Sanding Sharpener

      

      That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

So some time ago I bought a strip sander from Lee Valley (I've covered using it for curved blades in earlier posts). During covid lockdown I somehow stumbled across the tormek.  Maybe I was thinking about buying the Tormek I don't remember really. Pandemic fog is a thing. 

Anyway I didn't get the tormek but I did buy the guide bar and sought about seeing if I could use it on my sander. 

Well I did get it mounted and was able to use it on carving gouges which are definitely not my strong suit when it comes to sharpening.   

I use the big gouge to trim the tops of the legs and ends of tenons etc.  I noticed the other day it had some pretty good nicks in it so I decided to see how fast I could sharpen it start to finish. 

I used four different grits in the interest of time...180, 600, 1000 and 2000. Normally I wouldn't go all the way down to 180 but like I said there were nicks. 

I didn't take any shots as I was just seeing how quickly I could sharpen from nicked to razor. 

The official time was 2:40. That's it. Another thing I like about the sander is there isn't any (well very little) set up. No stones to wet not paper to dig out. It's literally just set the bevel, mark it make sure it's hitting right and sand for 2 minutes. Done. You can see the results below. Plenty sharp for me.