As a follow up to my conversation with Andrew Detloff about what to look for when buying a hand cranked grinder, this episode details how I use the grinder in my day to day sharpening routine. I managed to pull an Underhill early on in this video and cut myself along the sharp edge of the chisel. I think I had stopped bleeding by the end but let’s see if you can spot when I did it.
I also detail my honing method on my waterstone and talk a little about how I free hand sharpen. Let me first say that there is nothing wrong with honing guides. If they work for you, keep using them. I got into the habit of free hand sharpening while working at the Steppingstone museum and it just stuck. I maintain that it is quick to learn but I also don’t want to lead anyone to believe that using a honing guide is bad. Using dull tools however is very bad! Enjoy.
Thanks for putting things into perspective for me Shannon. I think that was the best “cut-to-the-chase” sharpening tutorial that I’ve seen to date. It was nice to see how neatly the hand-cranked grinder fit into the process. For a beginner like me, that’s important. I was visualizing many stones, many steps, and a lot of time spent getting a tool sharpened.
Thanks for the great video Shannon.
One quick question for you, I have to keep buckets of water around for my stones too as I have no sink
in my shop. I noticed you are only using the one bucket, is there any worry of cross contaminating your
stones with other ones or from the grinder dust that ends up in your water bucket?
Cheers
I’m not worried about it Charlie. Any grit sinks quickly to the bottom and I haven’t experienced any ill effects. I do empty the bucket at the end of each shop session however so the water never really gets that nasty.
I just bought my handcrank grinder on E-Bay. Lots of grease to clean up but I am not worried about that. My problem is I can’t get the old wheel off. The shaft seems to have some sort of cap on the end and the nut won’t budge. Any thoughts from your clean-up experience?
I haven’t run across this personally. The 2 grinders I refurbished just had a typical nut on the arbor. I did have to loosen them up a bit with WD-40 before I could break them loose however.
Well I had to saw off the end of the arbor as whatever cap was placed on there was hopelessly rusted to it. There is stll plenty of room for the wheel and nut. The rest of the clean up and refurbish was straightforward. What grit wheel are you using? I have a fine and extra fine white wheel on my power grinder. I think I am going to move the extra fine to the hand grinder and install a cloth wheel charged with buffing compund on the power grinder.
I’m using a 60 grit wheel. I only ever use this grinder for reshaping edges so I want it to work fast.