the tooth that's coming towards me and the front of the tooth that's going away from me, simultaneously. But the only thing I've changed, here, is I've pointed the tip of the file towards the toe, which is out here. So I've pointed the tip of the file towards the toe; the handle of the file is now pointing towards the handle. Before I do that, I'm going to just start by taking this end, right here, and I'm going to work it in the same 20-degree angle with a flat file. Now you'll notice what I'm doing here is, I'm holding the file at 20 degrees, but I'm using this angle, right here, perpendicular-- this angle is forming a 90 degrees; it's perpendicular to the face. So that ensures that I'm 20 degrees-- 20 degrees-- to the face of the saw. That is, my file is 20 degrees to the face of the saw. The rake angle is still the same-- 15 degrees, back this way, as long as I keep that flat. I want to maintain the same number of strokes on each tooth as I did before, which was about two strokes. The removal of the die can tell you a lot-- the removal of the layout fluid that we have, on here. Because if you find that you're filing and the file just isn't taking away all of the layout fluid, it could be that you could be slightly off with your angle or slightly off with the top, here. It might need to be rotated just slightly. So keep an eye on that. For example, I just did a stroke, there, and you can see just a little bit, right there, that I haven't taken off. Most likely that'll come off on the next stroke, but if I just put a little bit of pressure this way, I can take that off. And you can see it's gone. Try to keep the file flat, right across the top of the saw. The saw vise is actually leaning in just slightly, so I have to raise the handle of the file up just a little bit, to ensure that this is 90 degrees-- that is, flat across the top here. We're almost done, here; just the last few teeth. And that completes the sharpening of a crosscut saw. [MUSIC PLAYING] Please feel free to leave comments or questions below. Thanks for watching. [MUSIC ENDS]

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Sharpening a card scraper

Hi. My name is Frank Strazza with the Heritage School of Woodworking. And in this video, I'm going to go over how to sharpen a card scraper. I think a sharp card scraper is one of the most useful things in the shop, enabling you to scrape unruly grain and figured woods and such. A dull scraper, probably the most useless thing in the shop. One fellow said that's a card scraper is to sandpaper what a word processor is to a typewriter. I find that to be very true. This is a great tool. But it's got to be sharp. There's two parts to sharpening a scraper. The first part is to file it, hone it, basically get a perfectly 90-degree sharpened edge. If you've watched any of my other videos, you know that when I talk about sharpening, the definition of sharp is to have two highly-polished surfaces coming together to infinity. It doesn't matter if those surfaces are at an angle, if they're 90 degrees. In this case, with a scraper, we want both of those surfaces, the face, the edge, to come together to 90 degrees. But we want it to be sharp. That's the first part to sharpening a scraper. The next part is to, then, burnish the edge. The burnisher here will form a burr, which forms a hook which actually does the cutting. Let me talk about some of the tools that you'll need to sharpen a scraper. I've got just a regular mill file here, which we'll use to start working the edge. I've got a set of diamond stones, coarse, medium, and fine. And then an oil stone, as well. We've got a burnisher, which we'll use for the second part of the sharpening. Along with the file, there's some ways to help hold the file 90 degrees. Because what you want to do, here, as I mentioned, is you want to make sure this edge is perfectly 90 degrees to the face. So I have here a saw jointer. It essentially holds the file in place to keep the file 90 degrees. It's used for jointing the top of hand saws and such. But it also works for scrapers. I don't know of any new makers making these. You can find this on the used market. Or you could simply make your own, just run a groove in a piece of wood like this. And take your file, and knock it in with a rubber mallet. And now we have-- the file is now 90 degrees to the face there. So let's begin. The first step is I want to remove the old burr. So there's a burr on the face. This is what I'm referring to as the face. And this is the edge. Normally, when I sharpen a scraper, I'll work both edges in the same sharpening. But in this video, we'll just do one edge here. So I want to remove the old burr. And I'm going to come over here to the diamond stone. And I'm going to use the fine stone, which is all the way on my right here. And it's flush with the edge. So I can access the edge right here. I like to put a little bit of water on the stones. And that helps float away the metal particles. We're going to work the face just to remove the old burr. Now it's flat. I can feel there's no burr on the face. The next step is to file the edge perfectly square to the face. And that's where we'll use our little holder. You can do this freehand. You can make a holder. But we want to basically file this perfectly square. If you'll notice, I'm just going one direction with the file because the file only cuts in one direction. Now, I can see on here that the file, there's a scratch pattern right there. You can see is very slightly there. There are some of the polish from the other previous sharpening. And then you can see right there, there are some scratches right there. If you catch it just right in the light, you can see that. We're going to work this. Now, if you can't see it, you can actually feel that you've gone enough with the file. I think this is the mistake that most people make when they're sharpening a scraper. They don't go enough with the file. Now, how do I know that I've gone enough other than visually looking and seeing that scratch pattern all along there? Well, when this edge meets the face, I'm going to feel a burr all along that edge. And sure enough, I feel, I feel a burr right there. Let's feel it on this side. I feel a burr, as well. So I'm feeling that burr to make sure that that burr goes all along that edge. And I do. I've got the burr. Now, let's take-- again, we're going to go back to the stone here. And we're going to take that burr off using the fine stone on the face like this. So that burr is a tactile indicator that we've gone enough with a particular grit, in this case, the file. So now we've got to remove the scratches that the file put in there using the course diamond stone. I'm working at an angle to work across the stone, increasing the surface area of the tool. Again, I want to feel the burr. I feel the burr on both faces. Work the burr off on the fine stone. Again, the burr is a tactile indicator that we've gone enough on this particular grit. Let's go to the next grit. Now, one of the things, here, I want to do is I want to hold this perfectly 90 degrees. Now, if you don't know if you're holding it 90 degrees, sometimes what'll happen is you'll get a burr on one side but not on the other. That could be-- might be leaning it like this. So we'll work it until we get a burr on both sides. But you can also just take a block of wood, like this, hold it up against there, and work the whole thing back and forth. I don't like this method because the block just gets in the way. And I prefer to just-- I can do it a little bit faster this way. And you can train your muscle memory to get it right at 90 degrees. Again, feel the burr. Let's take the burr away. And then we're going to go to the fine stone, 90 degrees, working it back and forth. Feeling the burr. Take the burr off. So now what we've done is we have essentially sharpened this to a perfect 90 degrees. What I like to do is go to the oil stone. This is a hard, translucent oil stone. It's a natural quarried stone from Arkansas. I use a little 3-in-1 oil on the stone. And, again, we'll work across the entire length of the stone at an angle. And you'll get a very subtle burr. And then we'll work the face. Now, what we have here is we have a perfectly sharpened edge. We can test it on our thumbnail like this. So I'm going to take my thumb, flat like this. Take the scraper, flat like this, and approach the scraper to my thumb. And it should catch it when it's flat. Not up like this but perfectly flat, it should catch that. The same thing here. Catching it on my thumbnail just like that all along there. Now, I know that this is perfectly 90 degrees. That concludes the first part of scraper sharpening. The scraper won't work just like this. It'll just take off fine, really fine, almost dust. But this is very important before we go on to the step. The next part to sharpening the scraper is burnishing the edge. And I want to start by burnishing the face, which is right here. I'm going to burnish this face and this face right here. What that does is it essentially pulls the steel up like this. So we'll start by working the burnisher. The burnisher is basically a hardened piece of steel. It's perfectly round. It's also polished. And we'll start by working the face. I'm putting a fair amount of pressure right here, right along this edge. And we'll work it starting right about there and moving this way off the edge. You can hear the amount of pressure that I'm putting just by the ticking sound. This is also referred to as ticking the edge. Speeding up. You can see how this works. We'll work that about 10 times on that face. Flip it over. Work it about 10 times on this face. OK. So now what we have here is we've got the steel. It's drawn up like this. The next step is to start out at 90 degrees with the burnisher and move to about five degrees in this direction, rolling it back five degrees, then, in this direction, as well. If you go too far, you'll end up with a weakened burr. And it won't cut effectively. You must only go about five degrees. You could even go three degrees. It's just a very subtle rolling there. So I like to just stick this in the corner of the bench, flexing the steel a little bit. Bring the burnisher down, right down to the edge right there. And putting pressure this way, against the edge. We'll work this at 90 degrees about 10 times or so. You can actually feel it smooth out. And then we'll just take this and roll it five degrees this way. So I'm rolling it five degrees this way. And then we're going to roll it five degrees back this way. Now what I have got is I've got a burr. And that burr is actually going to do the cutting. Now, if the scraper becomes dull, you can go about three times back with the burnisher, working on the face, both faces, and re-burnishing the edge, about three times before you have to go back to the whole file and the sharpening stones. Let's see if the scraper works. I've got a piece of curly walnut here, something that would be very difficult to plane. And you can see the scraper works perfectly. No tear out. And it makes beautiful shavings and leaves just a beautifully smooth finish. That concludes this video on sharpening a scraper. Please check back for future videos on how to use a scraper.

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Sharpening a cabinet scraper

[MUSIC PLAYING] In this video, I'm going to cover how to sharpen a cabinet scraper. Check out our other video on how to sharpen a card scraper. We have here a cabinet scraper and a card scraper. The biggest difference, here, with the card scraper, is that it's just a piece of metal that's held in your hand, and you scrape along. But it's sharpened a little differently. It's actually sharpened to a 90-degree edge, there, with a burr put on both sides. The cabinet scraper is actually sharpened only on one side. So it, essentially, has a 45-degree angle-- [MUSIC ENDS] --on one side, and then a burr put on one side only. So that's really the main difference, here. There's two steps to sharpening a cabinet scraper, just as there are to sharpening a card scraper. In fact, there's-- I would say it's more than two steps-- it's two processes. So we've got here-- the first process would be honing the edge. So we're going to file it, we're going to go through the whole honing process, and we're essentially going to get a really sharp edge. The next step-- or next process, rather-- would be to burnish that edge. I've started by putting a little water on my diamond stones. I'm going to start with the fine diamond stone, working the back of the scraper blade to remove the old burr. So we're just going to go here, and I don't want to feel any burr on that back side. So let's just work this until that burr is gone. Now that the burr's gone, I'm going to stick the blade into the vise, here. And we're going to start by filing the edge. This is different than most of your edge tools. Most of your edge tools, you don't file them. The reason why you file a scraper edge is because, when you burnish this-- which will be the next process-- when we burnish it, we're actually pushing that steel over. So we really have to file it to get a fresh, new edge. Be sure to check out the other videos, where we talk more in depth about the definition of sharp and the importance of having two highly polished surfaces coming to infinity. That's really the defining-- that's really the definition of sharp. What we have now is, we've got-- I've filed this at 45 degrees, approximately. This doesn't have to be exactly 45; it can be a little bit higher. I've even sharpened it up at 80 degrees. But 45 degrees is fairly optimal. OK. So now I've filed it, and I have a burr. I will not want to go on to the next step until I get a burr. Very important that I get a burr with the file. And I'm feeling that burr right here, right there-- all the way across. Let's now go to the stones. And our goal, here-- next step-- is to remove that burr on the back side. Because that burr is a tactile indicator that we can now go on to the next step. Let's go here to the diamond stone. I'm using a coarse diamond stone, holding it at 45 degrees. Working it. How do I know that I've gone enough on this stone? Well, when I feel a burr. OK? I've got a burr here, not so much in the center. Let's work this a little bit more in the center. And that's pretty good. Let's go just a tad more. There we go. I've taken the burr off; now we'll go to the medium stone, here. Put the burr back on. Feel the burr. Got the burr. That means that the back-- that the bevel is meeting the back. Now the burr's gone. In fact, the burr is off of the back, but it is on the bevel. So now we're going to go, here, to the bevel, and we're going to put the burr back on to the back. Got the burr again. Let's inspect this edge and see how it looks. Of course, it should look polished all the way across. You can hold it in the light, and you can see the light reflecting. You can see a little bit of the file mark, right there at the edge. I'm not going to worry about that. But if I see an even light reflection all the way across, there, an even polish, then I know that we're good; we're ready to move on. But what I don't want to see is any file marks that may have been left over that we didn't get out with the stones. If I did see some file marks, I would really want to go back to the coarse stone. I'm using a hard, translucent oil stone. And I'm going to work this edge. This is the finest of the oil stones. We're just going to put a really fine edge-- again, maintaining about 45 degrees. I should feel a burr on this, as well. Take it out. Let's check it on my thumbnail. Yes, that's all right. I'm going to come back to this and just work it just a little bit more. That's better. I can feel a nice burr. What I did, there, is, I lifted it up just a little-- again, not a problem-- just lifted it up a few degrees. And I've got a nice burr. I'll take that burr off. And we should be ready to go on to the next step. We can test this, though, on our thumbnail. Yes. That catches a lot better on my thumbnail. And now we can move on to the next process-- part two of sharpening a scraper. I'm going to start-- just as I did on the card scraper-- I'm going to start on the back of the tool, using a burnisher. Now this burnisher is a hardened piece of steel, and it's also polished, which is very important. Hard and polished. I've heard of people using the back of a chisel; I don't recommend that, because you have a sharp edge, and that sharp edge could cut the burr off when you're working it along. Plus you have the sharp edge working towards your fingers. I like to use the burnisher. And if you buy a burnisher, I'd recommend even polishing it up a little. Go over it with some steel wool. You could even-- really fine, fine sandpaper, some 600-grit. Work it up and get it as polished as you possibly can. Let's work the back of this scraper. So my burnisher is right here, on the back. I'm taking it, starting here, working off, and then coming here, and working off, like this. This is called ticking the edge. And although I haven't started counting, and so I've miscounted, here. I'm going to go about 15 to 20 times, working the back of this tool. What that's doing is, it's drawing the steel up, like this. OK. Now what we're going to do is, we're going to start here at 45 degrees. So I'm going to start here at 45, and we're going to raise it up to about 65 degrees. If I go too far with the angle-- if I go up like this-- it's going to make for a weak burr, and it's not going to cut. Again, 45 degrees, and then raise it up, just to about 65 or so; just about there. OK? Let's put it in the vise, like this. Tighten it down. And I'm going to burnish this. Now keep in mind, this is a razor-sharp edge, so if I slip with the burnisher, I'm going to slice my finger open. So what I want to do is, instead of positioning the burnisher like this, I'm going to take the burnisher like this, because most of my motion is across. However, if I do slip, I'm going to come down here and hit the handle and not my finger. 45 degrees, just like this. Again, starting here, working it across, coming in like this, working across like this. 45 degrees. Working it, just like we did the card scraper, but this time we're at 45. Now I'm going to start rolling it to 65 degrees, lightening up the pressure. And I can actually see a white line form on the top, here. And that's because I'm taking this and rolling it over, like this. Again, to about 45 to about 65 degrees, like that. Now we have it. We've got a sharpened scraper blade. Now we need to know which way to put this in the scraper. So you see the angle, here, of the scraper. We need to determine which way to put the blade in here. The blade is going to cut-- this, actually, is leaning away from you. But let's just try this. Let's put the blade-- again, angling it the same way that the scraper is angled-- and run it on here. It's not doing anything. Let's turn it around. Again, same angle. It catches the board. That's the way that we put it in the scraper. Just like that. Put your thumb here, your finger right there; tighten right up on these, and then apply a little bit of tension, right here. One side note. If you're buying a scraper, I highly recommend the Stanley number 80. Only available on the used market. Also, I prefer the thinner blades. I have experimented with, sometimes, thicker blades, and they just don't work as effectively. So the thinner-- the original blades are the best. Original blade. If you need to make one, you can even use a card-scraper blade and make it to fit in here; you have to cut it and refile it. OK. Let's try out this scraper. This is curly walnut. [MUSIC PLAYING] And I think that is sharp. If your scraper isn't that sharp, all you gotta do is go back to the beginning of the video. [MUSIC ENDS]

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How to sharpen a rip saw

[MUSIC PLAYING] Using a sharp saw is such a joy to use. My name is Frank Strazza with the Heritage School of Woodworking. In this video, we're going to talk about how to sharpen, recondition a saw. We're going to talk about the different types of saws. I'm going to show you a saw that most people might be more familiar with. You can both see and here the difference in this saw. I think most woodworkers would be familiar with a saw like this, maybe a saw that's been sitting around in the garage or the attic. One that hasn't been sharpened. The key, though, is they must be sharp. They've got to be razor sharp in order to cut like this. And in this video, I'm going to show you how we recondition and sharpen a saw. I'd like to start by going over some of the different tools that you'll need to sharpen a saw. Any saw be sharpened in either one of two configurations, either a rip configuration, or a cross cut configuration. And I have different saws here, a dovetail saw, a tenon saw. We have a couple different crosscut saws, and rip saws, and such. Again, the only thing that denotes the difference between whether it's a crosscut or a rip is how the teeth are configured, that is how they're sharpened. In order to sharpen a saw, we're going to need some files, triangular type files. Depending on how bad the saw is, we may need a flat file such as this to joint the teeth. We'll go over that in a second. And we'll need a saw set. That I've got two types of saw sets here. I've got one for small teeth, and then one for larger teeth, so two types of saw sets. And then last but not least, we will need a saw vice, something to hold the saw. This vice enables us to hold the saw right up close to the teeth, right up right at the edge of the teeth, which keeps it from vibrating. There are several steps to sharpening a saw, rather, reconditioning a saw. If you're going to recondition a saw, oftentimes you have to start by jointing the top of the teeth, that is, making the teeth level and straight as you look down. If you look down this saw, you can see that the teeth are not perfectly straight. As you can see, there's a high spot here. It might lower a little bit right in there, maybe come up there. So that's the first step, is to joint the teeth. The next step is shaping the teeth after they're jointed. I'll do an illustration here of a whiteboard to show you what I mean. If we have a series of teeth like this. I'm just going to draw some on here, small ones, big ones, the first step, as I mentioned, is to joint the top of teeth. So you've got to go across and bring them all to a consistent, bringing them all down to the lowest point. Sometimes you'll have to do this in multiple steps, as we probably will have to do on this saw. But as you can see now, we've got all of the teeth all level, jointed. So as I mentioned, the next step is to shape the teeth. And that is to bring all the teeth to an even size. So when I file this, I'm going to take off half of this tooth and half of this tooth. So I'm going to bring this down to where this comes even. Then we're going to take half of this tooth. And, obviously, here we're not going to take any off this side. So the shaping process is probably the most difficult process because what you have to do is alter the pressure with your file as you're filing along. Essentially, with this, I would put fairly equal pressure with the file on both sides of the tooth. On this one, I'm going to have to put quite a bit of pressure on this side over here, and no pressure over here, because I want to take off this metal, bringing this down even. Over here on this one, we're going to have to bring this one down. So lots of pressure on this side, but no pressure over here. Again, our goal is to bring the bottom of the gullet. This is the gullet down the bottom. Bringing all of these level, and all of the tops of the teeth all level across. After you shape the teeth, the next step is to set the teeth. And that's where the saw set comes in. Every single saw, whether it's a rip saw or a crosscut saw, has set to the teeth. That is where one tooth is bent one way, and then the other tooth is bent the other way. So, essentially, when you look down the saw, it looks like this. You have teeth bending in alternating directions. Every other tooth is bent in one direction, every other tooth bending back the other way. The purpose for the bend or the set in the teeth is when you're cutting it allows for the back of the saw to go through. It allows for the saw to be able to cut through the wood. If you don't have any set in the teeth, the saw will bind. It depends what kind of wood you're going to be cutting. And what you're doing with the saw will depend on how much set you put in the teeth. If I was cutting green wood, or a soft wood, or a fibrous wood, I want less set. If I'm cutting hardwood, I want less set. If I'm cutting dovetails, where I'm cutting in a hardwood usually, and only cutting down a little ways, I want very, very little set. That's going to give me a finer cut, not as aggressive, not as big. Once we set the teeth, the final step is sharpening, which is almost like the shaping the teeth. But when you sharpen the teeth, what you're doing is you're going an even stroke on every single tooth. For the shaping and the sharpening, we're going to use files. And I have here several different files. Again, these are all triangular-shaped files, 60 degrees, three-sided. And we've got different sizes here from the small all the way up to the largest. I'm going to explain what we have here. We've got a four inch. These are four inch files right here. These are six inch files. And these are seven inch files right in here. The main difference between these two files is one is called a double extra slim. And then one is an extra slim file. So we have double extra slim, extra slim in the four inch. In the six inch, we have a double extra slim and an extra slim in the six inch. And in the seven inch file, we have-- I've got to read on here and see, but I believe this is just an extra slim and what we would refer to as a slim taper file. Obviously, the slim taper seven inch file being the largest, the double extra slim four inch file being some of the smallest. The idea when choosing a file is for the file to fit about one third into the tooth. When you sharpen a saw, you want to be able to use all three sides of this file over multiple sharpenings. In other words, the file is going to dull over time. So I could get maybe three or four sharpenings out of this side of the file, three or four sharpenings out of that side of the file. And turn it, three or four sharpenings out of this side of the file. That is if only one third of the tooth goes into the file. Let me do an illustration on the board to help illustrate that point. So here's the tooth, right like this. Again, that should be approximately 60 degrees. Here's the file setting inside of that tooth. Hopefully we can draw this correctly here. So that's essentially not a perfect triangle. But you get the idea. So what we have here, this is the top of the tooth. This is the top of the tooth here. Obviously another tooth back here this way. But we have one third of the file set inside of the tooth. That way when we're sharpening, we're essentially not dulling all of the file. If I was using too small of a file, say the file came up to here, I would be dulling this part of the file. And I wouldn't get as much use out of the file. I'd like to explain the difference between a crosscut saw and a rip saw. There's a couple different angles. And sometimes these angles can be a little bit confusing when you're looking at a saw, when you're sharpening a saw. The rip saw is probably the least confusing of the two. As you can see, there's a little bit more geometry going on in the crosscut saw. The rip saw has a couple different angles. One is referred to as the rake angle. And that's this angle right here. If you'll follow along right here, you'll see this angle here. That's the angle that leans back towards the handle. That's referred to as the rake angle. I can adjust the rake angle depending on how aggressive I want the saw to cut. So if I want a more aggressive saw, I can raise the rake angle forward like this. That is bringing it up to maybe zero degrees or so. If I want a less aggressive saw, I could actually lower the rake angle down to, in most cases, 10 degrees. I have found, though, that by changing the rake angle by just a couple degrees can really affect how aggressive the saw cuts. So if your saw is kind of cutting too aggressive, you can actually change the rake angle. Bring it down to maybe 12 or 13 degrees. Lower, relax that rake angle down like this. It'll make a smoother cut. This angle here, obviously, will follow this angle because it's essentially 60 degrees right inside here. The other thing with a rip saw is that it's just filed straight across, that is perpendicular to the face of the blade. So it's just 90 degrees straight across like this. So the only thing we really have to worry about here is the rake angle, and then just filing straight across. The crosscut saw also has a rake angle. The rake angle generally on a crosscut saw is a little bit more than a rip saw. It's generally about 15 degrees. So you see here this angle is relaxed back, again, back towards the handle about 15 degrees. The main difference between a crosscut saw and a rip saw is on a crosscut saw you have what we call the fleam angle. Looking down on top of the saw, you can see that there's this angle right here. Instead of it being filed 90 degrees, you have a fleam angle. That's filed at an angle like this. That's generally. That can vary as well. It can vary depending on what kind of wood you're cutting. If you're cutting a hardwood, you don't need as much of a fleam angle. You'd want a little bit less, maybe 10, 15 degrees. If you're cutting a soft wood, you're going to want more of a fleam angle, so maybe 20 degrees or so. Generally 20 degrees is fairly standard for a crosscut saw for the fleam angle. The other thing when filing a crosscut saw is because the teeth are bent in two directions, well, obviously this one's going to be going this way. This one's going to be going back that way, you want to point to be facing out. So in this case, I would want this tooth bent out this way, this tooth bent out that way. So when I file, I'm going to file every other tooth on the crosscut saw. So I'm going to file here, here, and here. We're going to start by reconditioning a rip saw. I think the rip saw is the easiest of the two to start on to show you how to sharpen. And with the ripsaw you actually file every single tooth. And, again, just straight across like that. One thing that you'll find different between each of these saws is the points per inch, that is how many points measure to an inch. Sometimes that information can be found on the saw, right down close to the edge. it's sometimes difficult to see. If you catch it just right in the light, in this case this is a 10 points per inch. There's 10 points per inch. If I took a ruler, put it on there, you would count 10 points. That points per inch will determine what size file I use. And if you look in the Resources tab down below, you will see the specifications for which files to use for points per inch. I usually just do it by eye. You can take a file, and set it in the tooth. And usually you can see it. If you set it right inside there, you can see which size file works well. This might be a little bit large. We might go back to-- and this was the six inch extra slim. But let's find the six inch double extra slim. That looks pretty close. In fact, I'm finding that that's maybe a little bit-- this file might be a little bit too small for this saw. So, in fact, I may actually have to go back to the six inch slim taper file. I would say that for most saws, you'll find that the six inch slim taper and the six inch double extra slim taper files are going to do for most of your sawing. The four inch files come in when you're dealing with much smaller tooth patterns, such as this one here. You might be looking at maybe a 16 teeth per inch. And as you can see, the teeth are much finer. And this is a dovetail saw. So typically a dovetail saw is going to be sharpened for rip. [MUSIC PLAYING] Let's begin by sharpening, or in this case reconditioning, this saw. As I mentioned earlier, the first step is to joint the teeth. Before we joint the teeth here, I want to mark the teeth so I can know which tooth I filed. Some people use a magic marker. I actually like to use the steel blue layout fluid. The nice thing about this is it flows into the tooth so you can tell which tooth you filed as you're working along. You've got to watch. This stuff will stain everything that you're working on. So I like to put it away from the bench so I don't stain my bench blue. And we'll just brush this on. Again, check out the Resources tab below for a list of suppliers where these items can be obtained from. I'm just putting a very little bit on there. And I know it's dying the saw blue. But a little denatured alcohol will take that right off. This really helps in defining which tooth you have filed. It makes a big difference. So let's put this in the saw vice. And we're going to start by jointing the teeth. There's a couple ways to do this. You can simply run a file flat across the top of the teeth like this. But you got to watch because I've often been running the file along, and if my hand falls forward, and the file pushes it in, it can cut your finger. It doesn't feel very good. So there's a couple things to aid in that. You can use a block of wood with the set in it. And that helps in a couple ways. It helps keep it square. Just take a rubber hammer here. Tap it in place. And that helps keep the file square to the edge. And you can run that along just like so. Always push the file. And you'll see here, the file is jointing the teeth. If you look right on top, you can see that there is some flat spots. It's hitting hit there, right there. And this is jointing. There's one right there. It's jointing the teeth. You can see right there. So, ideally, we want there to be a flat spot. We're not going to take the teeth all the way down. But ideally, we would see that the file had touched every single tooth. And we would know that it was perfectly jointed all the way across. This saw is in pretty bad shape. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to probably joint it a little ways because, again, I don't want to take the teeth all the way off. We'll joint it a little ways. And then we'll start shaping it. Then we'll probably joint it again. So let's just joint over here. There's a high spot right up in there. So we're going to come in here like this and just joint this. Sometimes you can find these on the used market. This is actually a saw jointer. Its main purpose was for jointing the top of the saw. It's aluminum, nice little file holder here. And it's designed to keep your hand away from the blade. So we can just run that right along the top. Again, I'm working over here because that's the high spot. We'll just work this right along just like so. I'm going to have to raise this in the vice just a little bit because the jointer is hitting the saw vice. Again, that tooth, we're going to bring that tooth way down. Let's bring that down just a little bit more. Go back to using this guy because I want a little bit bigger file. I prefer to use an eight inch flat file because it's obviously a longer file. This holder will not hold an eight inch file. It just holds a six inch file. So really a homemade saw jointer might be better. We're going to bring this down. And that tooth right there is what's high. Again, working it down. Let's inspect the progress here. We can see flat right there, obviously a higher spot right over here. Let's continue to work it down. Again, let's just work this all the way down like this. sight write down this saw and see what kind of progress we're making. It looks like when I sight down this song you can see that there's a curve right inside there. I don't really like that. Most of the teeth are coming down pretty level, which is nice. But I would prefer there not to be a curve in the saw like that. I'm going to go ahead and shape the teeth now instead of jointing it perfectly flat. The reason why is if I keep on jointing, I'm going to start losing the teeth which, in this case, are my point of reference. And then I'd have to re-tooth the saw. And we'll save that for another video. I'm going to use a six inch double extra slim taper for this saw. This is about 10 to 12 points per inch for this saw. And I've got here a little simple little holder that I made to help me denote the perfect rake angle. All this is is essentially a block of wood with a 10 degree line drawn on this piece. So I've got a 10 degree angle. That's going to point back towards the handle. And all I've got to do is put my file inside there, line up this edge of the file with that 10 degree line, and tap it in. Now, when I file along, this will actually help keep it perfectly flat. As long as I keep this perfectly flat, I know that rake angle is going to remain at 10 degrees. So you can see right here, we filed quite a bit away, almost taking the teeth away. So in this case, I'm going to come in. And I can see a little tiny faint line there. Let's just kind of work there. We'll start by shaping the teeth. Now, when you heard of sharpening a saw, you probably heard, well, you've got to go an even stroke on each tooth. This is true when sharpening a saw. But as I showed earlier in the illustration, when shaping the teeth, we may have to take more than one stroke, oftentimes multiple strokes, on one tooth. And maybe the next tooth, we may not have to take any strokes on. Again, our goal is to take those flats away, getting rid of those flats. I'm going to adjust the pressure of the file based on which flats I'm trying to remove. You can see right here, we have a flat right there and a flat right there. In that case, I'm going to put equal pressure on either side of the file just straight down. And we should be able to remove half of the flat over here, half of the flat over there. There you can see there's a little bit of a flat, little bit of a flat. Let's work this one down just a little bit more. This part right back in here, I'm going to take a flat file and just take it at an angle right it here like this to bring it off. So now you can see we've got that worked down. And we're going to keep on working across these teeth shaping them as we go. This one here, I don't see any flat on the top. But I see a little flat over there. So I'm going to take gentle pressure, putting pressure on this side of the file. Just light pressure, now there's nothing there. This one here, we're going to have to work it because there's a flat on this side, but not on that side. So let's work it a little bit more. Now I'm only taking half of the flat off because I'm looking to move to the next one and take half the flat on this side. Move to the next tooth, and all the way down. You can see, clearly, which teeth I've filed because when you file, it files away that blueing that we put on there, that steel blue fluid. When I'm shaping the teeth, you can see right here there's an even flat on this tooth and an even flat on this tooth. With that, when I file this, I'm going to put equal pressure on both sides and go straight down, essentially only taking off half the flat. Of course, I've already taken off part of the flat on this tooth. So I'm only going to take off half the flat on this one and try to take off the rest of the flat on this one. This next tooth, you'll see we're going to have to file half of this and then half of that. So that's fairly equal. Pressure straight down. Next one, you can see here a little bit of a flat there, more of a flat there. So I'm going to put a little more pressure on that tooth, less pressure on this one. So more forward pressure with my file that way. This tooth here, we're going to put a lot more forward pressure this way because there's not much of a flat on the top there, but more of a flat on the top there. You can see when we topped the top of these teeth, the file didn't hit it all right there, but a little bit right on that one. So, again, we're going to put pressure leading this way and not much back here. And our goal here is to bring all of these teeth down to a consistent height, that is to where they're all leveled out. Sometimes I'll work alternating teeth. I'll work this tooth a little. Then I'll come back to this tooth, especially when there's a large flat on there, because I want to make sure that we bring it down evenly on each side. Putting pressure this way to get rid of that flat. We're almost done with this preliminary shaping. You can see we're just nearing the last few teeth. And then we're going to go back and rejoint it. This last tooth, I want to come back with the flat file and just come along here flat like this. Now we're ready to remark it. We're going to use the layout fluid, remark the teeth, and then joint it again. One thing to keep in mind when hitting a file, make sure you use a rubber mallet. Files are very hard. And they can break. They're brittle. So tap it lightly. Now we'll joint the top of teeth. I've marked it. And we'll joint it. It'll expose which teeth need to be shaped again. There's a little bit of a concavity to the saw. And I want to work that out. So I'm going to focus my attention on either end of the saw. Sight down the saw. That's looking better. We'll work it more over here. I can see quite a bit of flat spots there. And, again, as I mentioned earlier, I don't want to take the teeth all the way out because then I've lost my point of reference with the teeth. So I want to joint it a little ways. And you can see more flat spots here now that we've shaped it and we're getting it flatter. So let's work this down a little bit more over here. Flat, flat, actually we've got a flat on most all the teeth. Let's take a look at it. That's much better. I've done the final jointing. And I'm quite happy with how it looks. It's much straighter now, nice and straight all along the length. And what you'll also see is you'll also see that the flats on the top of the teeth are more even. So they're nice and even. As you look around, you'll see right there all the whites are all the same. So we're going to shape it one more time. The only difference between the shaping process and the sharpening process is with the shaping we're taking each individual tooth down to match the others. In other words, we're trying to take away the flats to bring it equally. So, really, what we're doing is we're taking maybe more strokes on one tooth, less strokes on another tooth, whereas with sharpening we're taking an even stroke on every single tooth. So, essentially, shaping the teeth and sharpening are the same. The key here is to keep the file 90 degrees to the face of the saw. Also, we want to keep the file perfectly flat to the top of the saw as well. You'll want to make sure you use a sharp file when sharpening your saw. The files do wear out may. And they become dull over time. And it's frustrating using a dull files. So make sure that the file is sharp. It'll cut much better. We're on the last few teeth of this shaping process. I'm just going to continue on. And we'll move on to the next step. When you file a saw, you're creating a bur with the file. That means you're pushing a bur. That's when one surface meets the other, you form a little metal bur. I want to take that bur off. But the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to coat the saw again with the layout fluid. And then we're going to take that bur off. I'll show you how that's done. I'm going to go ahead and remove the burr by cutting in a piece of hardwood. It's not going to cut very good because the saw is not sharp. And it's not set. But I'm just basically running it in a piece of scrap hardwood. And a few strokes will remove the burr. In fact, what we'll be able to see is if we sight on top of the saw, we'll be able to see little white reflection right off the top. Right there you can see that. It's a little white reflection. And that means I have not gone all the way down with the file. In other words, we actually have to shape the teeth again. And at this point, depending on how bad those flats are, these flats I might just come back and the flats that are wider, we'll just shape those. And we'll leave the rest for the sharpening process. That actually doesn't look too bad. Now that we've done the final shaping, we're now going to move on to setting the teeth. The reason why we have to reset the teeth is because we filed so much away. The teeth are like this. And we have actually filed it, filed it, filed it down to where we removed most of the set. So I'm going to come back and reset the teeth using a saw set. We've got two types of saw sets. The only difference between these two is the plunger. You can see the little plunger right here. This is a bigger plunger. That's what pushes the tooth. And this one here is a smaller plunger. Right there, that's what pushes the tooth to the side. So let's see which saw set fits this saw. If you look down in here, you can see that the plunger is somewhat larger than the tooth. In that case, I really want to go with a smaller saw set. We can see right there the plunger is a little bit smaller than the tooth. And that will allow me to be able to bend the tooth over. First of all, we got to set the amount of set that we want using the saw set. I'm adjusting the saw set. The saw set is numbered from four all the way up to 12. So we're going to raise this up maybe to around a seven. Those numbers really don't denote a specific teeth per inch necessarily. All that these numbers are suggesting is a size. So, essentially, we're going from large to small. So if you want more set to the teeth, you're going to set it on a four or something like that. If you want less set on the teeth, then you're going to go with maybe a 10 or 12. I'm going to shoot somewhere in the middle. Let's look and see how a seven looks. In this case, on a rip saw, it doesn't really matter which tooth we push to one side or the other. Generally, I try to look at the saw and see if the tooth is already going in one direction. Then I'll just go ahead and follow in that same pattern. We filed this saw so much that we've pretty much lost all the set. So it really doesn't matter which tooth we start on. We just want to do every other tooth. So we'll just begin here and start pushing these teeth to one side. I have had some of these older saws where a tooth will actually break off. And that's always an uncomfortable feeling when you're setting the saw and you hear a little break. That's oftentimes from the saw just being brittle, the teeth being brittle. It's because it's been sitting out, or getting a bit rusty. It'll tend to be more brittle. Now we're ready to set the saw. And I'd like to talk about the difference between these two saw sets. This is a fine saw set. And if you look on the inside, you can see the little plunger difference between the two. There's a little plunger right inside there that pushes the tooth to one side. There's the plunger right there. And that pushes the tooth. And then there's this one. This plunger is just a little bit larger. So there's also numbers on here. These are adjustable. By loosening up this part right there, you can see this wheel right in here turns. And that denotes how much set you'll put into the saw. I believe those numbers run from four all the way up to around 12 or so. All those numbers are is just a grading system. So essentially four is going to be more set. Twelve is going to be much less set. So we're going to go somewhere in between. Let's try both of these and see which one looks best in the saw. If I put the small plunger on there, it works. I could actually get away by setting the saw using this saw set. But on a couple teeth, there may be a problem where you might find that the plunger may actually push to the side of the tooth. So maybe a bigger plunger would be a little bit better, something that covers the whole tooth, as long as it's not too big and doesn't interfere with the other teeth. So I think I'll go with this one just because it's a little bit bigger. And it's going to cover that whole tooth and enable that whole tooth to push to the side, as opposed to the smaller one where it could actually slide off of the tooth maybe. The other thing when you're trying to set this saw is make sure that the pressure is down. Sometimes the saw set wants to ride up a little bit. The plunger inside there is actually angled like this. So what happens is sometimes the saw set wants to ride up like this. Make sure there's pressure down on the saw set. And then, of course, there's a little clamp that engages first. So that little clamp will actually go against the saw. So I'm putting pressure down. Clamp against the saw. And then the plunger then comes and pushes the tooth to the side. Well, we're finishing up this side of the setting of the saw. And we'll now flip it over and set all the teeth, every other tooth going the other way. So when we set it the first time, we set every other tooth going this way. Now we're going to flip the saw around and do every other tooth going the other way. I've set my saw set here on a number eight, which is somewhere in between. It'll actually do-- it's a finer set. And this saw is a nice, fine tooth pattern. So it'll make a nice fine kerf. And I can feel it there. It's a nice, gentle set. It's ideal once you start setting the teeth not to stop. It's easy to go cross-eyed doing this as well. But you don't want to lose your place. I'm nearing the end here of setting the second . Side The last few teeth, and we'll be ready for sharpening. Before I sharpen the saw, I'm going to coat it one more time so I can tell which tooth that I've filed away. So, again, coating it with the layout fluid. Now we're ready to begin sharpening. As I mentioned earlier, the shaping process is much like the sharpening process. The main difference being when sharpening, we want to have an even stroke on every single tooth, even stroke, even pressure, an even number of strokes too. So if I choose to do one stroke, I want to do one stroke on every tooth. If I choose to do two strokes, which, in this case I think I'm going to go ahead and do two strokes because there's still just a little bit of a flat left. And I want to get rid of that. Essentially, if you've watched by other videos on chisel sharpening, you know that what defines a sharp edge is having two highly polished points coming to infinity. In this case, it's not going to be highly polished. It's just the use of a file. But we still want both of those points coming to infinity. So we don't want any flat spot on the top of the tooth. Again, I'm lining up the rake angle with the handle. And we'll do two strokes per tooth. One thing you want to keep in mind when filing the saw is that you want the file to be perpendicular to the face, that is 90 degrees to the face of the saw. Also, we want the file to be level with the top of the saw as well. So I oftentimes look to the side to just make sure that the file is, indeed, level 90 degrees to the saw both in this plane as well as this plane. Don't apply too much pressure. Just allow the file to do the work. OK, we're almost done with the sharpening process, the last few teeth here. I've tried to maintain even pressure, even number of strokes. And if you follow all of that correctly, then the teeth should be all the same size. I'm just going to take a file right on the end here and work this last tooth right there just like that. OK, let's try it out. I think it cuts a lot better than I did before we started. One of the things that some people like to do is they'll sharpen every other tooth from one side, and then every other tooth from the other side. And the reason why is they say that it puts the burr on one side. When you file the saw with the file, you're pushing a burr to one side. So I filed this saw with the handle to my left so it pushed the burr over on this side. And I have to do a few strokes with the saw to wear that burr off. So you may find that the saw may veer a little bit to one side. And if that's the case, it's oftentimes because the burr could be pulling it off. Usually a couple strokes and the burr is gone. I like to work it from one side because as I file from one side going straight, it's easier for me to maintain the angles and such because I'm right handed. I can maintain even pressure on every single tooth. So let's try it again. Let's see if we can get a cut that's a little bit straighter. Now, that saw is working well. This saw was in pretty bad shape before we started. And most saws aren't going to be this bad. This saw probably took about two hours total time to restore it. If you've got a saw that's not that bad, it really shouldn't take too long. The processes are still the same. You just won't have to spend as much time. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to comment below. And I hope you enjoyed the video and that you can sharpen yours saws. And enjoy a sharp tool. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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How to sharpen a dovetail saw

Hi, my name is Frank Strazza with the Heritage School of Woodworking. And in this video, I'm going to show you how quickly you can sharpen a dovetail saw. Please see some of our other videos on more in-depth techniques on how to sharpen a saw, including saw restoration, how to sharpen a crosscut saw, the different types of tools used, and such. I'm going to start by marking with some layout fluid the teeth. So I can know which tooth to file. This is machinist layout fluid. And it darkens the teeth. So I can tell which tooth I filed. We'll put this inside the saw vise here. Line it up. just like so. The handle is to my left. And I'm going to use a four-inch slim taper file for this. I'm going to sharpen it to a rip as any dovetail saw is, sharpened to a rip configuration, which is just straight across. If you'll notice, I'm filing 90 degrees to the face of the saw, keeping the file nice and level with the top of the saw. And the rake angle, which is discussed in our other video, is about 13 degrees. So I'm working at a rake angle of about 13 degrees. And we'll work this right along. Equal pressure on every tooth as we work along using even pressure on the entire length of the file. And as we near the last few teeth, and that is how you sharpen a rip saw. That's just touching up a rip saw. And, of course, this saw, I'm not doing any other setting or jointing or shaping to the teeth. Just the touch up to it. And we'll see how well it works. I think we can cut some dovetails with that.

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