Sharp as a Samurai Sword

While I was down south I managed to find some time to sharpen my planes and hand chisels. I took them with me because dad's really good at this sort of stuff (he makes his own knives from bits of expensive stainless steel).

Rather than using a stone dad uses wet and dry paper on top of a small sheet of float glass. Starting with 100 grit and moving on down to 1200 for a mirror finish making sure to keep it very wet the whole time with kerosene (or in this case we used gum turpentine because it was all we had on hand).

It worked a treat. We re-ground all the chisel bevels and flattened the plane soles by hand this way too and it's all looking better than new.

I'm going to get myself set up to do the same thing at my place. I'm hooked on ninja sharp tools now.