Flip Your Honing Guide to Back

Flip Your Honing Guide to Back-Bevel Your Plane Irons You can get a repeatable back bevel on a hand-tool blade by simply flipping the honing guide and riding its top edges.A razor-sharp edge is the junction of two polished surfaces. It’s relatively easy to achieve a high polish on the bevel side of your hand-tool blades using a honing guide. Making sure the back of the blade has that same polish—all the way to the tip of the tool—is trickier. This is why many woodworkers—on their plane blades anyway—hone a tiny, shallow bevel on the back side of the edge. This is generally done with the finest stone, at the end of the honing process. (A back bevel should not be used on chisels, which require a fully flat back to work properly.) The usual way to back-bevel a plane blade is the “ruler trick,” in which a thin ruler is placed under the blade to raise it slightly on the stone. The problem here is that in order to hit the back bevel at the same angle, you have to maintain the same distance from the ruler to the edge of the blade each time you sharpen. Otherwise, the honing action might not reach to the very tip. My discovery is that honing guides have a built-in solution. By simply flipping the guide and riding its top edges, you’ll get a repeatable back bevel. I set my honing guide for a 27° angle on the main bevel of the tool, so the blade always projects the same amount from the guide, and my back bevels are as consistent as my front ones. By the way, the back bevel adds roughly 3°, bringing my overall tip angle to 30°. Because the back bevel only requires a few soft swipes on the finest honing grit, with pressure applied only at the tip of the blade, neither the stone nor the honing guide wears down very much. The big win is speed, because you can hone as usual and then just flip the guide for the very last step. I sharpen my plane blades on diamond stones and then use a leather strop for final honing, so I touch the back bevel on both the finest stone and the strop. But the trick will work just as well on your finest waterstone. —TIM KORBES, Wolfenbüttel, Germany Fine Woodworking Recommended Products Stanley Powerlock 16-ft. tape measure Suizan Japanese Pull Saw Rockler Silicone Sharpening Stone Tray Log in or create an account to post a comment. Sign up Log in