Sunday, September 13, 2015

LN Honing Guide

Ralph of the "Accidental Woodworker" has posted a couple or three times about the LN Honing Guide, guess I will post about it as well. The reason I bought the guide was to help keep my pig sticker mortise chisels square. They, narrow pig stickers, are not the easiest chisel to freehand and at the same time mortise chisels are the only chisel I'm anal about keeping square. A honing guide if it worked could help.

Well I finally got the mortise jaws for the guide, damn....No joy, the pig sticker is too thick to fit in the mortise jaw. From the base of the jaw (top of the fixed part of the guide) to the lip on the mortise jaw is 12mm. My pig stickers (I really like typing and saying "pig sticker", can you tell?) are 15mm to 18mm thick in the area where they need to fit the honing guide.

I thought, well Bubba maybe one of those pretty LN mortise chisels with the hornbeam handle would work so I whip it out, my AmEx that is, and get a couple or three LN mortise chisel sent out here to the desert. They will have to work, LN makes both amiright?

Well yesterday there was excitement in the Old Pueblo, the UPS girl showed up with a box from Maine in hand. I ripped the box open, grabbed the 1/2" chisel and tried to mount it on the honing guide....damn, damn, double damn. It didn't fit.

The LN chisel is closer but still a silly mm too thick. Here is a photo, click it to make it big:



You may be able to see the lip of the jaw to the base is 12mm, the mortise chisel is close to 13mm. Last time I checked 13 is larger than 12, my guess it is the same using imperial measurement or metric.

Of course I may be overlooking something, it has happened before, and if I am I'll have another "never mind" moment.

Ralph mentioned that LN will make custom jigs for the guide. I'll call tomorrow, a jig with 20mm between the base and the lip would be perfect.


7 comments:

  1. I can't believe that their chisels don't fit the guide that they said they made for their tools. QC and RD was OTL on this day. For the metric challenged I measured the mortise jaws at a hair under 9/16".

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  2. I have sharpened my pigstickers using my good old chesty side clamp jig. I simply let it ride lower in the jig and of course it meant that my required distance is changed for the same angle.
    I simply made my chisel set up block accordingly. See one of my previous post on the side clamp when I bought my replacement. That may work for you on this Cadillac of the side clamping jig?

    Bob, who is going to hold on on this jig, don't want to have to buy a cabinet full of adapter for it!!!

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  3. Chesty?? No idea what I wrote but stupid auto correct on my IPad is doing its funny thing grrr.

    Bob, looking to turn off stupid thing

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  4. Ken,
    just got off the chat line with LN and they don't often custom jaws. They said it was too difficult to make them. Deneb did tell me this years before they started making them.

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  5. Anonymous8:15 AM

    The Veritas narrow-blade guide slips on my mortise chisels, so that's out too. I guess there's still no good solution other than freehanding these.

    Derek

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  6. Derek,

    I think you have broken the code. Maybe some day, but it's not a big deal to go on working the mortise chisels by hand,

    ken

    ReplyDelete