How to Sharpen a Chisel

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Nigel Gregory with Blue Griffin Handyman. Today we're going to show you how to sharpen a chisel. Now be careful with these chisels. Even though the blade is dull, they still can cut you. Now what you need is a honing stone and the right kind of oil. It's a sharpening stone oil. You can get both of these at the hardware store. A local hardware store would usually carry them. Another nifty tool to use is one of these knife sharpeners. It's also very handy at getting these blades sharp. Now the first thing you want to do is, you want to go, if it's really rough and really bad shape you may want to consider using a grinder. But I would start with, depending on how bad the blade is, I would start with the rougher side of the stone. And what you do is apply a little bit of the oil and you place the block on the table, and there's an angle to the blade. There's a flat side and then there's an angled side. And so what you want to do is you want to take the chisel and place the flat side, the angle side rather on the stone and go in one direction. You never want to go towards the blade, but you always want to go away from the edge of the blade. And just slowly bring it so that is just shaves off just a little bit of that metal. Then once you get it kind of close to being sharp you want to turn the stone over, add some more oil and do the same motion again until it gets a fairly good edge on it. Just back and forth, never going like this, but just one direction away from the edge of the blade. Another thing you can do like I said with this tool here, is you can sharpen it by moving it at a 45-degree angle on the edge of the blade. And that, too, will give you a nice sharp edge. And that's how to sharpen a chisel."