John Reed Fox: The Uncompromising Craftsman - Fine Woodworking
John Reed Fox:
If you want to have the hand skills that it takes to do this, you have to do it a lot. There’s just no other way. You have to spend a lot of time at it. The way to learn how to cut dovetails is to cut dovetails. The way you learn how to sharpen is to sharpen.
Rather than being intimidated by this, I think there’s comfort in the fact that practice is all it takes.
It is completely worth the six minutes it takes to watch the accompanying video, and listen to John Reed Fox talk about his work. I would love to meet him someday. My one link with John Reed Fox is that he made the body of the plane I used to illustrate the set up of a Japanese plane.
Logic
My 8 year-old son was with me at the Japanese hand tool demonstration I was doing Saturday, and was doing a good job planing a piece of mahogany with one of my planes. He has figured out how to tap the blade with a hammer to advance the blade and make lateral adjustments.
He decided that the blade was advanced too far, and needed backing out. So he flipped the plane over, and tapped on the blade from the underside.
Ouch. To be fair, you can’t fault his thinking process.
Luckily, he had set the blade to take about a 0.001-0.002” shaving (that’s my boy!), so that very little of the blade was protruding, and so the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Besides, I’ve been down this road before, and this won’t be nearly as hard to repair.
He does know how to back the blade out now.
The problem with internet woodworking discussions
We’ve all seen this. A question gets posted on an woodworking internet website that asks a basic question, such as “How should I sharpen my tools?” One person posts a very well-written and well-reasoned explanation as to how they go about sharpening. Another person posts another method for sharpening that is just as erudite and logical. A third person weighs in with yet another method. Then the arguments start as to which method is better. Tempers flare. Feelings get hurt. The person who originally asked the question gets confused, and takes up knitting instead. Much popcorn is consumed by woodworkers lurking on the discussion.
I’ve seen this sharpening conversation happen many times at my woodworking club, and it’s always a completely civil and helpful back-and-forth. Everyone gets something out of it, and we all still talk to each other afterwards. But through the magic that is the internet, this conversation often takes a turn where I’m just glad to be rid of it.
So why does this happen? Let’s take the sharpening question mentioned above. If one took a look at the real world, this is what sharpening methods among woodworkers might look like:
(The data in this chart are completely made up by me.)
In the internet world, things are quite different. The internet is great for instant communication and the ability to reach people far and wide. The downside of that is nuance is hard to transmit by words alone, and the ability to communicate quickly often comes with a lot of hastily written opinions. As a result, what is written is often taken only at face value, feelings get hurt, leading to an overly quick response, and we’re back to popcorn time again.
Because if this limitation, if someone writes a long, detailed, well-written, and logical post on an internet forum on why waterstones are the best sharpening method around, then inevitably someone who doesn’t use waterstones to sharpen will easily interpret that statement like this:
Now, the person advocating for waterstones most likely doesn’t see others that way, but this is often how things come across over the internet. Break out the popcorn.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t share our experiences and opinions about woodworking with others. One of the things that makes woodworking such a rich and fascinating hobby for me is that there are so many ways of approaching the task at hand, and I try keep in mind that there’s always something to be learned from woodworkers who don’t do woodworking the same way that I do, and that the presence of one method of work does not automatically invalidate other methods of work.
This is also probably why I have little patience for people who insist that there is only one way to get the job done. The truth that in woodworking, there often isn’t a single best way of doing things. Because if there was, we’d all be using Japanese tools.
A grit too far
One problem with the “How high of a grit is going too far?” sharpening discussions that often come up is that we are using units of measure that very few woodworkers really have a good grasp of. Our brains just don’t do well with large numbers, and if you couple that with the realization that grit size is a somewhat logarithmic unit of measure (halving the size of the particle doubles the grit number, more or less), and let’s face it — how often have you thought about logarithms since high school? — it’s easy to see why this sharpening conversation comes up a lot:
“I finish my sharpening routine with green compound on a strop.”
“You, sir, have a reasonable and well considered sharpening routine. I am proud to call you a fellow woodworker.”
“I go to my 30,000 grit Japanese waterstone, and stop.”
“Why do you take it that far? You obviously like sharpening more than woodworking.”
I’m sure there’s a certain class of engineers that really understands grit sizes, but I bet most of us aren’t part of that club.
As far as I can tell, no one has ever criticized a woodworker who uses green compound on a strop as being overly obsessed with sharpening. So I take that as an accepted level of sharpening that woodworkers would consider to be reasonable. Given that fact, any other method that finishes with sharpening particles at around the same size as green compound should also be seen as a reasonable place to stop.
For the most part, using an 8000 grit waterstone translates into using sharpening particles of about 1-2 microns. Going to a 16,000-30,000 grit waterstone, or those crazy natural Japanese waterstones, means using sharpening particles on the order of 0.5-1 microns.
If this is true, then going to a very high grit waterstone is consistent with many other woodworkers who use green compound on a leather strop. Green compound has sharpening particles that are about 0.5-1 microns.
If we think about the physical properties of our sharpening methods of choice, much of the fog quickly fades away. Now, looking at that 30,000 grit number on the waterstone box seems scary high. But let’s substitute particle sizes for sharpening modalities.
“I finish my sharpening routine with [0.5-1 micron particle] green compound on a strop.”
“You, sir, have a reasonable and well considered sharpening routine. I am proud to call you a fellow woodworker.”
“I go to my [0.5-1 micron particle] Japanese waterstone, and stop.”
“Why do you take it that far? You obviously like sharpening more than woodworking.”
Seems like a double standard here, no?
I went down to the crosscut roads: Japanese saw sharpening — III
Now that the rip side of my 270 mm ryoba has been sharpened, that leaves the crosscut side, or, as it’s more commonly known, “The saw teeth that no mere mortal woodworker dare touch”. In fact, although sharpening Japanese crosscut teeth is more involved than western crosscut teeth, I don’t think that doing so is impossible. Disclaimer: I have no idea how close this method is to historical practice, but it does seem to work well for me.
The key for me was realizing that the main difference between Japanese crosscut teeth and western crosscut teeth was the third facet at the tip of the teeth.
This isn’t news, of course, but take the facets away, and what is left are basically tall skinny western crosscut teeth that lean to the right.
There is a post with a more complete illustration of how western crosscut teeth can be transformed into Japanese crosscut teeth.
My approach is to ignore the third facet at first, and pretend that all I am doing is sharpening tall skinny crosscut teeth with an aggressive rake. I start by jointing the teeth with a file.
You can easily see the flats left by the file.
Next is to file the leading edge of the teeth that are leaning away from me. Like western crosscut teeth, I’m working on half the teeth at one time. I use the same diamond shaped file that I used to sharpen the rip side of this saw. The angle gauge is to help me maintain a constant angle for the fleam. I’m going for 15º here. This saw seemed to be set up more for softwoods when I got it. The fleam angle was greater, which left a more knife-like bevel on the teeth. I picked 15º because I wanted this saw to be tuned more for hardwoods, and well-known Japanese saw aficionado Ron Herman said that 15º was a good fleam angle for hardwoods on his sharpening DVD.
After finishing filing the leading edge, I file the back edge, also going for 15º.
Then, the ryoba is turned around in the saw vise, and the same process is done on the other half of the teeth. Up to this point, the sharpening process is pretty much identical to sharpening western crosscut teeth, and in fact if this was a western crosscut saw, I would be done at this point.
But we have that third facet at the tip of the sawtooth to deal with. Filing the facet is really much simpler than the conventional wisdom holds, however. In order to do this, I just angle the file so that it’s pointing slightly upward and towards the leading side of the sawtooth, and establish a facet. Like the initial filing of the crosscut teeth, I’m working on half the teeth, the ones leaning away from me. Because the tip of the sawtooth is so small, it only takes 1-2 strokes of the file to establish the facet. This process should also make the flat made by jointing the saw at the beginning of this process disappear.
This is where the safe edge of the file is important. It’s very hard to make this filing stroke without touching the adjacent sawtooth. The safe edge minimizes the damage done to the adjacent sawtooth. Even so, the file can put a small nick in the tooth if too much pressure is applied. Although the file has a safe edge, it still is harder than the metal used to make the ryoba, and because the diamond comes to such an acute point, a lot of pressure can be generated with little effort.
There is probably an ideal angle to use for this facet, but since I want to use this saw on hardwoods, I shot for angling the file up about 15º from horizontal, in keeping with Ron Herman’s fleam angle advice. In general, the harder the wood, the less of a facet you want. For softwoods, the file would be angled a little further down from horizontal, and a longer facet is made.
After finishing this, flip the saw around, and repeat the process on the other half of the teeth, and that’s it. You’re done.
Again, I have no idea as to the historical accuracy of this method, and I fully realize I haven’t even tried to address the issue of set. But this method seems to work well, as can be seen in the photo from yesterday.
Tommy McClennan, Cross Cut Saw Blues:
I cut your wood so easy,
You can’t help but say, “Hot Dog!”
Crosscut in a scrap piece of 8/4 cherry with a 270 mm ryoba with freshly sharpened crosscut teeth.
Yes, sharpening Japanese crosscut teeth can be done.
Filing the rip teeth on a Japanese saw is pretty straightforward. Altogether, it took me less than 3 minutes to complete the filing of this saw.
This video is worth 2.2 million words.
Q:Great post Wilbur,I can't wait until your book comes out ; ] Where did you source the Japanese file?
Thanks! Although I highly doubt a book is in the cards.
To be honest, I don’t remember where I got the file from. I’m pretty sure it was from Lee Valley. There are a surprising number of sources for Japanese saw files, including Hida Tool, Japan Woodworker, Tools for Working Wood, Woodcraft, and eBay, of course.
