70 Popular Woodworking February 2008 PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

HONING GUIDES
With the exception of your two
hands, there is no such thing as the perfect
honing guide for every shape and size of wood-
working tool.
Some guides are great for short tools. Some
are great for chisels. Others excel at gripping
odd-shaped tools. But none of the guides
handle all the tools all the time.
During the last decade, Ive taught a lot of
people to sharpen chisels and plane irons, so
Ive gotten to use many of the students honing
guides. Some of these guides Ive purchased
for our shop at Popular Woodworking. Other
guides havent impressed me much.
The honing guides in this article are four
models that Ive found to be useful and com-
monly available. Now, I dont think you need
to buy four honing guides to get your tools
sharp. Depending on your work, you might
need one or maybe two.
BY CHRI S TOPHE R S CHWARZ
Honing guides are not a one-
size-ts-all affair. We examine
the weaknesses and strengths
of four popular models.
Or, perhaps if your hands are willing, you
might not need any of these guides at all.
The Case for Guides
More often than not, I use a honing guide when
sharpening. Though I can (and do) sharpen
without them, I nd them to be brilliant at
providing repeatable and quick results. And
when I teach sharpening, I like to show stu-
dents how to use a guide. Many woodwork-
ers sharpen infrequently and have difculty
training their hands to do what they want
every single time.
Im not hostile to hand-sharpening. If you
like the process and your results, please dont
change. But I also bristle when hand-sharpen-
ers run down people who use guides. The act
of sharpening already causes enough anxiety
among woodworkers.
About the Dull Tools
Hand tools come in a wide variety of sizes and
shapes, so I selected a broad range of shapes
that have been both easy and difcult for me
to secure in honing guides.
Some of the tools are common and are (usu-
ally) easy to secure in guides, such as 2"- and
2
1

4"-wide plane irons, a

1

2"-wide bevel-edge
chisel and a 1"-wide Japanese chisel.
Other tools are tricky because of their
shapes, such as a short spokeshave iron, a T-
shaped shoulder-plane iron, a fishtail-shaped
bench chisel and a skew chisel.
Many sizes and shapes. Here are some of the tools I sharpened (or attempted to sharpen) with the
four honing guides. From the left: plane irons for a block plane, spokeshave, bevel-up smoothing
plane, bevel-down smoothing plane and shoulder plane. The chisels include: a dovetail, shtail,
Japanese, bevel-edge, skew and mortising tool.
Understand
popularwoodworking.com 71
The gold-colored SharpSkate is the most
unusual honing guide in the test. To see
its inventor demonstrate it, go to:
popularwoodworking.com/feb08

Online EXTRAS
HONING GUIDES
Guidance on guides. Some
woodworkers have drawers
that are lled with honing
guides that have disap-
pointed them. We explore
four guides that we use in
our shop and explain their
pros and cons.
72 Popular Woodworking February 2008
And I threw in one tool, a traditional Eng-
lish mortising chisel by Ray Iles, that gives
almost all the honing guides a fit.
About the Guides
Honing guides have, in general, two ways
of going about their job of holding the work.
Some guides clamp a tool on its sides; the oth-
ers clamp a tool from above and below.
Neither system is superior in all cases. The
side-clamping guides excel at grabbing most
common woodworking tools and holding
them square, no matter how aggressively you
work. But these jigs fail when trying to hold
tools with an unusual shape or size.
The top-and-bottom clamping guides are
best at holding the weird stuff thats thick,
tapered or odd-shaped. These jigs arent as
good at holding the tool square as you work.
The work can shift out of square, especially if
you are removing a lot of metal or correcting
an edge that isnt square your finger pressure
will force the tool to shift in the guide.
Lets take a look at each of the four guides
and their weaknesses and strengths.
The Side-clamp Guide
When I started sharpening woodworking
tools, the rst guide I bought (and the one I
still use the most) is the common-as-dirt side-
clamp honing guide. This is sometimes called
the Eclipse guide after the name of a popular
English brand. The guide is rugged, common
and inexpensive (less than $20).
It grabs wide tools (up to 3
1

4" wide) using

the two lips at the top of the guide, and it is
designed to clamp bevel-edge chisels (up to 2"
wide) in the dovetailed channels below.
This guide is great if you dont have a lot of
unusual tools. Its my first choice for clamp-
ing my 2"-wide smoothing plane irons, block
plane irons and (as long as they arent too
narrow) most chisels.
The guides narrow,
1

2"-wide roller gives

you lots of control over the shape of your cut-
ting edge. If you apply uniform pressure on
the tools bevel, your cutting edges will be
straight. If you want a slightly curved cut-
ting edge, you can shift your finger pressure
exactly where you want to remove metal, and
youll end up with a cambered cutting edge for
a smoothing plane or other bench plane.
Where this jig fails is with tools that have
sides that are some other shape than a straight
line. A fishtail-shaped chisel is a nightmare
with this jig, as are skew chisels.
The tool also doesnt like thick chisels
without bevels on the sides such as mortis-
ing or firmer chisels. The chisels thick flanks
wont nest in the guides dovetailed ways.
It also doesnt like narrow block-plane
blades. Once a tool is skinnier than 1
3

8", then
you cant (easily) grip it with the lips on the top
of the guide. And good luck getting much of
anything unusual into the dovetailed-shaped
channel below. The guide doesnt like tools
thicker than
3

16" down there.

You can fiddle with the jig to get it to hold
most spokeshave blades, some shoulder plane
irons and some scraper plane irons (which
have to be honed at a high angle).
What else do you need to know about this
guide? These jigs can be poorly made. Ive
seen more than 100 of these in my career,
and Im amazed at how some are perfect and
others are covered in globs of paint. Use a
triangular-shaped file to remove excess paint
in the guides dovetail channel. And keep the
jigs wheel oiled. Its easy for the wheel to get
clogged and stop turning. When that hap-
pens, you end up sharpening a flat spot on
your wheel and the jig is worthless.
And finally, I recommend you always
secure your work in this guide using a screw-
driver. Hand pressure alone isnt enough to
prevent your tools from slipping.
Richard Kells No. 1 Honing Guide
Recently Ive become enamored with this side-
clamping jig because it handles some difcult
tools with great aplomb. Plus, its a beautifully
made tool and rolls smoothly in use on its
Ertalite TX low-friction wheels.
Richard Kell makes two versions of this
guide. The No. 1, which handles tools up
to 1
1

4" wide, and the No. 2, which handles

tools up to 2
5

8". The large guide isnt ideal for

shops that sharpen on 3"-wide sharpening
stones. Thats because when you clamp a wide
plane iron into the large guide, the wheels are
pushed out so far that its difficult (or impos-
sible) to keep the jig and iron on your stone.
You could build a sort of platform around your
stone (or you could sharpen with sandpaper
stuck to glass), but building a platform is more
work than is reasonable in my opinion.
The smaller Kell guide, however, is ideal
for narrow and unusual tools, and it is the
only tool that easily holds the Ray Iles mor-
tising chisel. The secret to the jig is, I think,
From the sides or from above? Honing guides
can clamp the work from the sides of the tool
(above) or from above and below (below). Nei-
ther tool-holding system is perfect.
Grab up here or down there. The
side-clamp guides hold wide tools
with the lips on top of the guide. It
holds the bevel-edge chisels (and
some other tools) using the dove-
tail-shaped channel below.
popularwoodworking.com 73
the plastic washers that do the actual clamp-
ing. These clear plastic washers are tough
but grippy, so they can hold a tool that has a
slight irregular shape, such as a handmade
Japanese chisel.
The other brilliant part of the Kell jig is
that you can clamp your work either above
or below its stainless steel guide bars. That
makes gripping unusual shoulder-plane irons
and dovetail chisels an easy proposition.
So where are the warts? The small Kell
wont clamp fishtail-shaped chisels or sharpen
skew chisels. The small Kell guide also wont
hold a standard spokeshave, smoothing-plane
or block plane blade.
Also, it will not allow you to create a blade
with a curved cutting edge. The jig forces
your edges to be straight, like it or not. The
upside to this is that if your only hand tools
are chisels (or you have mortising chisels
that give you sharpening fits), the Kell is an
excellent choice.
One final note: Im also quite fond of the
way you secure tools in the Kell. Unlike the
other side-clamping honing guide, you dont
need a screwdriver to torque the Kell down.
Here, finger pressure is enough.
Veritas Mk. II Honing Guide
The second honing guide I bought was actually
Veritass ancestor to this jig. I bought that older
jig which also clamped tools from above
and below to handle my odd-shaped tools.
That jig served me well, but tools would shift
around more than I liked.
This improved version of that older guide
is more complex, but the changes added accu-
racy, versatility and clamping power.
The Veritas is the only jig that allows you
to set the sharpening angle with an included
blade-registration jig.
You select the angle you want to sharpen
at, then set that angle on the included blade-
registration jig. Clip the jig to the front of your
guide then insert your tool between the jigs
two clamping bars (up to 2
7

8" wide). The

blade-registration guide sets the sharpen-
ing angle and holds the tool square while you
clamp it in place using two thumbscrews.
Then you remove the blade-registration jig
and start sharpening.
Its remarkable what tools the Veritas will
hold. With the exception of the Ray Iles mor-
tising chisel, the Veritas grabbed every tool
securely without complaint.
And its amazing the wide range of sharp-
ening angles the jig can be used to achieve.
Because it is so adjustable, you can use it to
sharpen weird angles (such as 20 back bevels
on handplane irons) that advanced sharpen-
ers sometimes require.
What are the downsides to the jig? They
are minor. The base model from the factory
will sharpen your tools straight across only.
Making a curved edge with this jig is nigh on
impossible without modifying the jig thanks
to the 2
1

8"-long straight roller. Veritas makes

a Camber Roller Accessory ($19.50) that
replaces your straight roller with one that has
a slight cigar shape. That allows you to camber
your cutting edges with finger pressure just
like the side-clamp honing guide.
Veritas also makes a Skew-registration Jig
($26.50) that allows you to set all sorts of oddly
skewed tools in the honing guide.
Like all honing guides that clamp from
above and below, there is always the slight
chance that your tool will shift in the guide,
especially if the tool is narrow, if you are work-
ing aggressively or if you are xing an out-of-
square cutting edge. And this is something to
be careful of with the Veritas.
One way to help prevent this is to take care
when securing your tools. The two thumb-
screws that control the jigs clamping bar
should be advanced so each one is applying
the same amount of pressure. If one of the
thumbscrews is doing most of the work, the
tool is more likely to shift.
The other thing to watch for on this jig is
the position of its roller. The jig allows you to
tweak the roller down a couple degrees so you
can create a secondary bevel on your tools. You
need to remember to return this roller to its
highest position when you are done sharpen-
ing, or you will introduce some minor errors
to your tools that can add some sharpening
time later on to x. Its a minor point, but it is
something to which to pay attention.
Pick an angle, any angle. The Veritas Mk. II
honing guide sets your sharpening angle with
an included blade-registration jig. The clamping
bars allow you to grip a variety of shapes.
Good and straight. The Kell jig is great for short
tools that need straight edges, such as plow
plane irons or this dovetail chisel. Its a versatile
jib because you can also clamp things below the
jigs guide bars, as shown.
Supplies
Woodcraft
800-225-1153 or
woodcraft.com
Side-clamp honing guide
#03A21, $11.99
Tools for Working Wood
800-426-4613 or
toolsforworkingwood.com
Richard Kell No. 1 honing guide
#EE-HGRK, $56.86
Lee Valley Tools
800-871-8158 or
leevalley.com
Veritas Mk. II honing guide
#05M09.01, $54.50
JapaneseTools.com
877-692-3624 or
getsharper.com
SharpSkate honing guide
$149.95
Prices correct at time of publication.
74 Popular Woodworking February 2008
The SharpSkate
The newest honing guide is the SharpSkate,
which was developed by sharpening guru
Harrelson Stanley of JapaneseTools.com. Like
the Veritas, the SharpSkate clamps blades
from above and below. But other than that,
the SharpSkate is different than all the other
honing guides in this article.
Every other honing guide that Ive used
pushes the tools cutting edge forward and
back on the stone, like a snowplow. The Sharp-
Skate works the edge side to side, more like a
rollerblade. The jig rolls on nine
3

8"-diameter
steel wheels.
The SharpSkates blade-clamping mecha-
nism is also unusual. Its a serrated V-shaped
clamping pad. The serrations grab your tools
(up to 2
7

16" wide) and squares them in the

jig. The V-shape of the pad allows you to flex
the pad slightly to generate serious clamp-
ing pressure.
This pad also can be rotated to grip skew
tools of any angle and has three detents (left
and right) for common skew angles.
The SharpSkate is the only honing guide
that could grip all the tools in the test well
enough to hone them reliably and repeat-
edly, though its hold on the fishtail chisel
and mortising chisel werent ideal.
The advantage of sharpening side-to-side
(as opposed to forward-and-back) is that you
can easily sharpen on all points of your stone
to spread out the wear and reduce your stone-
flattening chores. It takes a little practice, but
youll be an expert in less than an hour.
There are some quirks to the jig you should
be aware of. I recommend you use a hex-head
wrench to secure and release your blades.
Hand pressure is not always enough to pre-
vent the tool from shifting slightly.
Also, you need to watch where you put
your finger pressure with the SharpSkate.
One of the advantages of this jig is that you
can use finger pressure to create a cambered
cutting edge. But that finger pressure can
work against you when you dont want to
create a cambered or skewed shape to your
cutting edge.
Speaking of cambers, one of the great
advantages to the jig is you can hold small
blades at a variety of angles. The downside
comes when sharpening at really steep angles
for smoothing planes in bevel-up tools. As you
get into the really high angles (more than 40),
its difficult to get your fingers where they need
to be to create the camber with pressure.
Also, just as with the Veritas, you need to
take care that the tool doesnt shift slightly
out of square when working. Though the ser-
rations on its clamping pad work well, you
can still move the tool a bit when working
aggressively or correcting an edge.
One final note: Be sure to keep the nine
wheels clean. Theres some potential for sharp-
ening grit to accumulate near the wheels. A
quick spray of water keeps everything tidy.
Conclusions
The jig or jigs you choose should match your set
of tools today and what you might buy tomor-
row. If youre a chisel-and-block-plane wood-
worker (and always will be), the side-clamping
honing guide might be all you need.
The Kell is ideal for people with small-scale
tools with straight edges, or it is an excellent
second guide.
The Veritas is an excellent guide for begin-
ning and advanced sharpeners because it
allows you to hold a wide variety of tools and
accurately set them at the right angle every
time you pick up the jig.
The SharpSkate is also a good guide for
people with tools of varied shapes. It might be
the best guide for woodworkers who want to
graduate to hand sharpening some day. The
inventor rightly points out that his guide is a
good set of training wheels for some kinds of
hand sharpening.
For my work, I like having two guides.
One that clamps tools on the sides so I can get
a straight edge when I need it. And a second
guide that clamps above and below so I can
sharpen odd-shaped tools that I own now
(and those I might own in the future). Exactly
which guide or guides you purchase is up to
your tools and your pocketbook. PW
Chris is the editor of Popular Woodworking magazine
and the author of the new book Workbenches: From
Design & Theory to Construction & Use (Popular Wood-
working Books). You can buy the book through his web
site: lostartpress.com.
Roll with it. The SharpSkate hones your tools
side-to-side, which allows you to work all the
corners of your stones, even to work off the
stone if you like.
Holding Power of Four Honing Guides
TOOL VERITAS SHARPSKATE SIDE-CLAMP NO. 1 KELL
Chisels
1" Japanese Excellent Excellent Excellent Excellent
11

16" shtail OK OK
4
Poor Poor
1

4" dovetail Excellent Excellent Excellent Excellent

1

2" bevel edge Excellent Excellent Excellent Excellent

1

4" mortising Poor

1
OK
1
Poor Excellent
3

8" skew chisel Excellent Excellent No No

Plane irons
2
1

4" bevel-up Excellent OK

2
Excellent No
2" bevel-down Excellent Excellent Excellent No
1
1

4" block plane Excellent Excellent Poor

3
Excellent
3

4" shoulder plane Excellent OK

4
OK Excellent
2
1

8" spokeshave Excellent Excellent OK No

Notes:
1
Chisel repeatedly shifted out of square on tools rounded surface.
2
A steep position of tool in jig left little room for nger pressure for cambering edge.
3
Iron had to be sharpened in chisel notch, which had a poor t.
4
Fit in guide with some ddling.
popularwoodworking.com 75
The rise of power tools, safety razors and
pencil sharpeners years ago took away the
average persons need to develop sharpening
skills. Woodworkers, too, have lost the con-
nection between sharp tools and a simple,
readily called upon skill.
In my experience, many woodworkers
dont use good sharpening techniques and
may not have ever seen a truly super-sharp
edge. Not surprisingly, honing guides offer
an appealing solution for woodworkers who
have underdeveloped sharpening skills.
Its a quicker x than training ones hands
how to hold a tool, and all the responsibility
and blame can be laid at the doorstep to a
mechanical device.
Because I own Tools for Working Wood, I
have a vested interest in hawking woodwork-
ing tools and aids, but the truth is that for
me, woodworking is about developing hand
skills. Training hands to sharpen easily and
reexively gives you condence and makes
other woodworking skills easier to acquire
and then master.
When people tell me they have tried
freehand sharpening but the results werent
as good as using a jig, I always probe further
and have generally found bad technique,
insufcient practice, or folks not trusting their
own abilities.
I was lucky. I was taught woodworking
by Maurice Fraser. Typically in the rst class,
after a 40-minute demonstration and a 40-
minute hands-on session, Fraser had a group
of brand-new students (it was the rst class,
after all) sharpen a dull chisel to razor sharp-
ness without much trouble.
To get good at it took practice, but after
that rst class it wasnt anything anyone
thought twice about except maybe to
reread their notes and practice some more.
You can read about the way he taught
sharpening at www.antiquetools.com/sharp.
And a few years ago I did a video on Frasers
method for Norton Abrasives.
Why? It seems the common feeling these
days is that sharpening is something that
needs years of practice and only experts
can do it freehand.
This simply is not true.
Sharpening was something that you
learned quickly as a rst-day apprentice, or
you found another line of work. Woodwork-
ing is about learning dexterity. Training your
hands to sharpen is the rst step in training
your hands to cut straight, chisel to a line and
(in general) to not drop tools on your toe.
I disagree with a lot of teachers in the eld
on the subject of honing guides teach-
ers whom I respect so it bothers me that I
disagree with them. A lot of them say if they
show sharpening using a jig, students will
get sharp tools right away. Students wont
be discouraged and will be able to go on to
building a project. Maybe theres some truth
to this, but I think students would end up with
sharp tools and the ability to progress if they
were instructed that freehand sharpening is a
basic skill they could easily master.
Freehand sharpening the way we teach
it is faster and more repeatable than using
a guide because you dont have to continu-
ally build secondary bevels. You can trivially
sharpen and also include a true micro-bevel
that can easily be erased with each sharpen-
ing (which improves overall chisel perfor-
mance, not just edge strength). And of course
you can sharpen any tool, because the tech-
Joel Moskowitz on Why You Dont Need a Honing Guide
The ultimate honing guide. You can learn to sharpen your tools without the aid of jigs without too
much practice or difculty.
nique for one tool is the same for others.
You can also sharpen a lot of tools at the
same time without having to run each one
though all the stages before attaching the
jig to a new tool. When I teach people good
hand technique and they practice, most of
them nd the experience liberating. And
with their newfound skills theyre able to trust
their hands for more and more complicated
work earlier on in their training.
If you dont believe this is possible, take
a look at some early woodworking and
woodcarving books. Beginner projects were
far more involved in days past, and honing
guides werent really on the market in the
19th century. And by the way, if anyone tells
you that the people back then werent as
efcient at sharpening as we are now with
some honing guide, tell them to look at the
furniture made back then. I think the tools
were plenty sharp enough.
We and many other tool dealers stock the
short inexpensive DVDs that I mentioned
above. There are two versions showing the
same technique but with different technol-
ogy. You can nd links to them at popular-
woodworking.com/feb08.
So heres my challenge: Drop by our new
showroom in Brooklyn with a chisel. If I cant
teach you to sharpen it properly by hand, Ill
give you a free honing guide. (I do reserve the
right to rst grind the chisel to a nice hollow
grind on a powered grinder.)
Hopefully youll see that you dont need
the guide. JM
Joel is a woodworker, tool collector and the owner of
toolsforworkingwood.com, which sells hand and power
equipment (even honing guides).
When people tell me
that they tried freehand
sharpening but the results
werent as good as using a
jig, I always probe further
and have generally found
bad technique, insufcient
practice, or folks not trusting
their own ability.