So now that I have all these nice tools they need to be kept in shape. My dad introduced me to the concept of "Scary sharp": a honing method where one uses sandpaper instead of oil/Waterstones to sharpen ones tools.
The sandpaper is attached to a glass board in order to have a nice sturdy flat surface. The nice thing about this system is, that once the grit of the sandpaper is gone, you can just replace it. Sandpaper itself is fairly cheap and available readily available online (even the higher grits). This also means you can have all the different grits on one big board to keep it nice and organized and don't have to switch honing stones.
The Polthaus video series explains "Scary Sharp" technique very well (much better than I ever could) and I would highly recommend his 3 videos on it:
His blog in general is tremendously useful to learn all sorts of techniques and the history of tools, not to mention great fun to read as Polthaus has an amazing sense of humor (in my opinion).
To get hold of some sandpaper was no trouble at all, however to find a nice glass board that is thicker then 5 mm was rather tricky, or so I thought. (It should be thicker than 5 mm to stop it from bending)
So I started looking for local glaziers to ask them if they had any seconds, that no one wanted, that I could buy for as few pounds as possible. However I had to go to a small chain homestore shop to pick up some plastic boxes and had a brief look through their kitchen aisle and found a 1 cm thick glass "working-surface protector"! It even had some rubber blobs on the backside to stop it from slipping and all this for less then 10 pounds. So definitely worth checking if you are looking for one.
Polthaus recommended using sandpaper that already has adhesive on the back or use spray glue to fix the sandpaper to the glass, I chose the second approach. I wasn't quite sure how much glue was necessary and end ended up with 3 or 4 strips of sandpaper where the glue formed blobs underneath it. Luckily it takes some time to dry so I could use a small roll to even it out, but ended up with some glue on top of the sandpaper due to general clumsiness.... so practice is required (or sandpaper with adhesive strips).
This is a picture of my first attempt of a Scary Sharp board and I am actually quite chuffed with it. It has a range of grit on it varying from 100 to 1200.
To get the chisel angles right I have invested in a honing guide (Veritas MK 2).
To clean the metal dust of the sandpapers I got a strong Neodymium magnet (Amazon Link). I would advise to wrap some paper or plastic around it when hovering over the sandpaper. This way the metal dust does not cling to the magnet, which is otherwise impossible to ever get off the magnet.
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