My First Sharpening Experience on Roughing Gouges

I've been working with my Delta 1" belt sander learning to sharpen freehand.

The other day, I held the gouge (1/2" bowl) horizontal at 90 degrees to the belt instead of vertical.

MUCH easier to control rolling the gouge, controlling the angle the bevel was contacting the belt, and the pressure against the belt.

Give it a try. The other thing I've learned it to use a light touch.

djb

You might have better luck with a slightly finer grit belt, use a very light touch, the tool should just barely make contact with the belt, and IMO it works better to have the belt moving away from the edge, not into it as a conventional grinder.

We've discussed this at length several times, for the blow-by-blow you might want to do a google search on sharpening. The upshot is dependent on your experience with sharpening. If you are used to freehand sharpening your kitchen knives, and they are SHARP, you can probably learn to sharpen using almost any method. If you use the grinder on your can opener, you'll do better with one of the jig systems and a friable grinder wheel. You'll have to figure out which camp you fall into. No doubt others will have more to say on the topic. Dave in Fairfax

Dave- Run that by me one more time.... Is the belt horizontal or vertical?? And then where is the gouge? Having a hard time picturing this..

Thanks

Belt is vertical. I'm holding the gouge horizontal with the handle to the right, rotating it down to up on the belt, with very light pressure.

djb

Gotcha! Thanks.... Will try it.

Reminds me... I gotta try this soon myself. I have one of those cheapo sets to practice on too, and a 120-grit white wheel from LV.

I go out tomorrow, get back Monday night, then I'm home until Christmas Day. Since I have to go to the MIL's on Christmas Eve, and go to my grandparents on Christmas Day, and then leave out for some yonder, SWMBO and Mom have generously agreed to let me take my lathe out to the shop and out of the box on Tuesday.

I don't have a stand built for it yet, and no chance of a mechanical guide setup happening in the next few days anyway, so I guess I'll try my luck freehand for now.

I sharpen swords and machetes freehand on a belt sander, and they come out sharp, but not SHARP. (Sharpening those on the grinder is too dangerous. I ground off a knuckle once. Ouch. Don't try that at home, folks.) I'm thinking the skew will present the most problems. The gouges look like a good place to start.

Anyway, I guess we'll see how it goes. I'm looking forward to it, but I actually have more trepidation than enthusiasm at this point. Hopefully that will melt away as soon as I stick a piece of wood in this thing and fire it up.

That little Griz will fit on a workmate in a pinch. If you're turning fairly small stuff or not WAY out of round, it shouldn't jump around much. You can always bolt it to a piece of wood with an inverted "T" under it to lock the workmate around if you need to and then weight the workmate on the struts underneath.

Keep it greasy side down and have a good Xmas, Dave in Fairfax

I have a JET mini. It fit on the tool stand I made out of two discarded SYP end tables stacked on top of each other. That thing has been home to a benchtop DP, then a belt sander, and now my lathe and grinder. Not bad for free. It's butt ugly, but it works, and it only took me 15 minutes to make.

It's plenty solid enough I think, vibration wise. The only down side is that it's a bit tippy with all that weight at the top. I'm going to look at putting a more solid shelf on the bottom and weighting it down with cinderblocks or some such to lower the center of gravity.

I always try. :) (On both counts...)

BTW, on this subject, I've had *my* first sharpening experience today. White 120 grit wheel from LV. Cheapo 3500 RPM B&D grinder with a piece of junk tool rest. Trying to do it freehand.

I managed to burn the steel real good, got all the angles quite wrong, completely ruined the profiles on all the gouges, and I think butter knives would cut better.

I was getting better turnings than this using a four-in-hand rasp and a drill press.

Looks like I have a long learning curve ahead.

My bad, sorry about that, idea's the same though. didn't mean to insult your lathe. ;-)

That's why I was thinking the workmate with weight below.

If worst case happens, just remember, that's why God made duals,

4-wheelers fit right between them. and it's better to go over the idiot who caused the problem than clear the entire road trying to avoid him. Sad but true.

Sounds like you're sitting in one place too long before turning the tool, remember to set the bevel so that it'll contact the stone in the middle of the profile. It can be hard to match the profile if you're using the "start ant the bottom and tip the handle up until sparks come over the top edge" method of setting your bevel.

Nobody starts out perfect. This is why I recomment that $40 set from HF. The whole set costs 1/2 what a single good tool costs, and they're good enough that when you get it right you can tell the difference. No lesson is free, but this one can be made less expensive. Keep trying, I got confidence in you.

Dave in Fairfax

Silvan Can I recommend a sharpening jig? Go to my web site and check out the set up there. It is worth the buck and a half to try it out. I need to upgrade that page with better explanation but as it is you can make the jig no sweat.

Don't worry, I'm not a lathe snob yet. :)

This thing is an 80-pound hunk of cast-iron, and seems to be extremely solid and well-made, FWIW. I think I did good.

Plus when it's all over, just pull out the corner of your bumper while you wait on the paperwork, and keep going. (DAMHIKT...)

Yeah, I see what you mean...

I'm doing even better with some $15 eBay set. (I actually bought these years and years ago, when I was thinking of turning a treadmill into a shop built lathe that never materialized.) They might be the same tools, or they might not be that good, but the price was right. I can see that they're not top quality, but I judge that they're good enough to learn on, and if I screw any of them up, who cares?

Yeah, I'll be fine. As long as I stay away from frozen maple logs anyway. I got to thinking about that... Fresh-cut green wood, frozen... I probably didn't get the spur thingie thwacked in nearly well enough to have any hope of holding that. Plus just because I sank the points into the center of the pith doesn't mean it was the center of balance, or even the center of the log.

I forgot to buy one of those center marking thingies, and I'm out of money, so I guess I need to shop build one. Finding the exact center would be helpful. :)

That looks like a plan, and the price is right. I'll have to think about how to implement it though, since my grinder's most comfortable place to reside is hanging off the edge of a board with its front two feet off in space.

Some kind of auxillary, removable table most likely. I'll come up with something. :)

I just printed out your drawing. Thanks...

I picked up the Cheapie HF set when I first got my lathe, then a $40 set from HF. There was a notable difference in quality, the 2nd was a Windsor set rather than noname at all. They may be the same as the ones you got.

I keep a spare spur center on a long bolt just for whacking the end of pieces that are really hard, like Osage Orange, I picked up a center finder from Sears when I first started, brass and pretty. I don't use it much andmore, but sometimes it comes in handy. Making the wood regular in shape before you start goes a long way toward making the center of the wood match the center of mass.

Have fun and yell if I can help, Dave in Fairfax

********************************** Hi, The center of the log may or may not be the center of balance. And when you first start out, the balance point is most important. You can check that by loosening the belt so the spindle rotates freely. Then, let the piece turn under its own weight til it stops. The bottom is the heavy side. Try moving the tailstock center and spur center toward the heavy side in small increments. When you get it pretty well balanced, then drive the spur in to start the rough out. When you have it cylindrical, you may need to reposition it again if you've removed knots or voids that affect the weight distribution very much. If it's not vibrating very much, you are OK to keep on turning. Good luck, and stay out of the firing line.

Ken Moon Webberville, TX

Probably. They exude crappiness from every pore. I should try a better HF set. Or something similar. Actually, I'm rather proud of the fact that I have never ordered anything from HF, and I'm in no hurry to buck that trend.

I'm going to need to do something like that I think. Semi-frozen green maple is pretty hard.

Actually, I'm finding I can't whack things onto the spur properly even at the best of times. Even with a short 6" piece, I can't get enough room between the free end and the sharp little point on the tailstock to do much whacking. I bloodied myself several times today before finally resorting to popping out the spur and tapping it into the piece on my workbench.

I'm hoping to find a way around this latter practice, as it's very tedious. Maybe buying another spur is a good thing for the someday list.

Easier said than done though. I just don't have the tools to reshape a chunk of split log into a square. Especially not with these little 4" logs. The best I can manage is a fairly regular rounded triangle.

I'm afraid I'm beyond help, but I'm not putting my lathe up for sale *just* yet. I'll give it a week or two. ;)

Shouldda thunk of that. Good plan.

here is a link for a home made sharpening jig. i havent tried it but it looks similar to the wolverine jig i use.

As the books say, make a couple of saw kerfs at right angles. Doesn't have to be on the bandsaw. I use a cut-on-the-pull pruning saw to good effect. The ease of a single kerf, rather than a less than right angle pair talked me into a two-wing drive center.

I wouldn't use one on anything but end grain, though, even with the kerf. Make sure to whack that spur with wood (turn a mallet) or through a piece of wood to avoid mushrooming.

Reminds me, got a half-dozen carvers' mallets four months in the PEG. Time to pull 'em.