Product Description

This handbook concentrates on waterstones and teaches the reader how to use them to sharpen chisels, plane irons, carving tools and knives. It includes step-by-step photographs to show the precise details.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1618223 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Amazon.com Review
As any woodworker knows, working with properly sharpened tools makes even the rank amateur a better woodworker almost instantly. Kirby has taken a step-by-step approach to showing the reader in explicit detail how to keep common workshop tools perfectly sharp: exactly how to hold the tools, where and how to stand, and how to move. Extremely well illustrated and indexed, this is a new workshop classic and should find its way into any serious woodworker's (or even not so serious hobbyist's) library. --Mark Hetts

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Sharpening with Waterstones
I've been getting into sharpening over the last year, since I've started using handplanes seriously. I started with the scary sharp (sandpaper) method, but recently thought I'd try out waterstones. I already had a couple of books that discuss sharpening - Garret Hack's "The Handplane Book" and Leonard Lee's "The Complete Guide to Sharpening".

I was having a little trouble with my new waterstones, so I thought Kirby's book might give me some insight since it's specifically about waterstones. I should add that I'm not a big Kirby fan, having found his articles in Fine Woodworking to be highly opionated and non-empathetic with beginners.

This book is much the same as his articles. He dismisses the use of sharpening jigs, does not discuss any of the problems you might face with waterstones or even sharpening in general, and doesn't offer much detail or reasoning to back up his recommendations. I could go on, but basically I found this book to essentially be a subset of the sharpening information contained in Hack's and Lee's books, which are significantly more detailed and contain a wider breadth of information.

60 seconds?
Here's the whole book- Buy a grinder. Sharpen your blade. Use a waterstone, and make it sharper. Here's some illustrations.
Not very helpful. It didn't really cover anything for amatuers, but it didn't give much to a pro either. 2/3rds of the book is his view on how to set up a bench grinder.

Not bad...
I purchased this book to learn to get a keen edge on my tools in a minimum amount of time. This book offers a number of good pointers, although much of the advice is also to be taken with a grain of salt (the uselessness of sharpening guides, for example). Overall, a good book. The size and readability make it perfect for the workshop shelf as opposed to the office library.