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Sometimes I feel a tad guilty for owning tools from Veritas, Lie-Nielsen and Blue Spruce. But then I pick up my very first chisel and I get over it.

I've had that chisel since I graduated from college -- it's a 1/2" chisel I bought at WalMart and is branded Popular Mechanics (is that an example of irony? I can't tell. I'm American).

In the interest of full disclosure, the following book – "The Perfect Edge" – is being published by my parent company, F+W Media. Also, I consider the author, Ron Hock, a good friend. Oh, and once I got on stage and shook it with a belly dancer in Greece after too many grape leaves and shots of ouzo.

OK, now that all that's on the table, I think I can also say I'm a big fan of the two other big sharpening books out there: "The Complete Guide to Sharpening" by Leonard Lee (Taunton) and "Taunton's Complete Illustrated Guide to Sharpening" by Thomas Lie-Nielsen. I've also sharpened a few tools in the last 15 years using everything from a brick to a $1,000 electric-powered record player.

In a move that will please traditionalists and people who pare, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks has started offering some plane irons and chisels made using oil-hardening (O1) steel – in addition to the more modern A2 steel.

In my book, there is one rule for buying vintage tools: Buy them from someone who will take them them back if the tool stinks.

That rule keeps me on my toes on eBay, at auctions, flea markets and at garage sales. If I can't completely inspect, disassemble and use a tool before I buy it, I really want a money-back guarantee.

Some things about sharpening everyone knows (it’s two metal surfaces, an abrasive and friction). Other things nobody knows (such as the best system ever). And there is a third category of sharpening facts: Things that everyone should know, but some people don’t.

I’ve been doing a lot of sharpening these last few weeks, both for my own work and for tool testing. And three things have struck me as belonging to that third category. All three things are little steps I take that speed up the sharpening process.

As a beginning dovetailer, I had a crappy set of plastic-handled chisels, a newspaperman’s salary and a copy of the Japan Woodworker catalog.

All three things conspired to make me miserable.

I wanted to cut dovetails with bold angles, but my crappy chisels had side bevels that were as big as Cheddar Mountain at Bonanza. So every time I went to clean out the waste between my tails, the side bevels would tear a bite out of my tails.

When The Schwarz first handed me the M.Power PSS1, I was intrigued because sharpening has always been my woodworking Achilles’ heel – if you’re looking to round the end of a chisel, just hand it to me. I can do it. Having a device that locked everything in place to sharpen and touch-up my chisels and plane blades could be a godsend. If you’re a hand-sharpening guru, I doubt this is the setup you’ll be interested in using. But if you struggle with sharp, read on.

The most miserable aspect of hand work is setting up the tools for the first time. Removing the coarse manufacturing scratches from the unbeveled faces of your edge tools can be grueling, boring and filthy work.

(One side note before someone spanks me about David Charlesworth's "ruler trick." I really think you need to remove those deep scratches before you polish the tip with the assistance of a ruler. If you don't, the deep scratches will remain or you'll be ruler tricking that tool for a very long time.)

After setting up hundreds of tools for testing during the last 13 years, I've found that a few inexpensive magnets make the job easier and more accurate.

Get a Grip
I don't know about you, but my left hand gets pretty cramped when flattening the unbeveled faces of my tools. Once I get a cramp (even though I've waited 30 minutes after eating) I find it difficult to apply enough pressure. So the flattening process takes even longer. And so my hand cramps some more. And when I walk out of the shop, my left hand looks like the shriveled prop from "The Monkey's Paw."

So I stick a magnetic base from our dial indicator on the blade and grip that. No, it doesn't magnetize the tool. And no, in my experience, it doesn't bend the tool. What it does do is speed the process. It requires much less effort to keep the blade against the stone. My guess is that it cuts my flattening time in half.

The magnet, which is from Grizzly's G9623 Magnetic Base With Indicator ($16.95 total), doesn't slip or let go – until you want it to. I've also used the square magnetic bases that have a switch. These work fairly well, though I like the lower profile and shape of my base.

Another option might be the Mag-Jig gizmos, though I haven't tried them.

No More Slippery Rules
I do use the ruler trick quite a bit, especially when I teach sharpening and time is of the essence. Students love the trick, but they struggle to keep the ruler stuck to their stone. It tends to slide around, no matter what they try.

My solution? Magnets again. The ruler I use for sharpening is a 12"-long job that I received as a gift for subscribing to the British magazine Good Woodworking. One side is metric, so it's fairly worthless to an Imperialist like myself.

Like all rulers, it would slip on my stone. So I stuck a couple rare-earth magnets on the back; this prevents the ruler from sliding on the stone. I've been doing this for years; it works brilliantly.

Now the only thing that makes me nuts about sharpening is the grime (surgical gloves don't work – my hands get as hot as a monkey's bum). Perhaps I need to get my boss to start paying for manicures – that would definitely get Art Director Linda Watts and Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick interested in sharpening.

— Christopher Schwarz

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I'm fairly well convinced that my ears are different than yours. The music I like isn't going to sound the same to you. It's almost impossible for me to share with another person what the Heartless Bastards sounds like to me. Language is too imprecise.

Same goes with the eyes (and tastebuds). How you experience a Paul Klee or a Hebrew National is impossible to share with me.

The problem is that our senses are tied to our big, dumb brains, which process and filter the waves of information our organs receive.

And so it makes me crazy to explain how to sharpen to people because it involves so many senses (except taste I think) that are processed. And there is so much information that comes in through our eyes, fingers and ears that beginners cannot focus on what is important.

So here is what I see when I sharpen a plane iron. I'm going to show what it looks like on the unbeveled side, which I call the "face" and others call the "back."

Above is what the face of a smoothing plane iron looks like when it is fresh from the wrapper. The vertical scratches are deep and are left behind by the manufacturing process. These have to be removed. So I begin by abrading the tool on my #1,000-grit waterstone.

After a short time on the #1,000-grit stone the metal gets a scratch pattern that looks like this. I move the iron back and forth diagonally on the stone and examine it every couple minutes. I'm looking for where the deep vertical scratches go all the way to the end of the iron. That's where the metal is weakest and the edge will begin to break down. The arrows point to where I see problem scratches. When these scratches disappear at the end of the iron, I can move on to the next grit – #4,000 grit.

Usually #4,000-grit stones start to give me a good polish. And so the #1,000-mesh pattern is generally replaced by more of a polish. Some #4,000-grit stones don't do much polishing, but most do. Try working the iron in one direction – this brings up the polish faster.

If I can see the deep vertical scratches, I might need to drop back to the #1,000 grit. In the drawing above you can see some #1,000-grit scratches and one deep manufacturing scratch at the right that are problems. Usually I'll drop back to the #1,000-grit stone here for a few minutes to get that deep scratch out.

I'll also start to see faint horizontal scratches left behind by the #4,000-grit stone. When the #1,000-grit scratches and manufacturing scratches are gone, move to your next stone. For me, that's the #8,000-grit waterstone.

This stone should bring up a nice mirror-like polish. You might have some horizontal scratches from this stone, but those generally aren't a problem. Look for any #1,000-grit diagonal scratches (as shown with an arrow above). Keep working until all the vertical and diagonal scratch marks are polished away right at the cutting edge. Don't worry about the scratches that don't make it to the edge.

I'm sure all this looks different to other experienced sharpeners, but these crude pencil drawings are about as well as I can explain it without coming to your house.

— Christopher Schwarz

The hardest thing about dovetailing isn't the sawing or the chiseling or the layout.

It's the seeing.

I don’t think I can teach anyone to see, but I can show you where to look. Developing your eye – plus your ability to sense the perpendicular – will do more for your dovetailing skills than any jig, square, knife or saw.

Like everything with dovetailing, it all begins at the baseline – the thin scratch across the grain that determines the limits of the joint. When you remove the waste between the tails and the pins, a frequent error is to leave too much material behind, which prevents the joint from closing.

You need to be able to glance at the joint and sense immediately if the baselines on the front and back of your workpiece line up without any waste between them. Ian Kirby and other woodworking instructors recommend using a small square to probe the joint and look for humps and bumps.

I have never had much luck with the small square approach. If I have to probe a joint, I'll do it with the long side of a chisel and see if the tool rocks back and forth on anything. Then I use the same chisel to tease out the garbage.

But it's rare that I ever do that. Instead, I hold the board up to eye level and take a quick look. After enough dovetails, you'll see it and know exactly what to do.

And the truth is, I rarely have to do much to my baselines except chase some little bits of junk in the corners. And that's because I have a good sense of the perpendicular. We're all born with it, but it's like a muscle. You need to work at it.

When I'm chiseling out the waste between my tails and pins I hold the chisel at 90° to the work and stand to the side of the tool to ensure it's at 90°. Again, other woodworking authors recommend you use a square or even a block of wood clamped to your baseline as a reminder. But this is really a "Use the Force Luke" moment. You know 90°. Just position yourself so you can see it.

(Quick side note: The more hand work you do, the more you'll find this comes in handy for boring and mortising especially.)

The other time this sense of 90° comes in handy is when you are sawing your pins out and the waste blocks on the ends of your tail boards. A pencil line or knife line is handy, but the real guide is your gut. You'll know when things are going wrong, even if the line is covered in dust.

Once you start developing these two skills you'll find that you can put your winding sticks away when processing boards with your handplanes. Your sense of square will show you the high spots in a board at a glance.

This blog post is not brought to you by the High Times beauty pageant. Promise.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Plastic mallets can be highly durable, but they always look like plastic. Wooden mallets look great, but they sure get beat up after a few years of use.

Now Dave Jeske at Blue Spruce Toolworks has produced a mallet where every cell of the wood is infused with acrylic. This results in a mallet that looks and feels like wood, but it takes a bad-dog beating like plastic.

Jeske had one of these mallets at the Woodworking in America conference, and I ordered one shortly after returning home. (Despite the fact that I got free admission, that conference turned out to be a very expensive weekend for me.)

The mallet arrived yesterday, and the entire staff went nuts over it. Senior Editor Glen D. Huey, who has a thing about both round mallets and figured maple, held onto it for such a long time that I was a little worried that I wasn't getting it back.

Then, when I mentioned the mallet's head was infused with acrylic, we all immediately went to the shop to beat some things with it. After some serious pounding, we could barely even make a smudge on the surface. This morning I took it into the shop and beat a chisel about 120 times as hard as I could on one spot on the mallet's head.

Right now I'm looking at the mallet and cannot find the spot that took the beating.

The mallet weighs 16 ounces, the head is quilted maple and the handle is African blackwood. The two parts are joined with a stainless steel tenon and a small brass bead. If you've ever seen any of Jeske's work, then you know that it is over-the-top beautiful. The mallet costs $80. Photos do not do it justice. Check it out here on the Blue Spruce site.

And yes, I know that you can build your own highly effective mallet using shop scraps or (if that's still too expensive), may I recommend laminating together several hundred free stirring sticks from Starbucks.

Just sayin'.

If you want to read more about the acrylic infusing process (it's fascinating), check out this links to WoodSure, which performs the process using vacuums. (Think kitchen countertops, bathroom floors.) Also take note that they can add dye during the process, which creates some pretty amazing results. The process is covered in more detail here.

Jeske also uses the same acrylic-infusing process with his bench chisels with great results.

It's making me think what other tools could benefit from an acrylic injection.

— Christopher Schwarz

Sometimes brand-new chisels and planes (even from the best manufacturers) don't hold an edge well. I've seen some edges crumple like tin foil after two whacks with a mallet or two strokes on a board.

Weak edges aren't as common a problem as weak chin lines, but they do happen. When I teach a class of 18 people, for example, there's always one person with a spanking new tool that would crumble if you chopped a Moon Pie.

My solution to this problem has always been to take the tool to the grinder and create a new primary bevel. Then I grind off just a tad more. I take the tool back to the stones for honing and then (by magic) the tool holds its edge.

The strategy almost always works, but I've never known exactly why.

So I went to tool steel guru Ron Hock of Hock Tools looking for answers. As always, Ron set me straight. There could be two culprits: too much heat or too much oxygen during the manufacturing process.

"Should the blade be subjected to temperatures in excess of the steel's critical temperature (the temperature at which the iron crystals transform from ferrite to austenite) the steel will tend to form large grains, which don't stick to each other as well as we'd like," Hock writes. "This will cause the resulting steel to be very brittle and crumbly, though it will test as properly hard with a Rockwell hardness test."

If a tool breaks, you can see evidence of this problem, according to Hock. In a well-treated tool the fracture should look a very fine-grained gray (almost like gray primer paint).

"If you see sparklyness instead, it's been overheated," Hock writes, "Which is probably why it broke and you're looking at it."

Because the cutting edge of a tool is typically the thinnest part of the tool, it's the easiest part to overheat, even if the overheating is brief.

The other culprit is oxygen. As steel approaches its critical temperature, the carbon is released and is free to migrate about the steel. If there is air present when it reaches the surface (such as when heat-treating in air with a torch or forge) the carbon atom will run off with the oxygen atom to become carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide and the carbon is lost from the steel, according to Hock.

Most professional heat treaters use furnaces with atmosphere control (vacuum or inert or carbonaceous gas) to minimize this problem, which is called "decarburization."

"This creates a low-carbon skin on the steel," Hock writes. "This would not be a big deal except for the fact that the flat back of the tool is the cutting edge, and any loss of carbon results in a loss of hardness. Here again, the edge takes it in the shorts with the most to lose and the least to lose it from."

Both of these problems can completely ruin a piece of steel through-and-through. But usually the damage is localized, and you can get to the good stuff by grinding away some of the bad stuff.

Just tell your spouse you're exfoliating.

— Christopher Schwarz

Reaching underneath my tool rack can be like sticking my hand in a lion's mouth.

All of the dangling edge tools have alternately shaved, nicked and scared the bejeezus out of me over the years. So I try to protect the tips of my sharp tools whenever I can. And when a tool doesn't come with a tip protector, I make one from a business card.

Fold the business card in half and lay the tip of the tool into the crease. Fold the card shut on the tool.

Wrap the sides of the business card around the edges of the tool. For narrow tools you might have to snip some of the business card away.

Then wrap the card tightly with tape and cover the whole thing with gold leaf (just kidding). I use painter's tape, which we have in abundance here.

These home-brew protectors stay on fairly well and last a long time.

— Christopher Schwarz

Dave Jeske's tool-making shop in Oregon City, Ore., is in exactly the same place as his new bench chisel: halfway between the islands and toolmaking traditions of Japan and England.

Like a Japanese chisel, the new Blue Spruce Toolworks bench chisel connects the blade and the handle using a combination of a socket and a tang. It also has a price tag that is more in line with a handmade Japanese tool (a set of five Blue Spruce chisels costs $435.)

But like a Western chisel, the chisel's blade is long and flat on its face. And the handle is something else entirely. It has a Western feel, but it also has a high-tech secret (more on that in a minute).

This week I set up a 3/8" Blue Spruce chisel and put it through its paces in the shop. It's an impressive tool, and is different than competitors in many significant ways.

Blades for Chopping
The 5"-long blade is ideal for chopping out waste between dovetails. The sides of the blade are beveled perfectly to get the tool into the acute corners of dovetails without bruising your tails. The blade is A2 and comes with a 30° grind, also an ideal setup for chopping all day without having to rehone.

The unbeveled face of the tool I tested was fairly flat. It took about 20 minutes to polish it up from #1,000 up to #8,000. That time is a lot shorter than most garden-variety chisels from Germany but longer than the Lie-Nielsens, which are always delightfully flat right out of the wrapper.

The Tang and Socket
Many woodworkers will be delighted to see that Jeske adopted the tang-and-socket approach to attach the blade to the handle. This complex connection method gives you the best of both worlds. You get the durability of a socket and the secure connection offered by the tang. Pure tang chisels tend to split their handles after some abuse. Pure socket chisels tend to have their handles come loose when the weather changes.

Like all of Jeske's tools, you can really see how he fusses over quality when you examine the transition between metal and wood. It's a perfect mate.

The Handles
The 4-1/2"-long handles are longer than the Lie-Nielsen handles, which some people will like. This is really a point of personal preference. The longer handle tends to add weight, which some woodworkers don't like. And indeed, the Blue Spruce chisels are heavier than the Lie-Nielsens thanks to the longer blades and handles. But they aren't ungainly. You can still wield the Blue Spruce like a pencil when you are chopping.

The most surprising thing about the handles is that they are figured maple that has been infused with acrylic. At Jeske's insistence, I beat the handle with a 16 oz. steel hammer about 20 times and couldn't see a single dent. Impressive.

In all, I think Jeske has a winner here. After I get some more experience with the tool in our shop, I'll report back on its edge life and overall comfort.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Stanley Works will unveil a new premium bevel-edge chisel this year that bears some similarities to the company's vaunted Everlasting line of chisels that were made between 1911 and 1942.

Like the Everlasting chisels, the new Stanley chisels will have the blade, head and shank made from one piece of solid steel with wooden scales. The vintage Everlastings were a little different in that the wooden handles completely surrounded the steel shank. The new chisels will have the beech scales infilled into the steel, much like a H.D. Smith perfect-handled screwdriver.

Stanley officials said the chisels will be made from high-carbon steel hardened to 59-62 on the Rockwell "c" hardness scale. The tools will be hand-finished and be available in the following sizes: 1/4", 1/2", 3/4", 1", 1-1/4" and 1-1/2". The tools will be sold individually or in boxed sets of four and six sizes, officials said. They will be available only in woodworking specialty stores. Estimated pricing for the individual chisels is $17.99 to $19.99 each.

Company officials released the two computer renderings shown above. Production models are not yet available for testing.

Stanley has been testing prototypes of this chisel with woodworkers and builders, and 74 percent of those who used it said they'd consider switching to this tool. Because of its heavy-duty construction, Stanley officials said the tool will be ideal for both workshop and installation work.

From a furniture-making perspective, woodworkers will be interested in how narrow the side bevels of these chisels will be. Narrow side bevels are ideal for hand-dovetailing. It's hard to tell from a computer rendering what the tool will look like in steel, so I wouldn't make too much of the illustrations.

Also, many chisel users are keenly interested in how long their chisels will hold an edge. In my book, Stanley has always done well in this department. The yellow-handled Stanley U.K. chisels have always maintained a terrific edge for me. And the company's FatMax chisels have also been surprisingly durable and easy to sharpen (I have a set at home).

We'll obtain a set of these new chisels as soon as we can and report all the details. The chisel market is a crowded one (just open any woodworking catalog), so the quality of these new tools will be closely watched by competitors and consumers.

Also, a Stanley official sent me updated computer renderings of the company's new line of premium handplanes that we reported on here. There have been a couple changes to the details, particularly in the shoulder plane. I've posted these new renderings below.

— Christopher Schwarz

The standard-angle block plane.

The low-angle block plane.

The low-angle jack plane.

The No. 4 smoothing plane.

The shoulder plane.