I finally sharpened my mortising chisel, I had been waiting for a package from the Japan Woodworker (in retrospect I shouldn't have expected fast delivery from a company on the other side of the country). I bought a
DMT 335 8" x 3" diamond stone, and a
honing guide. I know that the honing guide might be controversial, but for sharpening, there are two options: buy a honing guide, or use a grinder for a hollow grind. I have a grinder. It is noisy. It is messy. Now I have a honing guide.
The diamond stone, I don't think is so controversial, it works great, and is very reasonably priced. I use it for truing up waterstones, and for grinding a primary bevel. Here is a group photo of my sharpening arsenal:
The water bottle is very important, it speeds up sharpening by a lot. I play trombone, so I have this bottle floating around. Someday I'll upgrade my bevel gauges, something better than balsa wood would be nice. I also made a jig for repeatable settings on the honing guide, I post that in a later post.
This all brings me to the project at hand; the mortising chisel. I first lapped the back, then worked on the bevel. The bevel was tricky, it was chipped, and had a curved bevel, the opposite of a hollow grind. using stones would be too slow, so I switched to my grinder. I ground the bevel until there was about a 1/16 flat area at the tip, since I have a 4" wheel I didn't want to make too weak of an edge.
At this point, I discovered that I have a laid-steel blade, which is a blade that consists of two steels. The harder one is at the bottom, and the softer one is at the top. This is not common in modern western-style tools, but this technique is still used in many Japanese edge tools. The rest of the bevel was then ground at 35 degrees.
I've been working on my workbench, I have all the legs made! Each leg is laminated from 3 pieces, except for the last one which is only two pieces. That one will be in the back right corner. After the glue was dry, I leveled each leg out , and jointed it. The front stretchers will have to wait to made once the top is done, they are too long to work on my bench.
I also purchased a router plane. It is a Stanley #71 1/2, less fancy than the 71, but whatever. It has a beautiful patina, the nickel plating is gone, and underneath there is a bronze-colored plating. It only came with one blade the 1/4", so I will have to buy some new ones. I know that Lee Valley sells them. The other bad thing is that the cutter adjustment wheel is made poorly, the tapped hole is off-center, causing the wheel to bind up when turned. To fix this, I filed the cutter's slot, making it bigger. This causes more backlash, but at least it works smoothly.
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