Comment by chris_st
2 years ago
While we've been doing pottery for about 30,000 years, and woodworking for perhaps 10,000 years, we've only been programming (digital) computers for about 75 years or so.
We're still figuring out how to do it. Trying new programming language ideas is a big part of that... I started with Fortran 77, and man oh man am I glad I can program in Go now.
Thank you language experimenters!
And even that, in woodworking there's been three "new" methods of sharpening in the last decade or so which all became trends (and counter-trends); and new tools, new jigs, new tricks pop up all the time, so...
I do almost all hand tool woodworking, but not purist. My main smoothing plane is from 1910ish. My most new fangled hand tool is a Japanese Shinto rasp.
And you’re 100% right. I’ve changed my chisel and plane iron sharpening method twice in the last 12 months.
There’s oil stones, wet stones, diamond stones, and sandpaper. Plus a leather strop with pick-your-compound. I’ve used 2 different jigs on stones to get a more consistent bevel than by hand. There’s high speed grinders with a lot of pauses and cooling to not lose the temper. There’s expensive water cooled low speed grinders. Then there’s debate on the angle, microbeveling, and how much of the back you should flatten.
I’m now using a new jig from TayTools that uses a 3M Cubitron II sandpaper disk on a drill press when they get bad. I freehand on diamond and a strop after and between resetting the bevel. It’s the laziest way I’ve found so far.
Claiming any choice is best is likely to result in fisticuffs. And don’t start a conversation on workbench design or vice choices.
Yeah, that's totally true (and probably for pottery too). I didn't mean to say, those are totally solved areas, just that we're really in the early days, and so we have a ton of learning and experimenting to do. It's a great time to be a nerd :-)