Transcription
Hi, I'm Rob Koz, and welcome to my shop. The most important skill if you're going to work hand tools is knowing how to sharpen a hand plane blade. Now, I prefer to do it freehand. That's what I'm gonna show you. I'm working on a nasty piece of maple. It's full of knots and twists, and yet with a sharp blade, you can pull off a shaving that measures somewhere around a half a thousandth thickness. It's an incredible skill. Probably it's just fantastic. You cannot beat this with any grit of sandpaper. Stay tuned. I'm going to show you how to do this. This will change the way you work wood.
I'm Rob Gozman, and welcome to my shop. I'm gonna start by showing you how I would re-sharpen a blade. I'm gonna do it in shop time. Other words, my blade edge started to break down, what do I do to get back to sharpening like you saw just a second ago? So, first thing I need to do is separate my blade, my chipbreaker from my blade. Now, I always come in and spend just a couple of seconds keeping my 16,000 grit stone nice and flat. You do it every time. That's all it takes. I'll lubricate both with Hone Right, which prevents water from rusting metal. Take my blade, set it down on the primary bevel. I've got four fingers distributing the pressure. Elevate two or three degrees above the primary with on a bit of an angle. Spend ten seconds. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Now, I should be able to detect a slight burr, and I always verify that that burr runs corner-to-corner.
Now, I'm gonna come back and walk you through the process in the teaching style. But I just want to show you how how it happens when I'm in the shop working. I leave my sixteenth, my one thousand. I jump over to the sixteen thousand. I'm going to do the same thing, except I'm going to raise up a few degrees higher than I did on that previous stone, and I'm going to actually create what we call a tertiary or a third bevel. About ten seconds of work on this stone, and you'll notice that I'm moving forward and back because they don't want to wear any one area more than and the other. At the end of 10 seconds, I'm gonna put downward pressure in one corner for 3 seconds, followed by downward pressure in the opposite corner for 3 seconds.
Final step. Take my steel rule, lay it on the edge of the stone, flush with this side. Lay the blade down on its back. This is called the Charlesworth ruler trick. Three fingers to distribute the pressure, staying within a quarter of an inch of the opposite edge. I'll spend one, two, three seconds getting rid of any burr that may be left over. Make sure you wipe these down well. You don't want rust. Now, all it is is a matter of putting a chip breaker back on. Get that to within about 1/32 of an inch an inch from the edge. Snug it up tightly. Back in your plane, and away you go.
All right, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start the process with a brand new blade. You bought a plane, how do you get it to a point where you're able to do this type of sharpening that takes less than a minute? So, stay tuned.
Alright, so before we can sharpen, we got to take a second to talk about equipment and get lots of questions from folks about, "Can I use this? Can I use that?" I can't tell you that. All I can tell you is what I use. If you follow my method with the stuff that I use, and you should be able to get the exact same results. And I teach this to thousands of folks every year. I shouldn't say that, every year, hundreds every year, but it's been thousands over the last ten years, and they are able to do this in a relatively short period of time. And by that, I mean maybe a half a day, and they've got it.
The simplest system is a Trend diamond plate. The advantage of this, it's got two grits, a thousand grit on one side and three hundred grit on the other. I start my sharpening on the 1,000 grit. I finish on a Shapton 16,000 grit. You can see it through the mud, it's called a glass stone. Now, this one essentially doesn't wear. Me, there's no maintenance to it. This one does. So, before every sharpening, as you saw me do, you have to go in and do a quick flattening. That's right. The three hundred grit side comes in. However, and this is critical, when you first use your stone, brand new, never been used, you've got to take the three hundred grit side and do a little bit of breaking in. I learned this the hard way. So, what I'm going to do is set that down, lubricate the surface, and using the back of the blade, just set that on there and rub it forward and back, covering the entire surface of that stone. Now, I'm only guessing at what is happening, but I imagine I set that over there, that there are some grit particles that are maybe a little bit longer than others, and they have a tendency to break off. And I've had them contaminate like a 16,000 grit stone on me. So, I take about thirty seconds, cover the entire area with a piece of steel, and once I do this, rinse it off, and it's good to go. You never have to do it again. And I don't ever bother doing it on the 1,000 grit side. I use the 300 for maintaining flatness on the ceramic stone. And that, the ceramic is hard, you do need diamond in order to work it effectively. So, I'll just rinse that off. Might even be better do it under sink, but that's probably good enough.
Okay, so I come over to my 16,000, lubricate it, and I try to keep the stone in this close contact as possible, meaning I'm not way over here, but I'm just overlapping by maybe an inch on all sides. Downward pressure. I like to spread the pressure out as evenly as possible, so I'm not just holding it like that. I'm using two hands. And as I said, well, you can see the worn spot right there. So, let's see if we can't get rid of that.
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Still a little bit there, but I can avoid that rather than waste more stone. Okay, so my blade is brand new. I just took this out of the package. So, this is what you need to go through in the initial phase to get this ready. I'm going to use my my steel rule, and you always want to keep that on the side, flush with the edge, always in the same spot. I hold this other hand down here and hold on to it. I'm gonna stay within a quarter of an inch of the opposite edge. If you come in like this, you're altering the angle substantially. Stay within a quarter of an inch, and it's not going to matter. Now, I want the pressure to be distributed as evenly as possible along that cutting edge. So, I've got my index finger in the middle. I grab that corner with my thumb. I grab that corner with my opposite finger. Now, I do this a lot, and if you were to look over here, you'd see my pinky laying along the side. And the reason I do that is so that I can move forward and back without fishtailing all over the stone. If you're new to this, well, you may have a little bit of difficulty. You may have to go slow, but I like to get this done rather quickly. I'm gonna spend just a few seconds, and then I'm gonna check it.
There are three different conditions that you can find a plane blade. Actually, there's four. Two are acceptable, two aren't. Unacceptable. If the blade is nice and flat, you end up with this, a nice even polish strip that is parallel to the edge. That's ideal. Second condition is the blade is slightly concave, and what you'd end up with here is an arc. Well, the good news about that is because it's concave, you're resting on two points, nice and stable, and you simply work it until you join that contact area all across the edge of the blade, and like I said, it'll end up in an arc. The third condition is unacceptable, and that's where the blade is convex on the bottom. You've got one resting point, it's teetering like this, and as you shift your weight, you're moving side to side. Forget it. Return the blade. It's not worth it. You'll never fix it. Now, the fourth way is a severe twist in the blade, and you started doing this, and you notice there's a big triangular shape. You can get away with it if it's not too bad. If it's severe, way too much work, not worth the effort. Get a new blade.
So, since this one is great, I mean, this is luck of the draw. I what I need to do, and the object of this is to get rid of the grinding scratches that are on the back of the blade as a result of work done at the factory. Those scratches, if allowed to go all the way to the end, will result in a serrated edge, no matter how much work you do on the bevel. So, we have to eliminate them. So, I'm gonna spend, and in this condition, I wouldn't expect to have to spend more than one or two minutes, but I'll just keep working that light to moderate pressure. How do I describe it? Well, if you had a firm grape and you're pushing down on it, you want enough pressure they just start to compress the grape. You don't want to crush it. And I find that my new students, when they first start this, that's the big mistake they make. Is they're putting so much pressure on there that they'll lose it, lose the ability to feel through their fingers what exactly is happening. The more effort you apply, the less control you have. So, in almost all cases, I have to remind people to back off. I'm holding this steel rule in place so it doesn't move. Same amount of pressure on all three fingers. Let's check that again. Now, I can tell from experience that I'm done. If you want, you can get a jeweler's loupe. We have, we have one that I usually carry in my pocket. I haven't got it with me right now, and you can see that the grinding scratches, when they get into that polish strip, they'll stop about a quarter way into it. At this stage, they would anyway, and that's when you know you're done.
Now, typically people sharpen, they go multiple steps. I'm going to jump from 1000 all the way to 16,000. And the reason I can do that is because the area that we're working on is relatively small. If I were doing the back of a chisel, well, then you're going to have to go through at least one more step before before you finish off at the 16. Same idea. Steel rule on the far side, flush with the edge. Hold it in place with my opposite finger. Three fingers, stay within a quarter of an inch. Pinkies over here, running along the side. You want to be careful because it's easy to cut yourself without knowing it. Try to use the entire surface area from one end to the other. Now, I spend a little more time on this one, just because you're dealing with a very fine stone. 16,000 grit is a lot higher than most people have ever sharpened to, but the results are phenomenal. However, it's a, it's a slow cutting stone, just because of the grit size. Now, after about a minute on that one stone, to save my stone, I'm gonna take it, swing it around, move my steel rule over to this side, and now I can work on this edge that hasn't been touched before. I stop and re-flatten the entire surface. Keep it lubricated. Helps to suspend the particles so it doesn't clog the surface of the stone. It's the 16,000 grit that will produce a surface on something like hard metal, pardon me, hard maple, to where you cannot improve it with sandpaper. It's, it's just, it's incredible.
Alright, let's take a look at that. Okay, if you can see that, it's nice and shiny. But just for the sake of it, I'm gonna go just a little bit longer. I'd rather invest a little more time at this dais and have to come back. Using the three hundred grit side, set that on there, just a few seconds. No, I still see some dark area right there, so I'll get rid of that. If this whole process took me five minutes, that's a far cry from what it used to take when we used to go in and polish and tie her back. In fact, let me stop and just promote this to you for a second. I learned this technique from David Charlesworth back in 2001 and didn't accept it right away, but went home, played around with it, and I came to a realization that's probably the smartest thing that I've ever learned about sharpening. David developed this technique way back in the mid-70s. What we used to do, and I used to teach this, was we would go in and we would flatten and polish all of this in order to get a working edge out here. You had to. So, you'd be back into here, and all this surface area, going through all the grits to get that whole area to look like that. Realizing that you're only ever going to use out here, well, on the bevel, when we get to it. Most folks now know about what we call prime micro bevels, and the whole idea behind micro bevels is to avoid having to polish unnecessary surface. So, we just do a little strip right out here at the cutting edge. Well, this uses the same idea on the back of the blade because it's sitting on a steel rule, it's elevated less than a degree, so it's not going to change the geometry of the cut. But you bypass all that prep work down in here by just doing that little strip. So, if this takes me a total of five minutes, the old way of doing all that on a blade this size, I would easily allow an hour and a half, and it's not fun. I'll spend another 10, 15 seconds on this now. Once this is done, I never touch the back of the blade with anything but the 16,000 grit. I never go back to the 1,000 on the back of the blade. This is like polishing your chisels in a way. You never touch the back of your blade and your chisel blade with anything but your final grit. All right, that should be good. And wipe that off and just check it. It's a nice polish. Okay, so that's the back done. Never touch it again except on the sixteen for three seconds each time you sharpen.
So, now I'm gonna come to my one thousand. I'm doing the blade bevel for the first time. A little bit of a, a little bit of information about this primary bevel. Is typically 25 degrees on most blades. That 25-degree bevel is merely there as a compromise. If it was too acute, there wouldn't be enough metal out here. And if it's too obtuse, then when it sits in the blade, if you go up beyond the 45-degree angle that the blade is supported by the frog, then the, it wouldn't function because the heel will touch before the toe. So, you want to stay somewhere in that high 25, low 30 range on all of these bevels.
So, here's the first thing I'm going to do. I'm gonna hold the blade in such a way that I can distribute the pressure uniformly across the cutting edge. I use, I hold it. If I'm, if you're right-handed, opposite, obviously, if you're left. I hold it like this. My fingers are just kind of tucked in the groove in the slot on the back side. I'm gonna take my left index finger and put it in this hole, and that's kind of my indexing point, home base, you might call it. Pinky goes here, ring finger here, middle finger here. Bring the index finger over here. Now I have four fingers to distribute the pressure as uniformly as possible along the cutting edge. Now, may sound easy, but it's a little bit difficult because you're used, far more custom to pushing hard with your index finger than you are with your ring finger, but you've got to learn to put the same amount of pressure in all of them. And again, make it light to moderate. I'm gonna set that down and I'm gonna say something right now about the advantage of these big thick blades on our modern planes. If you take an old Stanley, now, all I have here, for example, is a little number one, but if you look at the blade that came standard, they were anywhere from 70 to 85 thousands of an inch in thickness. The newer blades are anywhere from 125 to 140 thousands of an inch. Why is that better? Well, for one thing, it gives you a much wider primary bevel, and the wider the primary bevel, the easier it is to locate it when you're freehand sharpening. Here's what I mean. There's my fingers in position. The last note about the grip is I want my two hands to be tied together. Don't want them operating independently like this. So, I squeeze my left, my part of my right thumb between my right thumb and my right index finger, so they operate as one. Light to moderate grip. Set that down, find that primary bevel, and like I said, because it's so wide, it's easy to locate. There's my 25. Now, I want to come up three, maybe maybe four degrees. I'm gonna just get off of that primary bevel, and when I do that, I then lock my wrist, lock my elbow, and all the pivoting is going to come from my shoulder. So, find my primary. Oh, by the way, you also notice that I'm not sharpening like this. I'm on an angle. If you sharpen like this and the process doing these little circles, you're gonna be off your stone part of the time. If you hold on an angle like this, the same circles are gonna keep you on the stone. So, I'm holding it like this. Index finger, there we go. Find the primary, come up three or four degrees, lock it, and now just do little circles. Keep them tight. If you go away, big round ones, and you're gonna be rocking your blade like that. Little tight circles. It's much easier to maintain that angle. And because all the pivoting is coming from your shoulder, meaning as far away as you can get it, it's yet much easier to maintain these angles. Now, I'm gonna count out ten seconds, which would be right about now, and I'm gonna feel in the back. Now, if I can detect a burr that runs corner-to-corner, here's my thinking. The stone should come to you flat. If the pressure I'm applying is uniform, a burr running corner-to-corner tells me that this edge from here to here is straight, also defined as the shortest distance between two points. That's part of the reason that I'm gonna be able to jump from a 1000 grit all the way over to a 16,000 without having to do any in-between grits. Now, I didn't work the middle of this stone, so I'm gonna be okay. Here's what I'm going to do. Verifying with the burr. I'm done that stone. I'm gonna hold it the same way. I'm gonna come over here to my 16,000. I'm gonna find that primary bevel. Now, this is the part that takes a little bit of getting used to. If I went up three degrees on the previous stone, on this one, I've got to come up maybe five or six degrees. At that point, I lock my wrist, lock my elbows, and I do that same little circle bit. Only this time, I'm working on a stone that wears with use. So, while I'm doing these circles, I'm slowly rocking heel and toe, meaning my feet to cover more of the surface area of the stone so I can even out the wear. And I'll do that for about 10 seconds. Now, I'm in slow speed while I'm teaching this. So, my top speed would be typically like this. And now, at the end of 10 seconds, without changing anything, I'm gonna push down a little bit harder with my right index finger for about three seconds, then I'm gonna switch and I'm gonna push down with my left pinky for about three seconds. What I just did was this, and then this, and it results in a very light feathering of the outside corners. And the reason for doing that is when I plane a wide panel and I need to make overlapping passes, I don't want to feel any overlap or what we would call plane tracks. This will allow you to eliminate that, providing you can get that blade sitting in the blade in the plane parallel to the sole. Those that little feathering on each corner will take care of those overlap marks, and you can perfect this to a point where you'll run your hand over there and feel absolutely no marks, just a beautiful surface.
Final step is to take my steel rule, lay it on the edge, lay the blade down on its back, staying within a quarter of an inch of the edge. And this is the only time we ever touched the back of the blade again. And as I said, with the sixteen thousand grit, spend one, two, three seconds removing any burr that might still be there. At that point, wipe it nice and dry, and that should be ready to go.
All right, let me change gears. I'm gonna walk you through the process of setting up your chip breaker so we can put this in the plane and actually try it out. The chip breaker is an integral part of the way the plane works. There was a time when it was used to stabilize an otherwise thin blade. Now, I went and dug this out of an old number four, and you can see how thin it is. He'll also know that the old-style chip breakers had a bump on the back. I think the new style is a lot easier to deal with, but I don't think you even need them anymore with the stick as these blades are. However, part of the function of the plane engages the chip breaker to move the blade, so you have to have it. But there's the comparison. So, I'm gonna take my chip breaker, I'm gonna remove the screw. Now, the first thing I want to do is make sure that when that lays on the back, that it's touching all along the edge. This lip has a negative angle on it. So, in order to work it properly, and my method of doing it is from doing it on the road, so I've always had limited equipment. So, you might find something better in your shop to do this with, but I'll show you how I do it. I'm gonna use the three hundred grit side. I'm gonna use my blade because I find that if I set my blade down like this and put the back of the chip breaker on it, it holds it at just the right angle. I need to stay within a quarter of an inch of this edge. If I go over here, I'm gonna bump into this side, this underside, and I want to work just the edge. Set that like that. Again, three fingers to distribute the pressure evenly. Move it side to side. Now, give you a little tip. If you're having a hard time seeing where you what you're working on, you can go in and take a felt-tip marker, paint this black, go in and do that, look it over, and you want to see that you've removed all of the ink. But if you look real closely, you can see that I've made contact from here all the way over. I'm just shy of making it to the other side. That's only took me two or three seconds. So, this isn't going to take long at all. I don't care about the surface quality, meaning the 300 grit is fine. It's always best to even out the wear and even your diamond stone. So, I go into end. Check that again. Okay, if you look real close, we've actually made it all the way to the end. Now, I don't, it doesn't bother me that I've got more here than over there. It's just as long as I'm touching all the way, that's enough. The reason why, when that lays on the back of the blade, yet if it doesn't make contact, then when the shaving comes off, it may jam in there, and then you have to stop and take it apart. You want it to make contact with the shaving, hits the back of the chip breaker, and comes up over and out the mouth. Now, that is create a bit of a burr on the backside. So, if you want, you can turn this over, using the 1000 grit side, and just elevate that a little bit, and just flip that back and forth until you break that off, or you can simply take a piece of wood and just work it back and forth until that burr is gone. That blade, the steel in the chip breaker is much softer than it is in the blade, so you don't typically have this kind of problem getting rid of a burr on a blade, whereas on the chip breaker, it'll hang on a little bit longer. All of this is one-time prep. You never have to do it again. The only thing I'll ever have to do with this blade in this chip breaker in the future is usually get a bunch of pitch stuck on the back, and you go clean it off, or once in a while, but other than that, it should be good for, good for life.
All right, remember blade. You'll also notice too that I invested in the heavy holder. It's a lot easier than chasing that light stone all over the place. And that ceramic stone made by Shapton, it's actually called a glass stone. They did this several years ago. What they did, I'll see if I can clean it off so you can see, they took the 16,000 grit abrasive and they mounted it to a piece of glass. The best part of this, not only does it keep it flat because of the glass, but you'll, you can get to use 100% of the abrasive. You wear it down right until it gets to the glass. I like the holder because it's heavy. It probably weighs 5 pounds. It's a bunch of glass encased in rubber. These three surfaces are all in the same plane, so when you set that on there, it's well supported, doesn't move around on you, and keeps it nice and flat under the pressure of the lapping process.
Okay, clean this up. Typically, there's no anti-rust in any of these blades. So, if you don't get all that moisture off, you're gonna end up with some. Now, on this style, I'll put it on here like that, pull it back, slide it into place, and then while I have to finger fingers and thumb like this, I can move that forward, and I'll slide that until it gets about 1/32 of an inch away. I'm not a, I'm not a believer of chip breaker sitting right up on the edge doing anything that a lot of folks claim it does. And the reason I say that is I've never experienced it. And if you look at beveled down planes, I, pardon me, bevel up planes, they don't have chip breakers, and they perform just as well. I just happen to prefer the traditional bench plane. So, there's where we set it. Now, there's, there's a couple of ways that you can test for sharpness. This one that I do is probably not one that everybody, the faint of heart, we're going to want to do. I'm just kind of dropping that a bit on my thumb to make sure there's no burr there. Take my fingernail. This is one of those, don't do this at home. And I run my fingernail in this direction, and I should be able to do that without feeling any nicks. Now, right there, I feel a definite little nick. I suspect that when I take, when I plane this shaving, fact, I'm gonna switch this board over to a piece of yellow cedar. I love working this stuff. The bonus is it smells so good. But I suspect, based on what I just felt, that when we plane, we're going to get a cut shaving in that spot. And I'll show you how, how I'll prove that to you.
Now, see how that shaving is coming off serrated like that? Well, that's bad news. Now, I'll shall prove to you that it's next fine. Nicks on the ends of the blade because as I advance the blade even more, I can get rid of some of those. Okay, but if I were to look at that closely, I can see that there are little places where thinner shaving would actually rip up. So, this sometimes happens when you first sharpen your blade. So, it's alright. We're going to go back and do it again. Take the blade off. Nothing to do with the chip breaker. What I'm going to do different this time is I'm gonna spend a little more time on my secondary bevel on the 1000 grit stone to get down below any nicks that may be on there. Hold that like I showed you. Four fingers right out on the cutting edge, not back here, but right out on the cutting edge. Squeeze the right thumb between the left side and the left index finger. Find the primary. Once you locate it, come up three or four degrees above it. Tight circles. Light to moderate pressure. Remember, you want to just start to squeeze a firm grape. I'm going a little more than 10 seconds because I want to purposely go below those nicks. We had. Verify it with a burr. Burr runs corner-to-corner. Come over to my 16,000. Repeat the process, meaning locate the primary bevel. By the way, what we put on there just now is called a secondary bevel. Over here, we're going to do a third or a tertiary bevel. Find the primary, come up higher than you did in the previous stone on an angle. Like the moderate pressure, slowly migrate forward so that you're using more of the stone. Now, after 10 seconds of work, downward pressure in one corner for 3 seconds, followed by the opposite corner for 3 seconds. Try not to think about the transition so that you're not moving like this. Stay in that same angle and just simply push a little harder, and then a little harder. Final step. Steel rule on the edge, working the opposite side. Spend 3 seconds removing that burr.
Now, if you'll notice, my sharpening station is quite a bit lower than my bench. And I found, and teaching folks, that if they tried to do this sharpening at bench height, the biggest problem was their pivoting from the wrist. Very difficult to maintain. Dropping your sharpening station down here allows you to lean over and move that pivot point all the way up to here. It makes a huge difference. Try it if you're having trouble getting this down freehand sharpening.
I got something that may help. Several years ago, I developed what's called the angle trainer. Real simple piece of composite that has two real powerful magnets on either side. It's got a 29-degree slope and a 31. Let me show you how that works. Make it even easier. I add a little bit of dish soap to my Hone Right, and it'll just make it so that the angle trainer will slide a little easier. So, put that on, set it down. 29 degrees is the angle you're gonna start with. That's gonna be the one you do in the thousand grit. So, the advantage of this is you get to hold the blade the exact same way. Idea is when you eventually get it, you just remove this, and you've already got all the rest of those habits developed. Hold your blade, engage the magnets. As you slide it forward, it now supports your blade at 29 degrees. It does not interfere with how you would do this if you're doing it freehand. Same idea. Ten seconds. Light to moderate pressure along the cutting edge. The angle trainer simply slides over the stone. Stop and check. Soon as you get your burr, take your angle trainer off and switch to the 31-degree side. This is where we create our tertiary bevel. Hold the blade the same way. Engage the magnets. Slide forward. Now it holds the blade two degrees higher, so it allows you to do that tertiary. Same ten seconds of work. And again, a little bit of dish soap in with your Hone Right helps it slide even easier. Now, at the end of ten seconds, downward pressure on one corner for 3 seconds, by pushing down with my right index finger, switching to my left pinky for 3 seconds. Take the angle trainer off. Put your steel rule down. Apply the Charlesworth ruler trick. Three degrees on the back, and there you go. Now, the angle trainer will not last forever. It's running over a coarse stone that will eventually wear it out. But in the time that it will work, you'll eventually get that angle down so that you have the confidence to be able to do this, and you'll actually get a good sharp edge. There you go. Now, if you've tried this method and it's worked for you, love to hear your comments. You never know, sometimes somebody will just say something that will connect with others and help them figure it out. Leave that in the comment section.
Alright, let's do that quick check before I put the chip breaker on. All right, that feels much better. I didn't detect any burrs. Let's see if we got it. If we got it, we should be able to get a shaving that has no rips in it. Lock that down tight. You'll notice my screwdriver has hockey stick tape on there so that you can get a really good grip because that has to be tight in order for the movement on the chip breaker to bring the blade with it and not allow it to slide. Leave her cap on. Nice thing about that, it goes back to the same spot. So, once you've tightened up that screw, you shouldn't have to do it again. A little bit of wax. Just a long s. And that's a formula that we worked on for quite some time. We wanted something that wouldn't leave a wooden cake on there, but it would leave a film that would last a little bit. As I planed, I started spinning the adjuster knob and just do that until I determine whether or not the blade is truly parallel to the sole. Just a little bit heavy on the right.
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Now, I'm gonna retract the blade a little bit and see if we can hold that full shaving as we get down. Now it starts to come apart when we get down to it. I would say both the sub ones out level. Now it's really coming apart. Well, I wouldn't give up. I'll go and do this again. Get it right. Sometimes you go through this with a brand new blade. You can't be frustrated if it doesn't work. Just keep trying it. Sometimes, and this we weren't planning to have it happen like this when we're shooting this video, but sometimes you get a blade that for some reason, it's lost its temper right on the very edge, I guess from the grinding process, and you got to come back in a little bit in order to get into some good steel. I'm gonna shut down. I'm gonna redo this. We'll go back over here and we'll try it a third time, and hopefully that'll be the charm. Relax. I often get asked, does the wax bother a finish? I wouldn't wax my plane prior to my final pass, and I've never had an issue with it, so I have to say no, it doesn't. But you need to be smart about it. To get that blade moved over a little bit. All right, that's better. So, there you go. The nice thing, nice thing is once you learn to freehand sharpen, it's a minute from the time you break down your plane, go over, process it, come back over, and you're back to work. Doesn't take a ton of time to learn how to do it. Anybody can learn to do this if you have the interest. Just follow what I told you. Get the gear that you need so that you know what's going to work and work the process until you get it. Don't give up. By the way, it doesn't work the first, a second, or third time anyway. I hope this helps. Enjoy your planing, and we'll see you on our next video.