Sharpening ,Repairing Tool Edge with a Worksharp 3000 and Alec Lacasse

Hey guys, Doug here again, and we're on the road today. We're with buddy Alec LaCasse. If you don't know Alec, Alec is a fellow woodcarver, only much better than me, and also my partner in crime on the Coffee and Carving Show. So we just got together today to kind of reboot for the fall the Coffee and Carving Show, which if you're not familiar with it, is a podcast with its own YouTube channel. So link in the description if you're interested. Check it out, and Alec is also the owner of the Fundamentals of Woodcarving online school. Now again, you see some of the work behind me here. It's ridiculously good, and if you have any interest in that kind of thing, Fundamentals of Woodcarving, yeah, it's just AlecLaCasse.com. Last name is L-A-C-A-S-S-E. First name Alec, A-L-E-C. You have online classes, and check it out too, and if you use a code word with LINKER, capital L-I-N-K-E-R, and you'll get a discount for the school. But that's not what we're here about today. Today I thought, people always question my sharpening methods with the stropping and the power stropping and whatnot, so I thought while I'm here, I wanted to get old Alec here to show us how he keeps his tools sharp, and just to get a different take on it, because you get 10 different carvers, there's going to be 10 different ways to sharpen, so I just wanted to capture his technique, and yeah, I'll let you walk us through what, maybe a v-tool, a gouge, yeah, just some hand tools. All right, let's do it. All right, so important thing to remember when you're sharpening your tools, you want to start with an aggressive sandpaper and work to a finer one. In this particular instance, I'm using a WorkSharp 3000, which is a very simple situation, whereby you take this glass disc and you mount sticky sandpaper to it. The 3000 comes with several different grits of sandpaper, and they graduate in fineness, so the really aggressive one, which I have on my machine now, will cut rapidly. So you start with that. If you've got a damaged tool, if you have a tool that has a really bad edge and it needs to be reworked or reshaped, that's a whole other story though, as far as like reshaping. We might get into that a bit, but mostly just talking about going through the kind of basic process of maintaining a knife. This one's got some kind of small chips in it, so I'll show you how to redress the edge, starting with a 80 grit wheel. I'll move down to a 220, subsequently a 300, and then I think something like a 600, and then I'll finish with a leather strap, which is, again, mounted to the glass wheel to keep it from, to keep the tool from overheating. The glass absorbs heat and so prevents you from ruining the temper. So we're talking about fixing a damaged v-tool. Right. Yeah. What'd you do with that? Drop it on the ground? Cement. Cement and gravy, that's rough. Yeah, it's bad. Really bad. Yeah, so we'll fix it. All right, let's fix it. Got my 80 grit sander, sanding paper on here. I'm going to start by doing something that's very counterintuitive. First of all, you can see that this tool is back bent, so it's actually got the angle going the wrong way. We want it to have a bit of a toe or to be flat, so I'm going to grind it flat first by going straight perpendicular, straight down into the wheel. This just works again. I know, it does. And you always want to have a glass of water nearby when you're reshaping or removing a lot of material. So Doug, you got that? Perfect. Yep, so dip that in there. Set that over here. But if you see, if it turns black, you're just taking the temper out. Right, so. Taking the temper out. Yeah, exactly. So you don't want to see black. You don't want to take the temper out of this tool. Correct. I'm doing your tool. But again, it does help to have the work sharp. I picked mine up used on Marketplace online for, I think it was $100. So yeah, it's not unattainable. I think the unit's new is $200 or somewhere thereabouts. All right, so I'm going to take the tool. Important thing to remember here is if you are doing hardwood carving, like say walnut or oak or something just mostly like hard, then you're going to want to use a more aggressive angle, like a greater angle. If you're carving in mostly softer woods like basswood or cedar or cottonwood bark, you're going to want to use much less of an aggressive angle. So you're going to see instead of hiking it up, I'm going to go pretty flat. And so that bevel is going to be longer. If you want to get technical, which I never measure, it's somewhere in the realm of like 15 degrees, somewhere in like the probably like the 15 to 16 or 18 degree range, I guess, approximately. Maybe even less. So with the V tool, it's important to think of it as two separate, actually really three separate tools, or really a flat connected by a veiner. So you got your tool one, tool two, and then your veiner. And so I try to treat them as one tool, but conscious of the fact that they each need their own separate even time. So I'll start on one side and in one fluid motion, I'll flip to the other. So I'll count in my head. One, two, three. One, two, three. And I am rolling the tool over on the wheel, making contact as I roll over. Otherwise you'll get an uneven grind. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. And I'm looking at the bevel as I'm doing this to make sure that I'm getting the right angle. I don't want to see any reflection that varies from just that one major reflection, that long blade, long bevel. This is the bevel that you're looking for. You don't want to see multiple angles there. If you do see multiple angles, you're probably hiking your tool or you're lowering it too much. So you want to keep it as consistent as possible. And dip in that water often. Yeah, it's really nice if you're struggling to see what you're cutting. In this case, I can see there's a couple of bevels there. I don't want that, so I want to try to unify them if I can. So I just need to be a little bit more stable and go quicker to try and spend an even amount of time. Find that rhythm and spend an even amount of time on all sides. And do evaluate. You want to look at the edge and see where it needs to be grinded. In this case, the top of the V and both sides of the V needs to be ground more, so I'm going to take a little more off that. So I'll apply a little bit more pressure on the edges than the front of this V here. I guess you could call that the top of the V. Pull it down. I'm trying to really emphasize the areas of thickness here. The areas where you can see light reflecting off of the tip. So you want to look at the cross section, the tool straight on, and look at how light reflects off of the edge. That's going to tell you where material needs to be removed. Now the hardest part of sharpening V tools is getting the sides proportional to one another or symmetrical, and believe me, I struggle with it to this day after doing it for whatever, 15 or 16 years. So I'm not concerned with them being exactly alike. It's okay if they're close, they're maybe cousins instead of brothers or twins, just so long as they're both very sharp. I haven't found that a tool that's slightly out of symmetry is all that much of a problem personally, so just do your best. Okay, it's doing a little black, so I want to keep that in the water. Yeah, so yeah, it's starting to get thinner. You can see that the bevel is flattening out. There's not as much reflection there. It's nice to have a towel near you as well. You can wipe the inside of the blade off. I have one right here. Yeah, sure. All right, it seems like the left side needs to be thinned down a little bit more. Really close, really close. You're trying to keep a consistent position. I don't want the tool to ride up or try to keep my wrist stiff as possible. My arm is not moving a lot, and I'm actually using my non-dominant hand as a sort of guide, right? So I'm using that to keep pressure on the blade. One of the things I'm also looking for here is the feel of the flat. You can sort of feel when you lift up on the blade when the bevel is parallel to the surface, and so I'm looking for that feeling as well, and that takes time. It takes experience and time to get familiar with your bevel edge and how it feels. Looking at that edge really close. I might take a bit more off of the inside of this left wing. All right, looking much better. Most of that material is shaved down. We've gotten the bulk away. I might touch up just a little bit more on the left side. I don't want to go too far with this really aggressive wheel. I'll move to the finer wheel to make the final touches. All right, so here we have a fishtail gouge. This just means that it starts narrow and widens to the edge. This looks like a number five, maybe, I don't know, 10 mil, eight millimeters. Yeah, show it off. It could use some help too. It's got a rounded... Yeah, and I'm not so concerned about the toe nailing. You've got the rounded edges. What I'm most concerned about is the bevel. It's a little, like I said, a little round. It needs to be flattened out a little bit. When you polish a tool and you hike up the bevel too much, you create this rounded bevel. That's a problem. I'm going to flatten that bevel out using a very similar motion that I used on the V-tool, except for now I'm thinking about curve. I want to start at the edge. We're sticking with... Sorry, yeah, that is the 120. We're sticking with the 180. We haven't moved on, so the V-tool, we're doing this in order. Correct. Yeah, thanks for clarifying. Yeah, so we're still on our aggressive sandpaper. I'm going to start on the side, the corner. When I'm sharpening gouges, I like to come perpendicular to the wheel instead of with the wheel, the movement of the wheel, that is. If it's turning this way, I want my tool to be going perpendicular, not against the turn of the wheel, but just perpendicular to the turn of the wheel. I'm going to roll. I'm using my wrist as I'm keeping it nice and consistent. I'll start at the side and roll. You can see that that just took a bit off of the center of that bevel. Again, it's important if you're going to be doing this to be checking your angle, make sure that you're not hiking it up too much, that you're matching the correct angle, and you're also getting it in water to keep it from burning up, getting black. If Doug would stop moving my camera. A consistent turn. I'm trying to spend an equal amount of time on the whole of the bevel while turning my wrist. Again, I'm using my non-dominant hand to anchor it. Would you look at that? Beautiful. Now I could, if I'm really particular, I could regrind this flap, but personally, I don't care. Some people will intentionally grind the edges off. There ain't nothing wrong with it. Just for fear of it burning up, I'll dip it in some water again. Keep it nice and cool. All right, looking good. Gonna move to the finer sanding for both of these. Sighting down the shaft. They both look good. You shouldn't be able to see the edge at this point, or see much of an edge. So we'll go to the opposite side. I like to put the sandpaper in order of grit. So this is my 80, and this is my 120, or thereabouts. Moving on to the 120. You got it. So similarly here, I'm perpendicular to the turn of the wheel, and I'm using light pressure. Trying to put equal amounts of time on all sides of the tool. And I have my finger close to the edge, so that I can feel if things are getting too hot, and dip it in the water. I've got a little bit of a problem area in here. It's a little bit of a dip there, but again, I'm probably not going to fret. I'm being honest. I would just let that slide. You particular people out there might regrind this flat and start afresh, just to make sure that everything's perfectly even. I'm not quite that concerned. Okay, checking the edge for reflection, making sure there's nothing significant there in terms of width or reflection off the edge. You don't want to see any white, or very much white. If you do see a little white, it's from the burr that's formed on the inside of the bevel. I'm happy with that. I'm going to do the same with the gouge. Similar motion here. Rock and roll. Actually, don't rock, just roll. No rocking. You should see from the base, or from the heel of the tool, all the way to the cutting edge, a continuous line. You don't want to see too much of a reflection outside of that, just straight across. All right, I'm going to move to a finer sandpaper. You say you spent as much time on the 20 grit as you did the 80? I spent significantly less time, because I want to establish the most important thing when you're starting out with this, is establishing the proper angle, and trying to keep things as even and symmetrical as possible. Once you've done the hard work with this, now you're just removing scratches. You're just getting rid of the surfaces, the rough surface. Now I'm at the finer, the 320. Really, a lot of people might even skip this process and go right to the 600, or right to the polish after the 120, but I'm going to be fickle and polish it a bit more. At this point, I'm going a little bit more with the movement of the wheel, instead of perpendicular or against it. You should see a nice, shiny, reflective surface. The same with my gouge. All right, after the 320, you have the option of moving to an even finer sandpaper, and polish that. You can then move to your leather strop. I'm just going to touch it there. You can use the leather strop to get the outside bevel. I use a cotton wheel to get the inside of the bevels of both my gouge and my v-tools. I'll use a mirror polish on the inside of my wheel. This is a really, really ultra-fine polish. It's excellent for putting the final edge on your tools. I'll rub it into the leather when the machine is not running, otherwise it'll fly off. Then at the outside of my WorkSharp leather strop, I'll have my grain zam. This is a much more aggressive polish. This is something that is used to polish jewelry. Actually, both of them are. I'll get just a little bit off. Quiet. I need to get the rest of this paper off later. I'll start with the aggressive. The zam, the green compound, any green compound will work. It's like a medium as far as aggressiveness goes. If you can, on the shallower gouges, you can use the edge to catch. Again, make sure that the polisher is moving away from the knife's edge, not into it. Otherwise, you'll flip your tool and hurt yourself. Very, very important that you pay attention to the direction of the wheel. It's moving away from the cutting edge. Then, as you can see, it's starting to develop a bit of a polish. Then I'll move to the mirror polish, which will just absolutely make it glow super bright, just like a mirror. Finally, if I want to put a micro bevel on the tool, I might take the tool and hike the angle up, something close to a 45, and just barely touch it. Light pressure, and this creates a more durable angle. Why would you want a micro bevel? Yeah, a micro bevel, at the very end, strengthens the blade. When you've done this, you've made such a very thin edge, it's liable to break in harder woods. Basically, convex in your flat grind. Right, just a touch, just at the edge. Some people will do this with really fine sandpaper. That's fine, too. I choose to do it with the polisher. I like to keep a piece of wood. In some cases, I'll even screw it down to the bench nearby, just to test out, to make sure that what I've done is good. It looks like we've got a nice, sharp tool. You can diagnose the edge by looking at the wood and seeing if you have any lines. In this case, we don't have any streaks or lines, so it looks like we're clean. I'm going to polish the V-tool the same way, running with the direction of the wheel. In this case, not perpendicular on the polisher. Start with the green and move to the mirror. Then finally, to get the inside bevel, I'll use either a piece of cardboard that I've polished with the green, or I'll move over to my bench grinder, which we'll show you inside. The polisher here that I've dressed with my green compound. The way that I load it up heavy is I'll take the compound and go directly in the wheel. When I'm really loading my wheel up, I'll wear a mask because it throws a lot of dust. It's moving downwards right now. I want to be careful to pay attention to the direction of the wheel. Again, I want the cutting edge to go with the direction of the wheel, not against it. I'll hold the tool. I have a soft wheel here, meaning that the stitching is sort of far away from the edge of the cotton wheel. The stiffer wheels don't work to get the inside of these deeper Vs because the stitching prevents the cotton from getting in the inside of it. Like so. I can even, while I'm here, use the green compound on the wheel to hone the tool and get rid of any little fine burr, which is just a bit of hanging metal on the cutting edge. Test it out. Nice. Looks pretty good. Very nice. Very nice. I'm not seeing any serious problems with this edge. That turned out like you dropped it on the gravel. Yeah, and now we've got a nice polished edge. Pretty much the same idea from the couch. Yeah, same thing to get the inside bevel. If you can't get the inside bevel with your work sharp, you can do the same thing here. Just polish it like so, and that's that. Speed doesn't matter. There are slow speeds and high speeds, but this is just your general hardware store. Yeah. I have a wet-dry grinder here that I've modified. When I need to get into a very specific profile that I'm not able to get into with the leather wheel, say it's got a bit of a problem, a lot of times I'll use this wheel that I've turned on the lathe for smaller profiles. This particular one in the middle here fits perfectly on the inside. That's pretty much the same as the hard wood wheel that I have at my house. Comes with the flex cut sets and works out pretty well. That's the thing that my sharpening video does not do. I can't tell you how to re-profile a damaged tool because I'm only doing the stropping, which is considered a form of light sharpening. For sure. Yeah, you're actually removing material. I'm removing material, but this is more aggressive. If you've got nicks and dings and stuff, and we should have stipulated that in the beginning of the video, that this was a re-profiling or re-sharpening of a damaged tool to bring it back. These are pretty slick. What was this sharpener? This is a Work Sharp 3000. I may actually end up investing in one just for that purpose to re-profile to fix damage. I do have a couple that I've dropped on the cement floor that I'm not capable of repairing. Very cool. Thank you very much for showing us that. Like I said, 10 carvers, you're going to get 10 different ways of doing it. True. This is foolproof. 80, 120, 300. Then you're done. You can go right to the polisher from there. Then straight to the polisher. If you want, you can hit the finer sandpaper. It seems dummy proof. All right. Well, thanks, Alec. Thank you for having me, bud. Anyway, yeah. I just wanted to share that with you guys because I know there's a lot of questions and I can't answer because I don't do it that way. That's the video. Yeah. Thank you guys. Cool beans. See you guys.