I must be an animal - I use the heel of my hand to wipe the wire edge off. Possibly because I'm a horny handed son of toil...
BTW don't try this if you have soft pink hands - it really is risking injury
No, a leather strop is used to remove the wire edge and burnish the surfaces - and in the wrong hands a leather strop will just end up rounding over the edge - which is why you shouldn't let an apprentice joiner near a strop until he can produce a sharp edge on abrasives.
^woody^ said:
Water for lubricant.
Or just a standard oil stone.
If you use water you need to dry everything off before putting it away or next time you get it out it'll be covered in rust, as will your hands. Not so with oil or paraffin. If you are working oak and need the stones out all day (because you are constantly touching up chisels) with water you run the risk of transferring water to the workpiece and water + steel filings (off the irons or chisels) + oak (or walnut or mahogany, all of which contain tannin) can result in black marks. Never worked with a joiner yet who was keen on using water - it was always either light oil or paraffin.
Oil stones are another issue - they are rather prone to going hollow, especially the cheap ones, they can clog easily (solution - flood with oil constantly), and you always had to make-up a wooden box to protect them from being broken. They also aren't the finest of things and don't cut that quickly. I doubt that any joiner who has moved to decent steel and diamond honing plates would
ever go back to using oil stones. We used oil stones because there was no alternative at the time
^woody^ said:
I can't image that the quality work produced by past carpenters relied on a "scary sharp" system ie what happened before YouTube?
Well, speaking as someone who trained as a joiner (not a bricky or another trade) in in the "olden days" (i.e pre-1980s, so more than 20 years before YouTube) I can tell you there
were additional stones that a quality man would also own and use after his Norton combination, namely either a Washita stone or a white Arkansas stone, and then for a really fine edge some guys used a black Arkansas stone. Stropping was more what carvers did because you always risks dubbing over the edge, so you never let an apprentice near a strop when they were starting out, although there was a fad for a while of having a leather strop glued onto a piece of wood which was loaded with valve grinding paste to give you a nice shiny chisel (although it didn't seem to cut any better). There also were other stones that were used, like slate stones (I still have one somewhere), Turkey stones and Charnley (?) stones most of which have disappeared leaving a few firms selling an ever dimisnishing supply of Arkansas stones which are increasingly expensive and rare, the province of the knife afficianados from what I've seen. TBH Arkansas stones could be inconsistent and were easily clogged.
During the 1980s there was a shift to using Japanese water stones in some circles (often well healed amateurs and posh boutique furniture makers from what I can remember) whilst the rest of us discovered modern man-made abrasive sheets and super flat hard surfaces, like float glass, which became cheaper and cheaper as time went on. The difference is we didn't call it "scary sharp".
Starting about 25 years ago we had diamond honing plates with diamonds embedded in a coating of nickel on flat steel plates and they have just got cheaper and cheaper - but at £40 for a decent pair of double-sided ones they are a bit "spendy" when you start out
There is also a considerable difference between how sharp a chisel needs to be for mainly softwood site work (or how blunt you can get away with?) and how sharp a chisel needs to be for working in a shop. There is equally a difference in the sorts of chisels you need - for site work I know I'm not alone in prefering a slightly softer steel which is less likely to chip and which will hone out faster than the harder steel chisels which holds a better edge that I use when doing bench work (where they will never be abused as they would be on site)
So somewhere along the line you've missed 40 odd years of developments out...
