Now for the business end of the plane. The iron is the sharp bit that does all the cutting. The base keeps everything nice and flat, the frog supports the iron. A chip breaker sits on top of the iron to... well... break the chips and keep them from getting in the way of the cutting surface. A good plane must have an extremely sharp iron. This method of sharpening is called Scary Sharp. It's very well documented on the interwebs, so if you want more details, just use altavista or your favorite search engine to find it. But the basic is this:
1. Keep the blade at a very specific angle
2. Bond sandpaper to a very flat surface (in my case, the granite tile)
3. Sand the angle until the surface is uniform
4. Sand the back side of the iron until it's flat
5. Start at 80 grit, work your way up until you can't get finer paper. In today's post we go to 1500 (plan to do up to 4000).
Lets get started! (okay in reality, I started this quite a while ago....)
Side note: it's really difficult to get good pictures of the surface using a 13 year old camera, inside, at night... so just pretend that you can tell that things are happening.
First, put the iron in your sharpening tool. There's a wheel on the bottom for it to roll on. You set the angle by adjusting the position in the clamp. I just matched the angle that it already had. I don't really know what angle it is. Roll it back and forth over the paper until it feels like the paper has gone dull. Then flip it over and knock off the burr that forms and sand the surface flat. I should have done a better job of sanding the back flat, but it will get the job done. You'll see later that it isn't perfectly flat.
This is where I left it a while ago and started to finish it up tonight. I think this was maybe 320 grit.
400 grit
Sanding the back flat.
This is after 1500 grit. This is the back of the iron. You will notice a couple things here. First, I didn't flaten it well enough. The outer sides of the blade seem to be a bit thinner than the rest and I didn't pay enough attention at the course grit and didn't really get the outer edges totally flat. But that shouldn't hurt the performance too bad. Next you'll see that there is kind of a s-curvy line at about the center of the picture. I'm guessing that they only hardened this portion of the iron, I've seen marks like that when I harden my knife blades.
Shiny enough to get the reflection of my hands while taking pictures.
It's really hard to tell, but it's very polished at this point and it's easy to see reflections in it.
Sharp enough to shave with at this point. (sorry for the potato picture, maybe someday I'll get a new camera.... maybe.)
Next time, I'll polish a few more steps and we'll be good to go. I think it's time to start working on the wood bits. Last weekend was Jackson's baptism so we had lots of family over and had a really great time. Laura's dad told me several more great stories about Leland, I'll have to get them written down for next time.
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