How to Sharpen a Plane Blade

Video Transcript

"Hand Planes, wonderful tools to use. The trick is to keep the blade sharp. I'm Robert Markey and we're going to talk about how to sharpen a plane blade and this is a block plane so the blade is going to be sharpened straight across. Some planes you want to make it curve but we are going to go with the straight across one. I'm going to use three different grits of sharpening stone and they are all oil stone so just a touch and almost any kind of oil WD-40 or a heavy oil is not a problem and start on the coarser stone and you want to basically feel the angle of the blade on the stone and that is where you are going to be sharpening. When you feel a little bit of a burr here rub it to take the burr off. You are going to move up to the next and this is a medium Arkansas stone, much much smoother. You can also hear if you do this a while you hear a certain sound that tell you you are at the right angle. Again when you feel the burr you take it off. You come back to this hard Arkansas, beautiful, beautiful stone and you can kind of feel and hear that you are just at that right angle, ever so slight burr and you are going to keep this absolutely flat when you take the burr off and you just run it once right on a piece of wood and test it on your fingernail and if it jabs into your fingernail you are good. I'm Robert Markey and we have been talking about sharpening a plane blade."