Course #1 Recap

Looking to buy a new square, saw, plane, or ?? Have a question about which sharpening stone to buy? This is the place.
Matt J
Hopper I
Hopper I
Location: Maynard, Massachusetts
Posts: 91
Joined: Sat Jul 02, 2011 9:27 am

Course #1 Recap

Wed Oct 28, 2015 9:19 pm

Since no one else is jumping in I thought I'd do a recap before the memories get too fuzzy... I only attended the first class so I'm interested to hear from the guys who stayed longer.

There were 7 participants to begin, people came from Washington, Missouri, Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Vermont, and one guy came all the way from the UK! (Hope I got all that right) The weather had turned a little cold but it was peak foliage season and the scenery couldn't have been better in western Mass.

We focused on chisels the first day. After introductions and a brief shop tour, Chris talked for a short time about chisel anatomy and theoretical aspects of the tasks we were about to do. Then we removed lacquer from our handles and set our hoops. There were some high end tools in attendance, some mid range, and one guy brought a bunch of ebay dogs to see if he could make something serviceable (ok that was me). One interesting problem that surfaced was setting the hoop on very narrow chisels which tended to drive too deeply into the block of wood we were using (teak worked better than cedar... (yes, you should be jealous of even the offcuts from Chris' shop)). Never the less we all moved through handle setup at about the same pace, and by lunch we were ready for sharpening the blades. We ate quickly, talked a little more theory, then Chris gave a demo of how he likes to sharpen. My major takeaway was to ruthlessly flatten the coarse stones- re-flattening after each pass, the reason being that the coarse stones have the greatest impact on the shape of the blade, they wear fastest, and tend to be the cheapest stones to buy. By keeping the coarse stones as flat as possible you spend less time on the finer stones, wear them less, and in my experience it speeds up the whole process considerably. This alone was worth the price of admission for me! I think I improved more in the first day of sharpening than I did in the previous year of self directed study. Chris also advocated for using short strokes in a sideways direction (moving the blade parallel to the cutting edge), especially on coarse grits, always advancing the edge toward the unused portion of the stone. Once you run out of unused stone, flatten!

The second day began with a discussion of kanna- anatomy, theory of setup and use, then we began flattening our blades and sub-blades. The tools present required varying degrees of work- I'm not sure if cost or quality of a plane was a reliable indicator of the amount of work needed to set it up... I think generally speaking a more expensive plane will be less work, but it definitely depends on the maker. I was lucky- the inexpensive 48mm Kikuhiromaru blade I brought required only a little flattening, and the sub blade only needed a small amount of work on the anvil to give it the correctly domed shape (though the dai that came with it was another story). Other folks had a lot of work to do, and the rest of the day was spent pounding on anvils and rubbing metal on stones. Major takeaway here was that sori can be a pain in the ass. It's important to have some very coarse stones at your disposal. 150 grit sandpaper and a granite plate came in handy.

Day three began with most of us returning to the stones to finish work on blades and sub-blades. Chris went over the anatomy of a dai and some theory, then set us loose to fitting our blades to our blocks. I found that the dai maker had been a bit over zealous when rough fitting the blade to my dai, and one of the ramps that bear against the ashi had a nice chunk taken out of it. I was able to get a good fit on one side of the blade, but the other side was loose, and ultimately I had to shim the back of the blade with (someone else's) wood shaving to get a reasonable fit. Even though my work went pretty fast it was a struggle to get it all done by the end of the day. Most of us agreed that we could have spent an entire fourth day getting the tools set up but several people were pulling decent shavings in the last hour.

It was a great weekend and I learned a lot. I definitely have a better idea of what to look for when buying tools, what questions to ask of the seller, and a better sense of the value of a tool-dollar spent. I'm confident that I can bring what I learned in class back to my shop and continue to improve my tools and skills. Besides the lessons it was great to meet and get to know a bunch of guys with diverse backgrounds that share a rare common interest. It almost felt like a support group at times- the only place I can blather on about tools and have someone listen! Many thanks to Chris H, Chris P, John, Ariel, Andy, Solo, and the other Matt. Hope to see everyone back here on the forum.

-Matt J
Last edited by Matt J on Wed Oct 28, 2015 10:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Brian
Deshi
Posts: 1090
Joined: Sat Nov 29, 2014 11:46 am

Re: Course #1 Recap

Wed Oct 28, 2015 10:15 pm

Thanks for recapping. So much of this stuff is self-study for those that do not work in the field (probably is to some degree for those who do work in the field) I expect it was interesting to see how other people do things in person and the results they achieve.

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