Looking Out: There is always something new to learn

“Can you teach me how to properly sharpen my tools?” I ask my friend Snowman.

“Sure,” he says.

Snowman is a professional who works with hand tools to create and restore wooden treasures.

We set a day. He arrives at my shop armed with a bag full of sharpening stones, strops, honing compounds, and what-not.

I’ve been sharpening stuff since I was a boy. I remember sharpening a big sheath knife when I was 14. What I knew about sharpening a big knife wouldn’t have made a damp spot in the bottom of a thimble.

I did learn from that episode that slicing a thumb while sharpening is a very bad idea. At least the blade was sharp enough to cut skin.

Since then, I’ve sharpened all manner of dull tools. My problem is that after I sharpen tools, they are duller than when I started.

Snowman is a great teacher. He starts by drawing profiles of blade edges on a piece of paper. Unlike drawings that I make, his actually look like what it is he is drawing. Were I to draw a diagram of the profile of a woodworking tool it would end up looking like a smiley face drawn with a crayon on the side of a wriggling Horned Toad.

“What do you want to sharpen first?” asks Snowman.

I pull out my favorite wood chisel. I’ve sharpened it dozens of times.

“This looks like a diagram of a smiley face drawn with a crayon on the side of a wriggling Horned Toad,” Snowman thinks but is too polite to say aloud.

“We’re going to use a grinding wheel to start with,” he says. “Once we get it shaped properly, you won’t have grind it again.”

We set up my electric grinder, which I inherited from my father. My grinder and I are the same age.

Snowman shows me how to correct the shape of the chisel. How to hold it, how to stand, how to move it back and forth across the spinning wheel, how to whistle a happy tune to keep the rhythm. Lots of sparks fly, and he explains the physics and chemistry of the steel so I can read the story the sparks are telling. Every few seconds he has me dip the tip of the chisel into a bowl of water to cool it so it won’t lose its temper.

“You shouldn’t lose your temper either,” he says calmly, sensing the limits of my patience.

After the chisel has finally regained its proper shape, we switch to hand-honing the edge, using a series of water-soaked stones. We follow up with a leather strop impregnated with honing compound.

“The leather strop is the secret sauce of a perfect blade,” he says, showing me how to drag the edge over the rouge-reddened leather.

My chisel is now sharper than it was the day I bought it.

We switch to a large plane blade, which I learn from Snowman requires slightly different techniques than the chisel.  He even lugs his own grinder from his truck into my shop. It is special, with a much wider, softer wheel that spins in its own water bath as it reshapes my oft-sharpened blade so its profile no longer looks like a crayon drawing of a smiley face on the side of a Horned Toad.

Minutes later, Snowman lays a piece of wood on my bench and slices a paper-thin shaving with my now keen plane.

There is always something new to learn. We run out of time before he can teach me how to sharpen my kitchen knives which are barely sharp enough to slice my thumb.

Next lesson, please and thanks.

— Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Looking Out: There is always something new to learn