I took this last week off from doing woodworking. I mostly sat around the house and was lazy.
I did go down into the shop on Sunday afternoon and spent a number of hours trying to flatten the back of a plane blade I ruined a number of years ago. I was trying to flatten the blade on a coarse water stone and didn't realize the stone was getting dished out. Riding up and down the walls of the valley cause much more material to be removed from the edges. I bought a replacement blade for my hand plane, chalked it up to lessons learned and move on with life.
The one good thing about it is that now I have a "busted" plane blade to experiment with when trying out new sharpening techniques.
A week or so ago I bought an extra coarse diamond stone from my local Woodcraft store. The coarse diamond stone I already had wasn't taking enough material fast enough so I figured I'd try extra coarse. I pulled it out and went to town. It was definitely taking more material than my coarse diamond stone but it still wasn't what I'd call fast. Certainly not compared to sanding wood.
I also pulled out my old dished water stones and tried flattening it on my diamond stones. I think it worked out okay but I was getting a little tired by this point. I had water everywhere including the floor. I had sharpening stone slurry all over me and my sharpening station.
In any case I worked on that busted hand plane blade for quite a bit using my water stones, my new diamond stone, and I even tried some sandpaper on a flat board. I got it better but still didn't manage to fix it. I was hopeful with the sandpaper on a board thing; however, I got lazy and didn't spray glue the sandpaper down. I think this allowed the paper to curl just a little bit so while it looked like I was making progress flattening the iron I wasn't.
I worked on one of my old cheap chisels and may actually have gotten the back flat. I need to go back and check it with a fresh set of eyes that might not be clouded by as much wishful thinking I had on Sunday.
Yesterday - Monday - evening I wanted to check out my new Grebstk chisels and see how they were. I saw Rex Kreuger talk about these on his YouTube channel. They're four wooden handled chisels for right around $20 on Amazon.com. His initial impression of them was favorable so I figured I would give them a try. They'd be cheap chisels I could practice sharpening, they might actually end up being good chisels, and I could always grind them to a different angle than my Irwin chisels.
Also, worst case... I could use them to scrape glue.
So yesterday... I stuck with my extra coarse diamond stone and my coarse diamond stone and flattened the backs on two of the chisels. Both were dished a little bit from the edge but still flattened pretty quickly. The dish was far enough from the edge on both of them I could have left it but I kept going until I had the backs flat.
I didn't take them any further because I didn't want to pull out my Tormek. I'd gone down to the shop in my street clothes and the Tormek can get a little messy. It doesn't create a slurry like the water stones but it does get water everywhere. I didn't do more than two of the four because I have tendonitis in both my wrists and I have to be careful how much I do to avoid aggravating it. I'll get the backs on the other two flattened some time this week and then this weekend I can finish sharpening them
I'm hoping I can get the bad plane blade to good enough shape that I can sharpen it into being able to be used for a scrub plane. I'll need that for flattening the top of my workbench which I need to get back to.
