Eating My Words

 With a side of beans and a little BBQ sauce they are not too bad.

As anyone who has read this blog knows I've been a pretty strong advocate of free hand sharpening mostly because of speed and the ability to sharpen all your tools with little of the monkey motion required by many sharpening jigs. 

Lately I've been playing with the Tormek and the results are really good. The big difference was after watching one of Tormek's instruction videos I took another look at the Tormek's leather stropping wheel and I realized with using the leather wheel to buff after grinding on the standard wheel followed by polishing with the Japanese water wheel I ended up with a Unicorn profile and not just a Unicorn profile but a damn sharp one.

The process still has the problem of not being usable on 100% of my tools but it gets close and some of the tools like shavespoke cutters (using the small knife jig) work much better on the Tormek than freehand. The new "77" jig puts a beautiful smooth camber on plane cutters and is very controllable with as little or much as you want. The biggest group that does not work with the Tormek are the Japanese chisels and with those I really like the look of the bevel finished on JNATS and a flat bevel anyway. So it isn't a deal breaker.

If the cutter isn't in bad shape, it is close to as fast as free hand and if using synthetic water stones I expect faster because there is no need for stone maintenance.  

Over the years I've had a love/hate, mostly hate, relationship with the Tormek and have come close to selling it many times. I'm glad I didn't. If you have a Tormek it is worth a go.

ken