Sharp

  Like most people my shop is filled with blades: planes, knives and chisels mostly.  I also take a serious interest in the blades in our kitchen as well as the gardening tools. 

  If you are vigilant in your tool maintenance your blades will seldom need to be really sharpened, they only need to be touched up (honed), because the edge has been slightly rounded over in use making it appear more dull than reality.

 The two most common ways to hone a blade are the traditional butcher's steel.

  With experience and practise a honing or butcher's steel will do a good job of keeping knives in top shape. It is easier to use with the longer blades you see in a kitchen.

  Another excellent way of honing blades, and the one I use with my wood carving knives and chisels is a leather strop.

   My carving strop is similar to this one, it is leather, glued to a flat pieces of wood and charged with green polishing compound.  In the old days when barbers used 'cut throat' razors they all had a strop hanging from their chairs and before you got shaved the razor was honed on the strop.  Cut Throat razors disappeared before my whiskers appeared so that is an experience I missed. (like many childhood diseases, an experience I am not sad to have missed)

  Neither the steel or the strop is very convenience to carry about and so I used a small ceramic stone (about a 2000grit) for a few years as a pocket touch up stone.  I had a couple of reservations with the ceramic stone:

one: is it heavy and wants to pull my tool belt or pants pocket down, and,

two: if a ceramic stone hits a cement workshop floor the result is modern art in the form of pieces of a once expensive sharpening stone, and so it becomes a detail to be fussed over and worried about while trying to work. I found myself putting the stone away in a drawer and finally it ended up in the tool box containing my carving tools. Not handy at all.

  The solution presented itself about a year ago when I was visiting New York state and stopped into a Rockler store.

DMT credit card diamond stone

  I bought a fine stone and stuck it to a piece of 3/4 inch oak with double sided tape.

  The wood backing provides a place to grip the stone and I have painted the wood red, like all my shop made jigs and tools.  This little honing tool weights almost nothing, is a good size and is unbreakable.  Those characteristics mean that this tool is close at hand when I am working. It is good for touching up an edge without interrupting the flow of the work. 

  I expect to buy another one the next time I am in a Rockler store, in fact. Then I will have one for the bench top and one for my tool belt.