This, My Friends, Is a Pencil Sharpener!
EDIT: Resurrected from Photo(scum)Bucket Hell, Feb 2018. Smitty
Picked this up at an estate sale, and only knew what it was because P. Leach had one in a Tool List some months ago. Yeah, I wanted the one he had, but just couldn't pull the trigger. This one was more affordable…
Consider this style of sharpening an evolutionary dead end. At the time this was available, the other prevalent style of sharpeners were thimble-like devices with wings, that were turned. This is mounted to the edge of a table and the pencil is drawn across the iron. Not this one, though, 'cause the iron is jagged and quite dull. So out came the DMTs.
Old habits die hard; I wanted a flat back to the iron and that wasn't as easy done as said.
So I moved the stone to the edge of my bench hook to get better alignment of thumb and fingers.
With the back honed and flat all the way in, up to about 1/4" from the edge, all was right with the world. I'm confident the iron will not get more use than that in several lifetimes… I held the iron very low to the DMT to get a primary bevel on the face of the iron, the did just a bit of polishing with strop as final cleanup. There was lots of back and forth at this point, and I didn't take pictures. I did stop before getting it to my best level of sharpening… too small to hold, and it's only sharpening pencils, for goodness sake. That, and I'm certain someone will run their thumb across the blade to 'see if it's sharp…'
Anyway, another old habit. I simply had to flatten the 'frog' before setting the iron in place and giving it a try.
It'll take some practice, like all good toolwork, but not bad for a shop pencil! Okay, it's pretty bad.
Love the new toy! Thanks for looking.
EDIT: Resurrected from Photo(scum)Bucket Hell, Feb 2018. Smitty
Picked this up at an estate sale, and only knew what it was because P. Leach had one in a Tool List some months ago. Yeah, I wanted the one he had, but just couldn't pull the trigger. This one was more affordable…
Consider this style of sharpening an evolutionary dead end. At the time this was available, the other prevalent style of sharpeners were thimble-like devices with wings, that were turned. This is mounted to the edge of a table and the pencil is drawn across the iron. Not this one, though, 'cause the iron is jagged and quite dull. So out came the DMTs.
Old habits die hard; I wanted a flat back to the iron and that wasn't as easy done as said.
So I moved the stone to the edge of my bench hook to get better alignment of thumb and fingers.
With the back honed and flat all the way in, up to about 1/4" from the edge, all was right with the world. I'm confident the iron will not get more use than that in several lifetimes… I held the iron very low to the DMT to get a primary bevel on the face of the iron, the did just a bit of polishing with strop as final cleanup. There was lots of back and forth at this point, and I didn't take pictures. I did stop before getting it to my best level of sharpening… too small to hold, and it's only sharpening pencils, for goodness sake. That, and I'm certain someone will run their thumb across the blade to 'see if it's sharp…'
Anyway, another old habit. I simply had to flatten the 'frog' before setting the iron in place and giving it a try.
It'll take some practice, like all good toolwork, but not bad for a shop pencil! Okay, it's pretty bad.
Love the new toy! Thanks for looking.