Sharpening Large Gouge

A large gouge takes the same road as any other tool, just a longer one. Clamp it square in a Tormek SVS-50, grind the bevel it already has, then walk up through 220, 3600 and 6000 grit before the strop and the felt wheel finish it.

I own a Pfeil #7 that is one of the biggest gouges in my shop. That gouge is stage number one on a large carving. When there is a mountain of wood in the way, this is the tool that moves it, and I reach for it before anything else. The day I filmed this lesson it had a nick in the edge. I hit something in the wood, a nail I think. The steel held. The edge did not.

Anybody who owns a gouge this size runs into the same question sooner or later. How do you sharpen the thing? A big tool does not come with a small answer.

Key takeaways

• A big tool walks the same stages as a small one. Only the clock changes.
• Tormek makes the SVS-50, which holds what the standard gouge jigs cannot, and it costs around $70.
• Keep the angle the tool already carries if you drive it with a mallet.
• Leave a hairline of steel at the edge while grinding, or it comes out wavy.
• Grind, take the marks off, polish, strop, buff. Then raise a small bevel on the inside.
• Minutes on the machine against hours on a stone, and that trade runs through the whole sharpening course.

Why not just put it on a stone?

Of course it can be done. This gouge would go on a stone and take the whole job by hand. Nothing stops you.

What stops me is the bevel. I want the same angle right across that sweep, and by hand it is much harder to reach than on a machine. A gouge this wide has a lot of bevel to keep honest. Holding one angle over all of it is the part that gets away from you. The straight gouge workshop runs the same stages on a smaller tool.

Then there is the clock. Think about how much metal has to come off a tool this heavy. By hand you are looking at hours. The machine does it in minutes. Even if I wanted to throw the old angle away and start the bevel over, still minutes against hours.

What holds a gouge this big?

The machine is a Work Sharp 3000. I have had it a few years and it works miracles for me, and the handle in these frames reads SWISS MADE because the gouge is a Pfeil. Fast, quick, and I can put any tool on it.

The jigs that came with it will not take this gouge. Too wide for them. So I use a Tormek attachment instead, the same one I reach for in the other workshops in this course. It is the SVS-50 multi-jig, about $70, and you can order it from Amazon or from the tool sites.

It arrives as two pieces. One is the main body and the other does skew chisels. For this gouge I only want the body.

Loading the tool matters more than most people think. Slide it in until it stops right before the flat part of the shank, then sight down the length and get it straight. Look at it from both sides, not one. Then tighten, and as you tighten keep the jig perpendicular to the tool. Not nearly perpendicular. Perpendicular.

Keep the old bevel, or grind a lower one?

I am not reestablishing anything on this tool. The bevel it carries is the one I want to keep, and here is the reason. I drive this gouge with a mallet, a lot. A low angle on a tool you strike is a chipped edge waiting for its day. So this one carries a steeper angle than my finer gouges, and my whole job today is to land back on what is already there.

I do not measure. I bring the tool to the wheel, look at where the bevel sits, and raise or drop the jig until it meets. Eyeballing is plenty here. Two things get checked: how close I am to the original angle, and where the tool is sitting on the bar, because that position has to stay about the same the whole way through.

The bar itself has a little play in it. I could weld it solid. Epoxy would hold it down too, and some people do exactly that.

I leave it alone. That small amount of give lets me work downhill at one end for a lower angle, then move up, which lifts the tool and lays a micro bevel right on the edge. On some tools I want that to happen. It has never once made trouble for me, and it has been on this machine for years.

How close to the edge do you grind?

Stage one is grinding, and it runs on an 80 grit wheel. The wheel has two faces, and only one of them goes forward, toward the edge of the tool.

After that it is passes. Right to left, left to right, checking every so often. I keep the tool near the halfway mark on the bar and I barely lean on it. This one just takes longer, because there is so much more metal to move.

I take it almost all the way to the edge. Almost. A hairline short of it, I stop.

That last hair earns its keep. Tool steel on these big gouges is not the same thickness everywhere, and if I run the grind right out to the tip it can come out wavy. Leave the hair, and the finer grits finish it flat. Uneven steel is the same fault that puts a notch in a V-tool. You can see the waviness in my own tool if you look. I am spending more time on the left side of that sweep because there is more material sitting there.

I check constantly, just to be sure I am doing the right thing. Three quarters of the way along I pull the tool off, look at it, and put it back. After that I read how much steel is still standing there, and when it is down to about a sixty-fourth of an inch I know I am nearly there.

Somewhere in the middle I stop and clean the sandpaper, and I clean it again between every grit that follows.

People call this machine sharpening. The power is a machine, but the work is still hand work, and plenty of control still belongs to you.

What do you do about the nick?

Grinding the bevel did not kill mine. When the rest of the work was done the nick was still sitting there, looking at me.

The fix is blunt and it works. Take the tool, hold it straight down against the wheel, and remove the edge. All of it. You are squaring the tip off below the bottom of the damage.

Now go back to the bevel and grind a little further than you first planned, until that flat you just made disappears. Every nick on every gouge comes out the same way, big tool or small, and it reads the same on a fingernail gouge or a back bent. You cannot sharpen around damage. You go under it.

How many grits, and what is each one for?

Stage two takes the tool marks out. I flip the wheel over, because the far face carries 220 grit, though mine has been used so much it behaves finer than 220 these days.

Two minutes, and the deep scratches are gone. There is a separate workshop on diamond discs if you would rather cut with diamond than with paper.

The move	What is on the wheel	Order	What tells you it is done
Reset the bevel	eighty grit, the correct face turned forward	step one	a hairline of steel still standing
Take marks out	two twenty grit, worn smoother than new	step two	the deep scratches leaving the bevel
Bring the shine	thirty six hundred grit, the polishing disc	step three	the mirror starting to show itself
Finish the mirror	six thousand grit, the optional last step	step four	your own face in the bevel
Strop and buff	leather and felt, green then blue paste	step five	paste turning black as it works
Bevel the inside	soft Arkansas stone, then a finer one	step six	a burr you can feel outside

Then 3600 grit, and the bevel starts acting like a mirror. Then 6000. That last step is not really necessary and I could drop it, but I like a true mirror on my tools, so I do it anyway.

Why strop and buff a bevel that already shines?

A mirror is not an edge. Polish tells you the scratches have gone; it says nothing at all about the wire of steel still hanging off the tip. The long version of this part is its own workshop, stropping, honing and buffing.

My leather is glued to a piece of glass and it mounts on the machine like any other wheel. On the leather goes green paste, made by Koch in Germany. Flexcut yellow works too, that is not a bad compound at all.

One rule here, and it is not optional. The wheel turns away from your edge. Strop on the wrong side and the edge digs in, and you will not hurt the tool, you will ruin the leather.

After the leather comes felt. Green paste first, then blue, which is the finer of the two. I pull the jig off for this part and buff freehand, finding the bevel with my hands instead of setting it with a screw.

Watch the compound while you work. Blue goes on blue and comes back black. That black is your tool. Paste is not polish, paste is a very slow file.

Does the inside need a bevel too?

It does, and this is where a gouge stops behaving like a chisel.

I use an Arkansas slip stone, the soft one first. Run it dry and it works fine, since you are hardly taking any steel off at all, or you can wet it. Machine oil is the usual answer. WD-40 is what I reach for. There is no deep technical reason behind that, it simply works for me and I like it.

Some carvers rub the slip back and forth across the inside. That has never felt right in my hands. I push the stone out, away from myself and into the edge, one direction only, and let it slide along the curve, starting at the left of the sweep and walking it over to the right.

All I want is a micro bevel. Not a second bevel you can spot from across the shop, just enough to break that inside corner. A spoon gouge and a skew bent want the same attention inside, with slips shaped to match them.

A few strokes in, I can feel a burr on the outside. Then I move to the finer Arkansas and do the same thing over again.

The burr leaves on the felt wheel. Blue paste, the outside face of the wheel, two or three passes on the back of the edge, and it lifts away. I do not strop the tool again at that point. Buffing is enough to finish it.

Then I try it. Across the grain, then from the other side, and the shaving comes off like butter and leaves a clean face behind it. The mirror was never the point. That cut is the point.

Is a machine and a $70 jig worth it?

Here is my honest opinion, and it is only an opinion. This machine together with that Tormek bar is one of the wisest investments I have made in the last few years.

Not because it is the only way. A stone sharpens everything on this bench and always has, and carvers were putting edges on gouges centuries before anybody plugged a tool in. It earns its place because of what it does to my week. By hand, a gouge this size is an afternoon. On the machine it is a coffee break, and an afternoon I get back is an afternoon I spend carving instead.

The jig is $70 or so, and you buy it once. If that money is the hard part this month, then put it off. Keep your tools honest on a stone, carve with what you own, and buy the jig the month it stops being a stretch. The tuition works the same way. You have to be real about money.

The full lesson runs four videos and shows every one of these steps at the pace they really happen, including the parts where I stop, look, and change what I am doing. The rest of the sharpening workshops does the same for every tool shape on your bench, down to the micro tools and the V-tool.

Shall we carve?