Alexander Grabovetskiy, woodcarver, School of Woodcarving · Published 2017
How do you sharpen wood carving tools?
Quick answer: Sharpening a wood carving tool has three stages rather than one. You reshape the factory bevel into a long low one, you bring the edge back on rising grits, and you strop it. The first job happens once in the life of the tool and the last one happens every day you carve.
Sharpening a carving tool is three separate jobs and most carvers only do one of them. You reshape the factory bevel long and low, once. You sharpen the edge through rising grits. Then you strop it, and that last one takes ten seconds a day.
Ever fight a board all morning and blame the board? A brand new gouge on basswood puts your hand up near your shoulder before the edge even bites. My teacher gave me one knife and would not hand me a gouge until I could sharpen that knife properly, and I have thought about why for thirty seven years.
What actually makes an edge cut
- A factory bevel comes too short and far too upright, and it has to be reshaped before the tool is any use.
- Long and low beats high and stubby on every wood except where a mallet needs clearance.
- Grind a micro bevel inside every single tool, without exception.
- Hand sharpening works and it will not give you a flat bevel.
- A dry grinder does two bad things at once, it hollows the bevel and it burns the steel.
- Stropping does round an edge, and stropping both sides cancels most of it.
- A V tool is three tools in one, so sharpen the keel first.
Is it the wood or the tool?
Almost always the tool. I brought my teacher a board once and told him it was bad wood, and he told me there is no such thing as bad wood, only dull tools. Sharp steel does beautiful work on the worst board in the pile. That one sentence has cost me a great many excuses since.
Sharpening also splits into three stages, and they are not equal in how often you do them. Reshaping a new tool happens once. Putting the edge back happens when the tool asks for it, which on a hard wood might be an hour of carving. Stropping happens daily and takes seconds. Most of the frustration I hear about lives in that first stage, because a tool nobody ever reshaped never really gets sharp.
Why does a brand new gouge fight you?
Factory bevels come short and steep. Take a new tool to a board and you have to lift the handle four inches before the edge grabs anything, and at five inches it still is not carving. Your elbow and your shoulder pay for that all day. Every brand does it, from a $95 Schaaf set to a French Auriou, and I was genuinely surprised how good the steel is in the cheap ones. BeaverCraft out of Ukraine gave me a tool I had no complaint about except the bevel.
How long should the bevel be?
Long enough that your knuckles nearly brush the wood as the edge bites. That is the whole test, and it beats any number I could give you. A bevel is a wedge, and a steep wedge fights the fibers while a long one slides. Some of mine run five eighths of an inch, about 18 mm. The exception is the mallet. Its head needs room to swing without striking the surface, so a mallet tool sits a little steeper.
Every tool of mine carries a micro bevel on the inside as well. Two things come of that. The tip is no longer weak at the very edge, and the tool will work upside down without digging in and trapping itself. On a very low main bevel that second bevel is what keeps the point alive at all.
Why did I give up sharpening by hand?
Hand work never gave me a flat bevel. Look along the bevel of an old second hand gouge and you will see it arching, every single time, and those men were not careless. Your wrist moves on the stone whether you want it to or not. You can still carve with such a tool, and you will feel the resistance in your shoulder by the afternoon.
The other half of it is arithmetic. I hold about half a thousand tools and I carve for a living, so the question is whether I am paid to sharpen or paid to carve. If you own twenty tools, buy a jig and a stone and enjoy yourself, because hand work with a jig genuinely does the job. My teacher taught me on a stone and told me that sandpaper on a flat bench is the same abrasive at a tenth of the price.
What does a grinder do to the steel?
Two bad things, and both are permanent. A wheel leaves the bevel hollow, which thins the metal right behind the edge, and a dry wheel heats that thinnest part until the temper is gone. You often cannot see it happen, because the steel never turns blue where it matters. The tool simply starts losing its edge every few minutes and you blame the steel.
Tormek fixed the heat with water and a slow wheel, and I bought the whole system when it reached the United States. Jigs for everything, including an axe attachment I have never once used. The hollow stayed, though, and on an 18 mm bevel a hollow is not a detail. Two grits then, coarse and slightly less coarse than coarse, and that was the end of it for me. Mine still runs, with a diamond wheel on it and the water tray dry.
| How you sharpen | What it does to the bevel shape | Real cost |
|---|---|---|
| A stone or sandpaper by hand | Bevel arches slightly | Slow, and stones run to $200 each |
| Dry grinder | Hollow bevel and a burnt temper | Cheap, and risky |
| Tormek with water and its own jigs | No burning | Still hollow, and only two grits |
| Flat glass wheel | Flat bevel, any grit from 80 up | About $200 |
What I wanted was a stone that ran on steroids. I found it in a $200 machine at Woodcraft that felt so cheap I walked past it three times before buying it. The wheel is flat glass, so the bevel comes out flat. It turns slowly and never burns anything, and the grit changes in one second, so I can run 80 to 6,000 and sharpen a tool in two minutes.
My own wheels are not all paper now. There are diamond discs on the shelf and boron nitride ones as well, and the diamond ones cost about $12 apiece. Chinese made, and I have not had to replace a single one yet.
Is a cheap machine safe for a good tool?
Safer than the grinder it replaces, and not foolproof. Put a finger on that wheel while it turns and nothing happens, which tells you how little heat there is in it. Try that on a bench grinder once and you will never do it twice.
All the same, a student in one of my in-person classes bought a brand new full length gouge on a Monday and by Friday it was a stub. Slow and cool does not mean the steel is not going anywhere. Watch the length of the tool, not the temperature.
The one catch on the machine itself is the bar that held the Tormek jigs, which Work Sharp stopped making in 2017. I bolted a Tormek grinder jig onto a scrap dovetailed block instead, and now it clamps to any bench I like, which turned out better than the original.
The jigs are the part worth paying for, whatever machine they sit on. Tormek designed those cleverly and they fit anything you can bolt a bar to, which is why I kept mine long after I stopped using their wheel. Work Sharp itself is harder to find in Europe now, and one carver watching told me it had vanished from his suppliers there, so check before you plan around it. Failing that, chase the flat surface itself rather than the brand name on it.
How fine is worth going depends on the finish you leave behind. For a tool finish I take an edge to 6,000 and stop there, though the wheels will run to 8,000 and past it if you want them to.
Does stropping round the edge?
Rounding is real. A carver in my chat told me he had quit stropping for exactly that reason, and he was not wrong about the physics. Your hand rocks a little on every pass, so the leather rolls the very edge over and you feel it as resistance going into the fibers.
Strop both sides and most of it cancels. My grandfather shaved with a straight razor and stropped it on a hide every morning of his life, and that razor was the thing in his toolbox I was most afraid of. He had it from his grandfather. I strop daily, on a Butz block that is twenty years old, and on two leather wheels I mounted on a cheap grinder turned to run away from me.
The green bar most carvers use is chromium oxide, and very little of it goes a long way. Load the leather until it just darkens, and then leave it alone. My two wheels are different thicknesses, one about 10 mm and one nearer 20, because a thick soft wheel reaches inside a gouge and a thin firm one does not deform on a chisel.
A piece of leather from a leather supply costs almost nothing and works as well as any block sold for the purpose. MDF also strops, and so does a scrap of hardwood, which is what carvers used before anybody sold a stropping kit.
Why does a V tool give everyone trouble?
Manufacturing, and it is not your fault. When you sharpen one you sometimes hit a notch on a wing, and the reason is that the two wings are never the same thickness. A cutter bores the inside of a steel bar and sits a hair off centre, so one wall comes out thicker. Cheap Chinese, hand forged, Swiss Pfeil, the most expensive machine in the world, they all do it.
Sharpen it as three tools rather than one. The bottom is a tiny gouge with real curvature, the keel, and the two sides are chisels. Work the keel first. Then bring each wing down to meet the notch, slowly, and stop when they blend rather than trying to grind the notch out of existence.
The V tool was barely in a European carver's kit before the nineteenth century, and some carvers have never used one at all. Knowing that helped me stop treating it as a test of my own skill.
How do you sharpen a knife on a flat wheel?
Flat on the disc, one side then the other. A knife needs almost nothing done to it compared with a gouge, so I usually skip the jig entirely and hold it. Lay it against the rotation, work the edge, then flip it and work the other face.
There are two small tricks worth having. The wheel turns the wrong way for a knife, and you can either rewire it or buy a plug with a reversing switch, which takes a minute. And the arbor hole is 10 mm, so a plain 10 mm nut drops in and centres a wheel perfectly when you have lost the bushings, which I always do.
What I would buy first
Leather and sandpaper. When I filmed myself carving grapes with a $95 set straight out of the box, the only thing I did to those tools was strop them, and they carved. Stones are where the money goes, and a single grit can run $200. The German Koch machine on my bench was about $500 and I use it for honing, but nobody needs it to begin.
A flat bench, a sheet of 6,000 grit automotive paper and a piece of leather will take you further than most people believe. That is what my teacher told me, and he was carving long before any of these machines existed. Pick a project first and let it tell you which tools have to be sharp.
The same man handed me a sheet of paper and a pencil on my very first day and said design. He came back an hour later, looked at my acanthus leaf and said think. He meant think about how many tools you own and what each one can reach, because a design you cannot execute is a drawing. He called them an army. Every gouge is a soldier with one job, and the bigger the army the more ground you can take.
Design comes first, then sharpening, and carving is the most important of the three, which is his order and not mine. Sharpening sits in the middle because nothing above it works without it. If you want somebody at your shoulder while you learn to put an edge on your own tools, that is what we do inside the school.
How it's done
- Read the wings before you touch a wheel. Sight down the tool from the end and compare how thick each wing is. One will be heavier than the other, and that tells you where a notch is going to show up.
- Treat it as three separate tools. That rounded bottom edge behaves like a small gouge, and the two flanks behave like chisels. Sharpen all three as separate jobs living in one handle.
- Start underneath, at the keel. Establish the bevel underneath before you go anywhere near the flanks. Getting that part wrong is what makes the rest of the job fight you all afternoon.
- Blend the flanks upward. Shave one flank at a time until it runs level with that raised point, rather than grinding the point away. Take very little per pass and keep looking.
- Hone the inside, then strop both faces. Run a slip or a folded abrasive down the inside of each flank. Then strop outside and inside, so the edge does not end up rolled over to one side.
Frequently asked questions
Can you sharpen carving tools with sandpaper instead of stones?
Sandpaper works, and my own teacher told me to use it before spending money on stones. Lay a sheet on a flat bench and use it exactly as a stone. A few dollars of assorted grit from a hardware store gets you further than one $200 waterstone.
How long should a carving tool bevel be?
Low and prolonged, far enough that your knuckles nearly touch the wood while the edge starts to bite. Some of mine run five eighths of an inch, about 18 mm. Raise it slightly only if you swing a mallet, because the head needs room to clear the surface.
Should you put a micro bevel on every tool?
Mine all have one. A very shallow main bevel leaves the tip weak, and a small secondary grind inside puts that strength back. The second reason matters just as much, because a tool without one digs in and traps itself the moment you turn it over.
What to carve next