Drawknife Sharpening
No Grinding or Jig
A big part of teaching techniques is trying to distill them to their simplest and most direct forms. Chris Schwarz was just teaching in my shop and he did things very differently than I do, but we absolutely share doing our best to make things direct, approachable and repeatable. I know how it must look when you see a new tool or technique for something that has been done for centuries. The reactionary response is to reject new ideas about old topics, but every idea was new once.
The beauty of the system is that the good ideas will live on and the bad ones will die out or be replaced. In making chairs, I found a lot of assumptions about tools and processes came from misappropriating tools. That reamer that surely proves 12 degrees is the best angle for leg tenons was a coopers tool someone found at a flea market… and so on.
It’s also an easy temptation to enshrine the things we were taught. Honestly, I learned some pretty bad ways of making chairs from some exceptional makers. Just because it works for them and is comfortable in their shop, doesn’t make a technique the best.
There are a bunch of ways to sharpen a drawknife. Yes, I designed a tool to help with this task and made it available because it’s proven itself in my hands and many others. But it’s hardly the only way. I want to guide you through a few different way to get results rehabilitating old knives or just maintaining and edge. Here I’ll start with the simplest, just using sandpaper to shape and polish the edge. If there’s not going to be any grinding, it helps to have an edge that is already well formed. If not, you might find using coarser sandpaper will certainly speed the process. In the video, I tune a Kimball drawknife belonging to Joel Paul using 600 grit silicon carbide sandpaper.
