For somewhere around 11 or 12 years now, we’ve been hearing about Paul Sellers’ sharpening method and the description of it being traditional.
I would liken Paul to being the Robert Kiyosaki of Woodworking. We have plenty of proof that Paul makes a living teaching students, or at least a large part of his living. I can tell you from the things that I know well, he isn’t accomplished when it comes to understanding tools or making definitive comments about them, but his audience isn’t the discerning type. An example of this is commentary about how someone hardening an iron in the old days would’ve been doing the work willy nilly. I’ve never seen any example of main line high quality tools where hardening is inconsistent.
I have seen cut price tools, like Ohio or Auburn irons that just don’t seem to get their shit together even when you reharden them. If I can’t reharden something fine, thermally cycle it as part of the process to reestablish grain and then get a good result, the stock is no good.
What we don’t know is anything of Paul doing any fine work to make a living. I vaguely recall him talking about moving to the US and scraping by on the craft scene. This is make trinkets during the week and sell them on the weekend. It can be quite profitable – my mother did this for 30 years. This isn’t the same as fine work – it’s kitsch most of the time.
I use Robert Kiyosaki because everything the guy says (he’s far worse than Paul) strikes me as not being credible, and not surprisingly, you will have trouble finding anything about Robert Kiyosaki making money other than selling things to beginners claiming stories that don’t seem to have any real proof. Another example of this is Frank Abagnale. Tells a story that seems less and less likely as it goes on, and if you look into his actual past, you’ll find that his real con is selling the story. Most of it didn’t happen and his criminal record isn’t flattering. He claims to have not ripped off individuals or small businesses, but his actual criminal record shows a history of doing that but none of his taller tale feats. If you ask 50 people about “catch me if you can” do you think a majority of them would say “i don’t know how that guy managed to seed a movie about himself when the real con is that he was able to get people to believe he was an accomplished con artist”.
You have to use your sniff sense with things, and Paul’s schtick in my opinion is a lot more subtle. Look at the “piece in the white house”. Does it look like paul made it or does it look like it was made by someone who does a lot of veneering? Does it look similar to work that Frank Strazza shows on his website? I don’t really know whose fingers did the work, but it looks more Strazza and Sellers to me.
OK – What’s the Rub and Where does it Meet Traditional Sharpening?
The big myth that surrounds Paul is the idea that somehow his sharpening habits are trade tested. I think they are tested by the paint-can opening truck unloading at the jobsites trades.
I think this because I have a lot of hands on experience trying different sharpening methods and what he teaches doesn’t last long if you do more than just beginner level woodworking. You will eventually learn in bench work to separate grinding and honing so that both can be done more quickly, and you will find that if you leave a bevel convex on a plane iron, the sharpening interval shortens *a lot* and you deal with much more trouble due to limited clearance early in the wear cycle. You do more work, get less out of it, and end up sharpening longer.
The Fakobs in the world will advise beginners that this is the traditional method, and that anyone saying otherwise is trying to sell you stones or gadgets or whatever.
This is talk of stupidity. I fought it on the forums for a while, but where proof occurs is actually trying “Paul’s Traditional Way” to what was actually prescribed in literature several hundred years ago. The difference in sharpening accuracy (without as much effort) and interval of use is stark. Paul’s method sucks. I suppose if you get a tool sharpened the first time, and it’s a thrill, that’s OK – look to move on quickly, and look to move on from gurus unless you’re in it because you like the yarn.
I can’t tell you how to avoid the Fakobs, who talk at length without showing anything related to the subject, and mention their age and that they were trained in the 50s. This stuff was dead for at least 50 years by then, and I hear often about the training – especially in the UK – with hand tools, but it migrates into things like drilling a hole in all mortises and using mortise chisels with the flat side toward the wood yet to be removed. These things make no real sense, but they could be pondered either in barn mortising or imitating a machine.
If chisels got rounded over on job sites, it may have been Ok because there was no demand for better.
What the Literature Actually Says
Nicholson carefully describes sharpening for fine work to include grinding a chisel or plane iron on a round wheel and doing it carefully so as not to have a lumpy bevel (that would be convexity or threatening it), and grinding the angle at such acuteness that if the edge were used, it would not hold up. That is, grind at a shallow angle. And then hone with a fine stone or pair of fine stones at a somewhat steeper angle.
We now hear often that this is “modern”.
Maybe it’s a fluke? Except it isn’t.
Holtzapffel has careful instructions for grinding and provides angles. I suspect the angles are somewhat important, but deviating a couple of degrees will make no difference. the concept is very important and it is directly addressed to planes and chisles, there’s no escaping it by suggesting maybe it’s for turning tools. That’s addressed elsewhere.
What does Holtappfel say?
Grind on a wheel at 25 degrees and hone at 30 for softwoods and 35 for hardwoods. This sounds simplistic, but remember, when you’re reading this from my context, I have a whole bunch of microscope pictures. Typical chisels stop taking damage with a flat secondary bevel in hardwoods around 33 degrees. They will not do it at 30 degrees, even with skilled use, unless the apex of a chisel is modified with some stropping or edge conditioning routine (like buffing!). At 30 degrees, agreeable softwoods pose no threats. This advice from Holtzapffel is so good that a modern microscope can’t put a dent in it.
Holtzapffel goes on further to describe the two step routine in their case being a turkish oilstone or something similar. This is the fineness of an 8k waterstone, but slightly different characteristics – and the speed of a 4-6k oilstone but different because you can lean on the stone and do the initial honing and then lighten up, with this sort of idea taking all of about 15 seconds on a bevel, refining the edge and then lightening up a little bit to make sure the fine burr is very weak and won’t pose damage when it’s stropped off.
And then further – Hasluck, maybe Hasluck will describe the “traditional” rounded bevel that can open paint cans, cut straps off of lumber bundles and then chisel wood.
No, it doesn’t. Instead, in a guide discussing sharpening of straight edges, Hasluck goes off on a tirade of the preference for a hollow wheel grind and how detrimental any convexity will be because it steals the craftsman’s time. In Hasluck’s word, it’s similar to a craftsman showing up to the job site for the week with a poorly set and sharpened saw – that sharpening this way (with convexity) is akin to losing several hours of time before even starting the week.
And that Hasluck talks about this agrees with what I see when people send me tools, and my own inability to not grind shallow enough with any convexity to make up for the poor performance of the method. People send me tools that look innocent, but the plane irons will have clearance problems immediately after sharpening. Hasluck talks about how the convexity is fat behind the edge and if the honing angle is appropriate, the amount of metal to be honed is too fat too quickly, leading to too many trips to grind when they shouldn’t be needed, and the habit of workmen to try to evade it by steepening the angle and then costing themselves time a different way.
By my understanding, these excellent editors put together volumes based on things that were relayed to them from experienced workmen.
So, perhaps there were rounded bevels, but the credible information sources feeding the writers would have put them to the side of being crude workers or people who didn’t have the discernment to know better.
Just like the present.
These publications from Nicholson to Hasluck encompass a 100 year period ending around 1910. The first two are laden with discussion about how cap irons work. I didn’t see discussion of the cap iron in Hasluck, which was the latest of these. Maybe it existed in another book – I tend to figure something out and then find later where it was described because when I do something and find out it doesn’t work well and it’s undeniably inferior, it’s suddenly a lot easier to see what the writers are trying to convey.
If you ask someone with little experience, they will attempt to write off these texts as being dilettantes just going on at length. Based on my experience, you can find the things that were novel at the time as they are presented as new. the other stuff, you ignore at your own peril if you want to progress.
We don’t all want to be beginners forever. I learned to sharpen first from David Charlesworth’s DVD. it took 45 minutes to set up my first plane iron. Today, it would take me about 3 minutes or less to do the same thing because I am making tools and have learned to be more nuanced. What I do isn’t for beginners when flattening – some parts of it may be, but the method overall is too nuanced.
Where I see the demonstration of Hasluck’s railing is simple, though. When I cut the initial bevel on an iron, it typically has a little bit of convexity. I try to cut it more like 20 degrees and flat, but even at that, the convexity on the iron will considerably shorten planing intervals within a couple of sharpenings and I will give in and hollow grind the bevel instead and restore planetary alignment.
If you are enjoying convex bevels, by all means, continue to do it. But don’t get sucked into these false scenarios where somehow you can’t do better as you move on. If you don’t feel like moving on and woodworking is just a transient thing, then that’s OK, too. If you want to move up because you’re developing discernment and you think there must be a better way, you’ll eventually back into things like using cap irons and sharpening and you’ll start to find historical concurrence. I am walking proof that you don’t need to read about things things to figure them out – you will figure them out and then you’ll be able to read about them. Having the experience with the way that works less good isn’t entirely a waste – it will keep you from wondering once you level up if you should try ten other things.
A friend of mine likes to say that the Rockefellers and Smiths differ by the fact that the Rockefellers will watch people do something that doesn’t work and they won’t do it. The smart Smiths (or Millers or Bakers, or there has to be a common name that isn’t a trade so it doesn’t seem like I’m talking about tradesmen) will abandon what doesn’t work well, but has to make the mistake on their own to understand it. The less inclined will fail to learn even from their own experience. I’m one of the Smiths and am first, not smart or wise enough to ever be one of the Rockefellers, and too curious, anyway.
I used the Robert Kiyosaki example because I have a morbid curiosity with folks who think they’ll get rich taking on debt and buying properties and becoming “independent”. There’s a “this is the real way, the secret that people have been keeping from me!” hysteria, and somehow, Kiyosaki gets held up even on financial sites with vague predictions. I find this appalling, but following him are probably people with their wallet open and maybe not much discretion – as in, loyal purchasers who advertisers find lucrative. But when you look at the real world of real estate investment (which I have no interest in), the credible stories come from guys like Ben Mallah. And Ben Mallah doesn’t have a get rich advice – I think he says something like “find someone in your area who is able to find deals and start small and learn from them”. The folks criticizing him for not making a business of teaching more directly and promising the quick wealth seem to fail to realize that he’s retiring and moving his real estate business to his kids, but he likes to do real estate and talk about it. Not farm peoples’ wallets.
And his honest showing of what he does day to day makes me realize something I already knew – I have no interest in real estate, but find what Ben shows interesting and entertaining. He provides excellent advice when people ask him questions – it’s just maybe not what they want to hear because it puts the burden on them to learn and own what they’re doing.
You owe it to yourself to become your credible source of experience and information within pretty short time after you just get started. it’s less inclusive than flowery advocation of paint by number listings, but you will be better off in the end. Even if that teaches you that what you want to be good at isn’t woodworking.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
So this one took me quite a while: I realized I don’t remember anything on sharpening in Hasluck books, so wanted a refresher. And apparently none of his books in public domain has anything on sharpening – spend this week digging a library. The Cassel’s “Cabinetmaking and Joinery” refers back to “Woodworking and carpentry”, which, in turn, only lists sharpening equipment, but not sharpening. His other woodworking books don’t have a sharpening chapter either. The only passage I have finally found was in quite a rare book “Working in with hand tools”. There he describes edge geometry very similar to what you’ve mentioned on forums a while ago: low grinding angle, high honing angle, the only difference he doesn’t mention a tertiary bevel (which is explainable). It’s the one that has a picture with vectors and where he suggest imaging we pare lead with a chisel. I was going to ask you about your preferred geometry anyway, so is this the geometry? I think I might have arrived at the same point somewhat independently messing around with regular DF from a box store.
This is kinda amusing, because apparently I’ve glossed over many parts of a book I’ve assumed I read properly. And some false memories, ‘cos what I think I read in that book was actually from another set, the “Practical woodworker”, where Hasluck was one of several editors. And the passage that was glassed over is kinda… profound, pardon me for a lack of a better word. Hasluck explicitly states that a chisel should be ground as often as possible to keep the grinding angle low – something that I do anyway. Not that reinforcement from authority was required, it’s just funny how hard is it to come up with anything remotely original in the craft. And the mind tricks, of course.
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the book that I read the comment about likening poor grinding to saws, and saws poorly set to being several hours behind for the week was a catch all book about hand tools in general. I would have to go find the name.
I’m a terrible reader – so experimenting is necessary both to understand what I’m reading in context and to be able to sift the BS from the gold. The whole multiple angles thing starts with Charlesworth, who would’ve learned it somewhere else and so on and so forth. it’ probably has lineage to holtzapffel or something.
After getting tired of how long that took, I moved on to freehand. Which was described at that point as creating a hollow and honing on it. Pardon if anyone is offended, but if you do a volume of sharpening, that method is amateur fare and doesn’t leave enough control and efficiency in combination to deal with the edge. the result is “two planes meeting” (and a weak apex) and a lot of polishing parts of the edge that don’t need to be polished.
It only seems logical to separate the honing and the grinding enough so that you can freehand a small bevel, and then strop – whether the small bevel is two stones or one after the grind doesn’t matter. One stone means grinding more frequently and something between the fineness of the fine and medium stone in a two stone regimen.
i started rolling the tip on a fine slow stone not long after that to try to get a chisel to last mortising planes. stopping to sharpen all the time to deal with a deflected edge is a waste. Figure at the time, 25 degree bevel and low/mid 30s final angle for hardwoods. Loss for softwoods if needed. it was monstrously faster and the edge is never missed – it’s the only thing touched by the fine stone- the job is completed.
My view at that time was that a decent medium stone and a very slow fine stone is faster sharpening than “a bunch of fast stones” sharpening too much space. It is.
And then the whole buffer accident came about in frustration with an SGPS steel pocket knife, and seemed like a good idea in frustration with a chipping incannel gouge, and that resulted in it working better to grind a little shallower and then if buffing, the second angle doesn’t need to be that steep. The angles in the unicorn article are 20/23/buff. Below 20 degrees for the grind can result in the grind itself getting bunched up and pushed back. no good.
I never saw anyone reference old texts the entire time I bloviated about this. I figured that nobody was ever as lazy as me and I was maybe doing something that doesn’t match dogma, but it sure matches straight razors once you see them under a scope, and it just makes sense.
And once in a while, you can find a really old plane with a very long thin primary bevel. I thought those folks were brothers in laziness. Rather than grind the primary steeper, I used the planes with these enormous long primary bevels and a secondary bevel and they held up.
A couple of years ago when someone was talking about convex bevels being “the way it’s always been done” I figured there would be a mention of flat bevels because if you’re actually using tools, you can see how short the intervals of use are with a convex bevel. you just can’t get the bevel shallow enough off of a slack belt or something to make up for what it does right at the terminus.
Instead, I found that the literature matches what I backed into.
the only caveat i can think of is if you pry, the bevel needs to be steeper on really hard tools, and if you ride the bevel on something, you can buff a little, but having the bevel to ride is important. Having a curved bevel is toxic – it halves the edge life when planing due to clearance running out, and the urge to steepen is something I see too often, and did on my own even when I didn’t tihnk I was steepening.
Hollow grind and honing guide, just not enough time in the day for me. Convex grind, leave it for knives that have…
wait for it….. a thin primary grind.
And finally in the last year, I see the old texts agree, and thanks to piggish stone buying behavior, I can see why they say what they do based on the stones they recommend.
and I’ll I’ve accomplished with all of the steps is learning something independently over a decade that one could learn in 10 minutes!
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I’m a terrible reader too: if the subject is at least somewhat familiar I might skip entire paragraphs because “I know it already”. But in fact often I don’t, this Hasluck method is a great example. I think I went through every old text that’s available online, so it seems I’ve messed up a bunch of subjects because the feeling was all these texts say the same, but apparently they don’t. Well, a good reason to go over them again – I just like reading and I like their illustrations. It’s a shame most of those books aren’t recovered and republished.
The Seller’s crowd would probably counter what you say with their regular mantra: “we are not grinding bevels convex, we grind away the toe”. Truth is a convex bevel exactly what they do. And it’s not like Sellers is totally fake or bonkers, he said and did many good things for the revival of interest, it’s just he is often almost a stereotypical Brit, extremely snobbish sometimes. I guess like most of us go through Krenov phase, many also had a “Sellers phase”. I, for one, had. It was nice to switch from a very prescriptive way of sharpening to something more relaxed and casual. But then I’ve noticed that even though I can get a sharp edge sooner, I have to take a long distraction from work and fix bevel issues more often, esp. on plane irons. Paul preaches eschewing a grinder, that doesn’t help either, besides I see no point: raising a fat wire edge like he does shortens a blade lifetime way more than grinding just up to a very tip. The issues became apparent once I’ve switched to oilstones, it made me realize grinding is good. And then Unicorn made the whole thing super predictable and brought the time down to approx. 3 mins per chisel, which used to be 20. I don’t really think it was ever “the way it was always done”, because if a worker at a piece work had to sharpen every hour or so – that would raise quite a few brows. And probably neither they were mortising with bench chisels, it’s just slow. I mean, there’s a number of things Paul says that just don’t make sense.
The low grinding angle\high honing angle came to me while trying to figure why the hell I can’t do anything to 2x DF or similar woods. Yeah, it’s nasty, nobody should be working it, but chopping cleanly across the grain should be possible, right? I absolutely couldn’t, but one day a random idea popped up. Something like “a low angle edge get destroyed by late wood, a steep edge squashes early wood” and it dawned on me: I was assuming these are soft (as in “low density”) woods, but they aren’t. Figuring how to combine seemingly contradicting conditions wasn’t even required, I immediately recalled what you wrote about your preferred geometry and shortly I was able to chop quite decent mortises in DF or pare end grain with minimal tear. I’m going to play around with what Hasluck wrote.
I still use a guide every once in a while. Sometimes when I can’t grind on a power grinder, I go with a 80 grit belt and a guide, or when I screw a narrow chisel bevel – it’s just hard to maintain a correct contact spot with them. I could imagine using it a guide for skew carving tools, modern plough irons or something like that. Otherwise setting up a guide is just a chore. I could never get same setting twice with a guide, my bevels used to have 4 or 5 angles. Also my guide couldn’t hold heavy and thick chisels I had then, so I went freehand. Learning that took me a few years, not really a decade (‘cos I didn’t really experiment, just decided whose advice to follow), but even a decade wouldn’t be too long. I routinely meet people claiming they’re in this hobby for tree or four decades and they can’t sharpen, like, at all. And I think to finally comprehend what’s written in those books is another win too.
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there are two parts in the hasluck book on google books. First, the discussion mentions grinding often to avoid resistance being defined by the secondary bevel vs. the first in terms of wedging.
Second, though, if you stopped reading there, is a long discussion after figure 138.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Working_with_Hand_Tools/HyyCDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=hasluck+working+with+hand+tools&printsec=frontcover
it’s wonderful. You could almost say that hasluck or whoever was advising him was so pissed off about wasted energy with poor sharpening and the bad habit of convexing a bevel that he went on a page and a half diatribe about it.
I don’t run into too many pros who keep their tools in shape like i do. Warren brought a chisel last he was here and he does a lot of professional carving work and turning by hand. I would’ve been surprised if he did a poor job, and he didn’t. His tools had a bias down at the tip but were mostly a single bevel, but he is very diligent.
I have not actually ever seen anything from anyone else here that has been sharpened perfectly (which is definitely less effort than not doing so, all the way around), but I have seen a whole lot of plane irons sharp and out of clearance.
Which leads to what you mention about sellers – his method may technically work. I doubt he actually does that much work with it, so demonstrating sharpening all the time and faffing around may keep tools in shape. In practical use, it’s the shits, and he probably knows it, but I doubt he cares. There’s something in-credible about him, if you catch my drift. Like he slowly took on hand tool use later in life and didn’t have any period where he used them significantly. Almost nobody has. It’s become clear to me that most of the angry self-appointed pros on the forums (many of them hiding a white collar day job) who pretend to have some kind of appreciation for high end work don’t actually ever do it, as I’ve sent a few tools to some of them and they remark how sharp the tools are.
And I don’t really tart up the edges, they get cowboy edges off of the grinder with a finish buff.
there is no way people who think those edges are unusually sharp are doing much with hand tools. I think that’s a shame just because that level of sharpness on the routine (I timed myself with a new 80crV2 iron refresh yesterday – one minute 20 including taking the cap iron off and setting it.).
it would’ve been daily fare to do that, sans perhaps the ability to grind quite as fast due to the equipment.
You mention the geometric benefit dealing with DF. it’s fine for people to say nobody should ever work with it, but sooner or later, all of us will have a painted project or something that we don’t just want to screw together. Dry SYP is my version of the same. it is an edge destroyer and crappy sharpening is a nonstarter with it. Like DF, when it’s still a bit damp, no problem.
My obvious motivation in looking at these various things while making tools at the same time is to get rid of the idea that hand tool only work is torturous or something. when we see someone with experience doing it (e.g., george wilson making a harpsichord and just kind of subtly working well and sizing wood with drawknives, etc), it means it’s possible.
I’m not the guy to reach people, I guess- nobody really is if they are going to be stern enough to not let people argue along the way when they don’t know enough to argue.
Well, that and the toolmaking – I’ve planed well over 1000 bf of wood, but for the last year and a half, it’s infrequent between toolmaking. i can see why good hand workers get sucked into making tools.
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