Last year I invested in all the ingredients to sharpen with the sandpaper method (a piece of plate glass, honing guide, and lots of sandpaper from 600 to 2000 grit). After using this method for a year, I've concluded that I go through way too much sandpaper to make it economical. It seems to me that the automotive sandpaper I use becomes useless after just a few passes over one spot, and I go through a ton of it as a result. My question is, do others using this method find this to be the case, or am I expecting too much from the sandpaper. Secondly, what type of stones should I invest in instead of sandpaper. I'm leading towards Japanese water stones, and what combination of grits would suffice?
If you want to go by what is commonly pushed on this group, expect to spend a lot of money on waterstones and waste a lot of time sharpening (and maintaining the sharpening equipment) instead of woodworking. If you want to save a bunch of money and time getting a great edge, send me an email. I don't feel like getting into a religious argument and sharpening is a religious subject with many.
You didn't mention what you are sharpening, but for chisels I use a water stone. I re-flatten the water stone with wet-dry sandpaper on a granite surface plate. I was thinking of trying this from Lee Valley, but haven't invested in one yet:
Then you can use the waterstones to sharpen, the flattening stone to flatten the water stone and sandpaper to flatten the flattening stone. Next, you need a sandpaper manufacturing kit.
Every once in a while I pop in a Tage Frid video and watch him use an upside down belt sander, probably with an 80 grit belt in it, to sharpen his chisel. A few seconds of flying sparks and that Put You Teeth On Edge noise and he's back to chiseling dovetails - or whatever.
Getting the Lapped Flat back of the chisel or iron is the PITA part - which only needs to be done once. WHY DON'T THEY DO THAT AT THE FACTORY!? They've got the machines, why not use them and save us a bunch of grief? I'm more than willing to pay a few extra bucks for a chisel with a dead flat polished back. Hell another $10 for a lapped flat iron back is worth it.
RE: japanese waterstones - they get the job done quicker than most other methods. BUT - they're messy and you need a flattening stone or ceramic flattening "stone" to keep them flat since they wear pretty quickly - by intent - it's the slurry that does the work. And if you're starting out with a dinged chisel or iron you need four of five stones 200, 400, 800 1000, 4000 and if you're anal about shiny - maybe an 8000. And with the 4K and 8K, you've got to be careful you don't put a gouge in them because their pretty soft. Catch a corner or raise the work a little too high and you'll spend 5 minutes reflattening the stone, a minute or two cleaning up the flattening "stone" and forget where the hell you were BEFORE the OOPS!.
And if you do any turning or carving, SCARY SHARP (tm), waterstones etc. are almost useless for curved edges. Turning tools see more wear in a minute than most chisels and plane irons see in a month.
That's where grinders come into play. But even then it's not One Does It All. The high and even "low" speed grinders will remove dings and restore a bevel -but a) can burn the steel and b) leave lots of scratches. The VERY low speed wet grinders (Tormek and now JET) will touch up a bevel and burnish it - but are slow as hell - and need jigs. Then there's the JoolTool which isn't like anything else in the sharpening realm. You can grind a new profile quickly without fear of burning an edge - and you can polish the hell out of the bevel and get an amazing edge -IF you have good eye/hand coordination - because YOU are the jig.
Because it's small I've got mine mounted on a little shelf on the left side of my little lathe bench, all it's Ninja Wheels for the various grits on a pegs on the wall behind it. A quick touch up with a 10 micron followed by a 5 micron and it's back to the wood. BUT I wouldn't use it on an iron or even a wide bench chisel.
Sure wish they'd shown Norm sharpening things BEFORE I got into woodworking. NAH - I'd still have gotten onto this slippery slope. The ride is just too much fun!
I've got to say that I pretty much agree with Stoutman. I have a granite sink cutout that I use with sandpaper... but only for sharprning jointer & planer blades, and also to do serious lapping (the sole of a plane, or initial flattening on a new chisel)
I use a combo waterstone (1200/4000, IIRC) to freehand sharpen chisels and such. With free hand sharpening, I eventually end up with a convex bevel. To fix that I will go back to the bench grinder to take the crown of the bevel. I could do that job with sandpaper, but it would take longer. I only feel the need to do that after a dozen sharpenings.
I have probably flattened my waterstone 3 times in18 years of light use. Set a full sheet of sandpaper on a flat surface (like your table saw top). Rub the stone on that.
Maybe you are expecting too much, or cutting too much metal...
I grind my blades on the grinder--once--to get shape and bevel angle about right. Of course disasters have to be ground out, but those only happen to the other guy, right???
I use 3M gold sandpaper for low number grits, and automotive silicon carbide for 600+ grits.
I polish the primary bevel from 150 to 320 grit, then work on the secondary bevel from 320 to 2000.
Usually about 10-20 passes over each grit.
At the end I reliably get a razor (as in hair off the back of my hand) edge.
I use a file card brush on the paper each time to remove swarf. (Magnet in a plastic bag works great too).
Low grits will probably do 6 plane irons, and a dozen chisels. (That's about 2 months worth for me, when the weather is warm.) High grits about double that amount--after all, I'm just honing, not cutting an edge.
I use 1/3 sheet strips for my sharpening. I don't find my sandpaper costs daunting.
It is silicon carbide (the same stuff wheel dressing sticks are made from) so it should stay flat for a pretty long time. It is much harder than the waterstones. Should cut very quickly. If I were you though, the first thing I would do when I got it is to check it for flat. No telling what care they took when making it.
Have we all been so infected with the "new and improved" ethos that "tried and true" is little better than a leper?
This group has got any number of folks who get excited by the prospect of aquiring an 80 year old handplane, and do all their work with hand tools- but when it comes to caring for those tools, those same people who made those coveted old hand tools must have been dead wrong when it came time to put an edge on them. Why?
Guaranteed, you go into an antique shop and look at the old furniture, the tools that made them were sharpened on oil stones. They didn't make a six month journey to Japan to purchase a gazillion-grit water stone every couple of years, and nobody was using special automotive sandpaper before the invention of the automobile.
If you can't sharpen your tools on a quarried stone, you don't know how to sharpen yet. Put your wallet back in your pocket, and spend a few hours learning to do it. All the fancy jigs and grits in the world will not compensate for such a basic skill. I'd bet a fair amount of money that a guy that can't sharpen a chisel without assistance can't really use it effectively, either- you don't use a jig for that, too- do you? If you're just into making them shiny and shaving your arm, you can do that the old way, too- only you can do it any time, not just when your jig and 50pc set of waterstones or assortment of microfine sandpapers is at hand.
Philosophically I tend to agree with you... comes from my having worked at Colonial Williamsburg, VA. It took my kids meeting Roy Underhill and hanging around with him for a few hours for them to gain an appreciation for handtools and old methodologies.
Where we may diverge a bit is on the old tools. Simply from an opportunity cost perspective I'd rather spend money on L-N tools than spend countless hours reviving old tools. I've revived some old tools in the past (planes mostly) but spent so much time looking for or repairing parts and "tuning" the tools up that it made no economic sense, e.g., spend 3-5 hours repairing/tuning up an old Stanley No 4 and how much is it worth when you're done? When I take into account the time it took to tune my Stanley block plans I'd have been way ahead of the game to buy some L-N block planes. The Stanley 45 I have was found in the basement of the house I bought and it was basically new--factory grind on all the cutters. That plane has been worth the effort to sharpen cutters as needed but ONLY as needed.
BTW, I've used Arkansas stones for over 30 years and don't plan on switching to something else in my life time... they work. I tried several different honing guides over the years and found that I can do a fine job by hand using feel to guide the angle. If you put a bunch of Starrett measuring tools to them I'm sure you could find things to criticize but the bottom line is the tools cut as they were designed to...
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