Last week I mentioned Angie from Lie-Nielsen gave me a lesson in sharpening my hand plane blades. What I learned was that over the last 10 years, my sharpening skills had dulled, and my blades no longer carried a consistent grind angle. Three were noticeably out of square along the edge, which prevented me from getting an even cut. The first step was to return the blade to the original grind. In the case of most Lie-Nielsen tools, this is a 25 degree bevel. They have some great instructions on setting up a jig that takes advantage of the distance between the honing guide base, and the edge of the blade.

 

Then the blade was ground to the original angle with 3 consecutive grits of sandpaper, dry. 3M manufactures big rolls of sandpaper with a sticky-backed adhesive. This uses 180, 220, and 400 grits attached in sequence to a big block of granite, although a big, thick piece of float glass works just as well. 20 passes along each grit, repeated several times, evenly grinds the surface back to true without leaving deep grooves.

 

Once it is back to 25 degrees, the blade is backed off slightly in the honing guide and run along a 4000 grit water stone backwards 5-6 times. Then the blade is removed from the honing guide, and a ruler is placed along the edge of the stone, and the flat edge of the blade is laid down on top of the ruler, and pulled backwards starting over the stone and then over the stone for 2 inches. This removes the burr on the underside of the blade and focuses on developing a sharp edge over a much smaller portion of the blades overall surface.

 

This produces a razor sharp edge that holds for a good period of time, and is easy to do minor sharpening before each use. Angie and the Lie-Nielsen team really helped me out and their instruction on sharpening has greatly improved my hand tool performance. They offer a full description of these instructions on their Web site. I encourage everyone reading to give this technique a try.

 

I successfully sanded down all of the large flat panels (sides and shelves) for the bookcase and was ready to cut the case pieces to their final size to prepare them for dovetailing. I’ll cut the shelves to their final dimensions once the case is assembled, this will prevent me from under/overcutting the shelves if the case size varies from my original measurements.

 

With a small shop in my basement, approximately 600 sq/ft, I have space only for a contractors sized table saw. It has no significant cross cutting capacity, limited only to the t-squares it came with. The panels, particularly the sides are going to be cut to 50” x 14”. This is definitely not an operation for a 6” t-square, and my current shop made cross-cut sled was severely undersized for the job. If I was cutting a long table top, I would have just used by circular saw with a fine toothed blade and ripping guide, however, because the pieces of the case will be dovetailed together, nearly perfect-square ends will be critical to ensure the case goes together properly. Any variation in squareness will be magnified across the length of the piece.

 

Following the basic instructions I found in Fine Woodworking  for building a cross-cut sled for the table saw, I pulled from my pile a 3/4 “ panel of cabinet grade, and very stable plywood. I then cut the piece to 26” x 48”. This will serve as the sled surface that will run along my table saw top. I cut some pieces of quarter sawn ash as rail guides that are attached the to bottom surface of the plywood to run in the table saw guide rails. Then I used a 4” x 8/4 piece of poplar for the leading edge guide, and a 1” thick piece for the opposite edge of the sled. I attached the thinner piece first, and then the thicker piece with counter sunk screws and some Gorilla wood glue on the undersides. The sled is then run across the blade to create a square cut, deep enough to accommodate a thick piece of wood, while maintaining the front and back edges of the poplar to keep the sled in one piece.

 

I lucked out and got the back end of the fence nearly perfectly square on the first time. It may take some finessing, or adding a small shim at the end of the poplar to bring the edge in square with the blade. An alternative method is using lag bolts and nuts that allow for some movement back and forth along the back edge of the guide to bring it into square.

 

The sled worked like a charm after a light coat of paraffin wax and my sides are ready for laying out the dovetails. I’ll cover that in my next blog post.