The craft of cabinetmaking is all to do with control. If you have control of your hand tools there is a strong possibility that you will be able to do what you want to do with the piece of wood in front of you. If you don't have control, then the chances are the piece of wood will win. If your tools are sharp then they will require less force to drive them through the wood, if they are dull they will require greater force and consequent loss of control. In this way sharpness is a doorway to the acquisition of skill.

There are three steps in sharpening a cutting iron. The first is the laborious process of getting the back of the cutting iron flat and polished to a mirror shine. This is a laborious process but, fortunately, it will only be done once for the back of your iron will only ever touch your finest sharpening stone. Why bother getting it flat, you say. Well, with a plane iron it is generally pretty important to have it flat because, as I explained last month, the rear surface of the cutting iron must be in contact with the "back iron" in order to function properly. But, apart from that, if an iron is to be sharpened successfully, first a burr must be created and then it must be polished off. I stress the word polished for you don't break it off, you don't waggle it about on the palm of your hand, you polish it off and if you are going to polish it off, the back of the iron has to have intimate contact with your finest sharpening stone. A wobbly chisel back would not have this intimate contact.

In order to get the back of the chisel or plane iron flat my workshop uses a thick metal plate which is periodically checked for flatness and reground.

Upon this plate is sprinkled 150 grit carborundum and water, and the cutting iron is rubbed until an even grey colour appears over its entire surface. I should issue a word of caution here, you can take perfection to too great an extreme. With chisels it is essential that the corners are coming up well, with a plane iron it is essential that the centre is coming up well. You don't need to do the whole length of a plane iron, just the front 20 mm or so.

Next comes the polishing. My workshop went over to Japanese water stones a good few years ago and I have never regretted this move. The stones themselves are very soft so they periodically need to be checked for flatness and, when they get out of true, a bit of emery paper placed on the melamine worktop and lubricated with water seems to do the job. We have two general purpose stones, one is a 1000 grit stone, which is used to turn a burr, and the second is a polishing, or gold stone, of 6000 grit. You can buy a super deluxe gold stone at considerable expense. We did have a couple of these but I am sad to say that we didn't notice a great deal of improvement in our work.

Once the cutting iron is generally flattened, test this by quickly rubbing on the 1000 grit stone and then transferring to the gold stone. Don't spend too long on the 1000 grit stone as the real test is the gold stone. If there are bumps or hollows then the gold stone will tell you. This will mean you will have to return to the 150 grit carborundum. All the polishing stones are doing is polishing not flattening so go back to the carborundum if you have any doubts about the flatness of the surface you are creating. It may take you up to a couple of hours to get a large chisel or a plane iron beautifully polished but you should then be able to hold it at arms length and see the reflection of a

tired and bloodshot eye ball. This will be you. Once you have got your iron into this condition never touch this surface of the iron with anything except your finest gold stone. You only do this task once, so it is worth doing it properly the first time.

Next most of the instruction manuals say grind your iron to 25 degrees. Easier said than done! Although we have an engineers grinder in the workshop it is not a well used or well loved piece of equipment and it certainly wouldn't be used for this very delicate task. There are many other water stones or water cooled grinders on the market but we use a machine called Sharpenset. I have had one now for nearly fifteen years and it hasn't let me down yet. I am frequently asked by people which machine should they buy first, the table saw or the bandsaw. My answer is almost invariably don't buy either of the things, buy yourself a decent grinder. If you can't sharpen your tools properly neither the table nor the band saw is going to help you make quality furniture.

So, grind the angle to 25 degrees. That's pretty good advice for most general purpose use. There may be occasions, for instance on paring chisels, where you might want to go a bit below this but for most cutting irons you grind at 25 degrees and then hone at an angle between 25 and 30 degrees. If you go above 30 degrees and it is very easy to do so, what happens is that you create a very strong edge that requires a great deal of power to drive it through the wood. Once again you come back to "the more power required to drive the tool the less control".

We don't use a grinding jig to set up this 25 degrees but there is a little plastic template with a notch cut in the corner that was given away with one of the magazines that gives us some idea of what 25 degrees should look like. Be careful to let the water run over the cutting edge, don't force the cutting action otherwise the temper will be drawn from the steel and you will get a small blue patch which won't hold a proper cutting edge. But for those of you that don't have a mechanised grind stone it is quite possible to do this with a very coarse stone and a honing guide, though this isn't something I would recommend.

first published in The Woodworker Magazine by David Savage in the series CRAFT OF CABINETMAKING 13