Wood Turning Tools Need Sharpening Regularly
Sharpening Jig for woodturning tools
| For the beginning wood turner and unfortunately for many long time users of a wood turning lathe, sharpening is a mystery. Sharp tools make for great shavings, better surfaces off the tool, less sanding, and more fun. Turning wood with a dull tool is hard work and leaves a lot of work with lots and lots of sanding. |
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| First of all, what is sharpening not for the turner? It is not all those honing stones and sandpaper setups that the wood carvers and other wood workers use. A well tuned hand plane needs a finely honed blade to bring up a good shaving. Many of us are going to sharpen our planes and stones with a 1000 grit water stone or better and then guard the edge. |
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That super fine edge simply will not last for us on thewood lathe. There are some who hone and strop a wood turning tool and claim that it out turns and out lasts a ground edge. Leave that argument to the blog. For now I am going to consider setting the grinder up as our lathe sharpener. Consider that you may be planing for a half hour. A good stroke for a hand plane is 18" and a steady pace is 1 second per stroke. So a plane blade covers 1/2 mile in 30 minutes; (1.5'x 60 strokes per min x 60 min per hour x 1/2 hr / 5280') |
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while a wood turning tool addressing a 6" diameter log covers 10 1/4 miles in the same time if turning at 1200 rpm. (.5' x π x 1200rpm x 1/2 hr / 5280') |
 See Video Here |
| Plus we tend to be turning logs that still have the bark on them and a felled log is likely to have grit, stones and other edge dulling debris in it. A quickly dulled edge needs to be quickly sharpened and back to the lathe. |
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| My tool of choice for this task of sharpening wood turning tools is the typical mass market grinder set up simply for the turner. |
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© 2006 copyright Darrell Feltmate, Around the Woods, Wood Turning Techniques