How to Sharpen a Woodworking Chisel

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Tim Gipson and I'm going to talk to you about how to sharpen a woodworking chisel. Now for this you're going to need either some flat files, a good flat file or a grinder. Now the grinder is going to be the preferred method. You will have to be very careful about using it, making sure that you keep even pressure and don't use too much or try to take off too much at one time so it takes a little more skill to use a grinder but it is a much faster way to sharpen your chisels. Now the whole idea of your woodworking chisel is that you want this edge to be nice and smooth, not have any nicks in it and you want it to be sharp and it needs to be square with the side and the whole purpose of that is that so when we are chiseling wood we can take thin slivers of wood such as mortising for a hinge or something like that. Now the first way we could do it and these chisels typically have about a 25 degree angle on the bevel so if all you have a is a flat file what we want to do is we want to secure the file in a good vice, clamp down on the face and make sure that it is nice and secure and then we want to take the file, we want to set the file with the bevel and then we want to make nice even strokes across the face. O'kay typically all we want to do is we want to file this bevel. If you end up filing this bottom side then you can actually end up with a face that isn't true to the rest and again the whole idea is to get a nice sharp edge where you can take thin slivers of wood off so we always just want to work on this bevel. So it takes a lot of patience when you are doing it by hand but you want to make nice steady even strokes and just let your file. So as you can see as we just make nice small strokes we'll start getting that so the second way to do this would be and the easier way and the faster way is using a grinder and what we want to do is we have a support here, a support foot and we want to make sure that this is set so that it is right at about that 25 degree angle so that when you are holding it on the support foot the face of the grinder wheel should match this bevel. Now these are narrow ones so you have got to be careful that you don't put uneven pressure and put any ruts on this. Go ahead and turn it on. Also whenever using a grinder you want to make sure that you have your safety glasses in place. So you want to hold firm pressure on this and you just want to work across the wheel and you want to make nice even passes so that you get a nice even finish across this and you want to be careful bout either putting too much pressure or twisting the chisel because then you can actually get a wave in the face of this and with just a little bit of patience and a steady hand you can put a nice finish back on this chisel. So I'm Tim Gipson and that's how to sharpen a woodworking chisel."