Sharpening V-Tool

The V-tool is three tools in one handle. Look at it as two little chisels that meet, with a rounded ridge running underneath where they join. Shape that ridge first and the rest falls into place. Work the sides first and you can finish with a strange channel down the middle, which is where people give up.

Have you spent an evening on a V-tool and got nowhere? Did the edge come out looking like a bird's beak, with one side longer than its twin? You are in very large company.

About a year before I filmed this, a man came to one of my classes with a brand new set. His V-tool needed regrinding. He worked at it for a couple of hours and walked away from the bench completely beaten. Many people who try wood carving quit over this one tool. I am not exaggerating, and it is not rare.

And yet, when I am carving, the V-tool is almost the first thing my hand reaches for. Outlining, undercutting, setting a line before anything else happens. I say this to my students and I mean every word, because the tool answers to the way you treat it. My biggest friend in wood carving is this one. Treat it like a friend, kiss it, tell it you love it, and it starts behaving.

What makes the V-tool so much harder than a gouge

• It has three surfaces to keep in agreement, and a gouge has one.
• The ridge underneath, the keel, is what actually rides the wood. Get that wrong and nothing else saves you.
• Grind the two flat sides before the keel and you leave a ragged channel where the ridge should be.
• Both sides have to end up the same length, and I keep working until they are.
• New tools often come with one wall thicker than its partner, which is normal and does not stop you working with them.

What are the three parts of a V-tool?

Picture one chisel on the left, a second chisel on the right, and a very small gouge joining them along the bottom. That small gouge is the keel. Once those three names are in your head, the whole job becomes ordinary work instead of a wrestling match.

A lot of carvers I respect, men who are genuinely masters, start on the sides. Mine is a different road. Your tool rides on the keel as it travels through the wood, so the keel decides how the whole thing behaves. The sides only decide how clean the two walls of the groove come out.

Part you grind	What it actually does when you carve	Grind order	Bevel I like on that part
The keel underneath	Rides the wood and steers the tool	Comes first	Ten millimetres, about three eighths inch
Left chisel side	Cuts one wall of the groove cleanly	Comes second	Slightly steeper than the keel
Right chisel side	Cuts the wall on the opposite face	Comes third	Must match the first side exactly
The micro bevel	Backs up the edge so it holds	Comes last	One hair, a fraction of millimetre

Here is what happens when you do it the other way round. You grind the left side, then the right side, they meet somewhere near the bottom, and then you go looking for the keel. By that point the two sides have already eaten into the ridge from both directions and you are left with a sort of channel running down the middle. I do not even know the proper name for it. The tool looks wrong, it feels wrong in the wood, and there is no tidy way back except grinding a lot more steel away. Start at the keel and you always know where the edge is, because you arrive at it deliberately rather than by accident.

Which V-tool should you own?

Sixty degrees, and you will use it for about nine jobs in ten. Sixty is what lives on my bench. There is a ninety degree version, which opens much wider, and a forty five, which closes the V tighter than the sixty does. Then the shapes: straight, spoon, short bend, long bend. Different brands, different steel, different money.

A long bend carries a long curve along the shank, and a short bend a much tighter one. Buy the sixty first. Add the others when a job asks.

Before any of it touches a wheel, look straight down the edge. It has to be square across, perpendicular to the shank. If the tip is running off at an angle you will chase that error through every stage that follows, and this is the same check I ask for on a straight gouge and every other shape in the sharpening course.

What is the right way to hold it on the machine?

Same jig as everything else, which is half the reason I like this setup. The Tormek SVS-32 short tool jig goes on the arm, and the arm sits on my Work Sharp. One thing matters when you clamp it. Get the screw landing in the middle of the metal, not off to one side, or the tool sits crooked in the jig and everything after that is crooked too.

Then drop the arm. I want the lowest angle the jig will give me, because the keel bevel wants to be long. Longer than the bevels on the sides, which surprises people. Eighty grit sandpaper stuck to the glass wheel, and I am not nervous about it.

Colour the keel with a marker before you start. I use red on this one. Thirty seconds later you can see exactly which part of the ridge the abrasive has reached and which part it has not, and you stop guessing.

Hold it straight down. Little by little. No pressure at all, and I mean none. Remember the keel is not a sharp point, it is closer to the smallest gouge you own, something like a number eleven with a very tiny sweep, so I rotate it slightly as I go rather than holding it dead still.

How long should the bevels be?

Ten millimetres on the keel, which is three eighths of an inch, and I take it to nearly half an inch on some tools. The sides come out about the same, ten millimetres, three eighths, and I eyeball the whole thing. I could not tell you the angle in degrees. I like it low, and low here means somewhere down around three to five degrees.

On the sides, hold the tool parallel to the wheel and do not wander around. Park it and let the abrasive work. On my own V-tool the metal is not flat at all, it curves a little, so I make tiny movements to follow the metal rather than fighting it. Those little movements take the steel off evenly across the whole face.

Work one side to the end before you touch the other. Then flip and match it. When the second side transfers into the first with no step and no shoulder between them, that is the tool looking the way it should look, and you can see it without any measuring at all.

Two more things about pressure, since it decides more than people expect. Lean on the tool and the sandpaper leaves scratch marks you then have to spend time removing at the next grit, so heavy hands make more work rather than less. And do not run the main bevel all the way out to the edge. Leave roughly a millimetre, then a whisker less, because that last sliver belongs to the micro bevel and you want fresh metal there.

That micro bevel is not universal, and it is worth knowing where it belongs. I put one on almost every carving tool I own, and on plane irons. Never on a bench chisel. A chisel with a secondary bevel on its main face will not pare a straight wall for you, and you will meet that problem the first time you cut a set of dovetails.

What if one side is thicker than the other?

Live with it. Brand new tools come out of the box with uneven metal more often than anyone admits, thicker on one wall and thinner on the other, and I would not tear my hair over it. Sharpen it, use it, carve with it. A perfectly made tool is a lovely thing and it costs lovely money too. The uneven one still works, and I have owned plenty.

Which grits take it to a finish?

A 220 grit comes next, to take the coarse marks out, keel before sides as always. Then three thousand six hundred, then six thousand. Raise the arm a hair for the micro bevel, which runs about 1/128 inch, or two tenths of a millimetre. Barely visible. Like a hair.

Now the felt wheel, which I sit right on top of the abrasive one so the metal ring on the machine stays out of my way. Green compound first, then blue. Mine are Koch, made in Germany, and I buy them at Woodcraft. Any compound works, the ordinary green bar, the yellow one from Flexcut, they all polish. What I like about the Koch is that it is not soft. It is crunchy, hard as a rock, so it melts into the felt instead of smearing across everything.

Watch the compound go black. Black means steel is leaving the tool, so this is still sharpening and not decoration. One hand is enough. I hold the tool with one hand on purpose while filming, just to prove nobody needs to push.

Check it against a straight edge and look for daylight. No gaps means the edge is true all the way across. Then the inside, where by now there is barely any burr left to remove. I take a small Spyderco ceramic slip stone, and one of mine happens to be ground at exactly sixty degrees, which fits this tool as if it were made for it. Dry is fine. Oil or water if you prefer.

Move the slip stone outwards only. Some carvers saw back and forth inside the flute. I never do. Then a leather strop for the inside, pressing one wall at a time, always pulling toward myself. You can buy a shaped block at Woodcraft, or take a scrap of basswood, carve the profile into it, rub compound on and you have made your own for nothing.

One small habit worth stealing. When I take a stone out, it goes back in its place immediately. My bench stays clear and I never hunt for the thing I need next.

One more habit that costs nothing and saves a great deal. Check, and then check again. I stop every few passes, lift the tool off, turn it to the light and look at where the marker has gone, then put it straight back. Carvers who work fast on this tool are usually the ones who end up regrinding it twice.

Is machine sharpening cheating?

Your hands are still doing the work. By hand you move the tool across a stone. On the machine you keep the tool still and the abrasive moves instead, and the movements are identical, just about twenty times faster. Sharpening one V-tool by hand costs me twenty or twenty five minutes I do not have.

Think of a coping saw against a jigsaw when you cope a crown molding. Five minutes one way, half a minute the other, and the joint is the same joint either way. I do both, by the way. I love sharpening by hand and I still do it. Some carvers genuinely control a stone better than a wheel, and if that is you, stay with the stone.

There is a great deal more of this across the course. A whole lesson goes to the V-tool that still refuses to behave. Separate ones handle large gouges and spoon gouges, then fingernail, back bent and skew bent shapes. Seven videos go to stropping and honing by themselves. Micro tools get their own, so do diamond discs, and so does the L-bracket I bent myself instead of buying the Tormek bar.

When it is right, the tool goes into basswood and leaves a clean bright line. Nice and clean. That feeling is the whole reason to put an evening into a piece of steel, and once you have had it you will never accept a dull V-tool again.

Nobody is born knowing this. Once you understand what comes first, what comes second and what comes third, it stops being difficult. Come and take the whole course, and bring a friend with no skills at all while you are at it.

Shall we carve?