How to Sharpen Skew Bent Gouge

A skewed, bent gouge sharpens like any other gouge, because the wheel only ever touches the sweep. What changes is the setup. Put the jig's arrow on zero, clamp the shank well back, and take the bevel lower than the books tell you.

On the bench is a Henry Taylor number 8, five eighths of an inch wide, bent a little and skewed across the edge. It came out of the box rough. Never sharpened, never honed.

Students in my in-person classes used to ask me this exact question. How would you attack a skew, especially a skew that is also a gouge, and bent on top of that?

Key takeaways

• A skew is no harder to grind than a straight tool. The abrasive only meets the sweep.
• The Tormek SVD-186 does the holding. Set its arrow on zero for a square edge.
• Keep the clamp a long way behind the edge, and never let the wheel touch it.
• Degrees are not the point here. Lower digs in better, and I go under ten.
• Near the middle of the wheel the cut is gentle, and out at the rim it turns aggressive.
• Four minutes of machine time, then stones and felt for the inside. The rest of the shapes have their own workshops in the sharpening course.

What is a skew bent gouge for?

Plenty of people wonder why anybody needs a skewed gouge at all.

It earns its place twice. The first is reach. You want a gouge cut down in a corner, a straight tool will not get in there, and the skewed corner goes in as deep as you like.

The second one settles the argument. Carve tracery, Gothic tracery, and you absolutely must have this tool.

Now that is not a small claim, so let me be plain about what tracery is. Pierced and moulded pattern, the kind that fills a Gothic window, cut as long flowing lines that run into tight corners and stop dead. Those corners are where a straight gouge gives up and this one keeps going.

And there is a third thing. Push it straight, no rotation at all, and the skew turns that push into a slice by itself. Less stress on the wood. A slicing cut normally means rotating the tool as it travels, and this one slices on the straight.

And when you do rotate it, the way you would with any gouge to get a slicing cut, the skew is still ahead. This one is better still.

Does the skew make it harder to sharpen?

Nothing complicated happens here just because the tool happens to be skewed.

Think about what the wheel actually touches. It touches the sweep, the radius of the gouge, and that is all it ever touches. Whatever shape you have chosen at the edge, skew or square, the abrasive does not know and does not care.

The bend is a different matter, and it only bites on the inside. I will come to that. A back bent gouge has the same trouble at the same place.

Where does the jig have to sit for a square edge?

I stay with the Tormek jigs for this, and here it is the SVD-186. A beautiful jig.

The body of it carries a scale marked zero through five, with an arrow. Line that arrow up with zero and you get a true straight edge, with no fingernail movement in it at all, which is what I want on this tool. Move the arrow up the scale and you are shaping a fingernail gouge edge instead.

Then it goes in like any other. Slide it, square it, tighten it. Nor do I clamp it right against the edge. About an inch and a half back is where I hold this one.

What angle, in degrees?

People ask me the degrees all the time, and I have to disappoint them. I do not measure.

On some tools it is not even possible to measure. On this one I probably could, and I am not going to.

For what it is worth, the usual advice runs from 10 degrees up to 30, and if you set 22 degrees you will be safe. I go lower than that. Lower still if I can get there. Under 10 degrees. Under 5 if the tool will let me.

One reason, and it is the only one that matters at the bench. A lower bevel digs into the wood much better, which is why my bevels run long on everything, right down to the micro tools.

What tells you the angle is right without a gauge?

A marker and your eyes.

I look at the heel, which is the back side of the bevel, take a marker and put some ink on it. Then I eyeball the setting, try to get it as low as I can, and see what happens.

The bar helps. This one micro adjusts, which the original Work Sharp bar never did nearly as well, so when I am close I can nudge it instead of starting over. On this tool I was already there at the first look, and I still dropped it a touch lower.

Why does where you hold it on the wheel matter?

This is worth knowing before you switch anything on, because it is control for free.

The closer to the center of the wheel you hold the tool, the less aggressive the cut. Out at the rim it gets much more aggressive. Same wheel, same grit, same machine.

So on a brand new tool with a rough factory edge I want to be out near the rim, taking off as much metal as I can in one go. Carefully. The one thing I will not do is let the wheel touch the edge itself.

Why not a bench grinder?

A bench grinder would be quick too, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

The trouble is the wheel. A grinding wheel is round, so the surface doing the work is not flat, and it grinds a concave into your bevel. Hollow. I do not like that concave.

This machine works on a flat disc, so what comes off it is a flat bevel. On a long low bevel like mine the hollow thins the steel just behind the tip, and that is exactly where a tool breaks.

None of that makes a bench grinder useless. It makes it the wrong tool for the bevel I want on a carving gouge. And if you would rather cut with diamond than with paper, that has a workshop of its own, diamond discs.

How long does the whole job take?

Stage one is a fresh sheet of 80 grit paper, coarse as that, on a brand new tool.

One small thing while the wheel is off. The light on this machine clips on and detaches. I can carry it across to another machine and keep using it as a light. I like that.

Less than a minute, and the bevel is ground.

Next the wheel gets flipped over and cleaned. The far face is the finer grit, though I have used it so much that it behaves like 300 now. Another minute, maybe less, and every one of those coarse marks has gone.

The step	What the wheel is wearing	Time	What tells you it is done
Grind the bevel	eighty grit paper, worked well out there	one minute	the heel coming down very low
Kill the marks	the same wheel flipped over, worn finer	under one	every coarse scratch leaving the bevel
Bring the shine	thirty two hundred grit, and nothing coarser	one more	a bevel bright as a mirror
Finish the mirror	six thousand grit, the optional last one	another minute	your own face in the steel
Lift the burr	the felt wheel, or plain end grain	couple strokes	no wire left on the back
Bevel the inside	the soft stone first, then the translucent	about one	a burr you can feel outside

Partway through I can see one side wants a little more than the other, so that side gets a little more. Carefully, and with almost no pressure on the tool at all.

Look at the thing riding on the wheel and it does seem improbable. Bent, skewed, an odd form altogether. It still gives no trouble.

3200 next, which no stone in the world will give you by hand in that time. One more minute. It is already a mirror at that point, and I can feel the wire edge standing up on the other side. I leave it there for now.

Let me add it up, because the number is the whole point. Sixty seconds on the 80. Another on the worn side, and a third at 3200. So three minutes of working time before the mirror arrives, and one more after it.

Then 6000, and you do not have to do this at all. I have said so in the other lessons, and I still do it, because I like it.

What comes off has no marks left on it. None. I can see myself in the steel. That is when the jig comes off and the inside becomes the job.

Is machine sharpening cheating?

Let me be honest with you, because people get funny about this.

I love sharpening by hand. Given the time to resharpen and reshape every tool you own on stones, the way the straight gouge workshop also shows, that is absolutely fine, and you will get good results. I get good results by hand myself.

It just takes so long.

And this is fun, which matters more than people admit. Grinding a bevel this way still has your hands in it, still has the small decisions in it, and when the steel comes up bright there is the same satisfaction there always was.

While I have been talking to you I have used this machine for about four minutes. And it is still hand work. You still make the movements, you still rotate the tool, you still watch what is happening. If you carve for a living, every minute you save is a minute you carve, and that is the whole argument.

How do you get the wire edge off?

Two ways, and one of them is free.

The paid way is a felt wheel carrying green paste, and the whole business of pastes and stropping is its own workshop, honing and buffing. I put the felt wheel on top of the first wheel, stacked, because that way I can reach the edge without fighting the machine for room.

The free way is any piece of wood lying on the bench. Lime, anything at all. Turn it to the end grain and rub the edge on it a couple of times. The wire comes off.

What the bend will not let you reach inside

An inside bevel is not optional on a tool like this.

Two stones do the work. Soft Arkansas first, then a translucent one, and I have a second translucent stone that is every bit as good as the first.

I always push away from myself. Some carvers see no difference and work back and forth, and it works for them, and I have no argument with it. I just prefer going away.

Here is where the bend costs me something. I am getting about a sixty-fourth of an inch of inside bevel, and I would go lower if I could, but the bend in the shank is in my way. It stops the stone before I want the stone stopped.

The oil is WD-40 again. Any lumber yard or hardware store has it, any machine oil will do the same job, and there are special stone oils if you prefer them. It is all oil.

A few strokes until I feel the burr on the other side, then the felt wheel to polish the inside, then the end grain again for whatever wire is left. A spoon gouge wants exactly the same attention in there.

The last thing is blue paste. Not a necessary step either, but it is finer than the green, so a few strokes go on each side.

So I try it. In the wood it sounds like butter, and you hear it before you see it.

The lesson runs three videos and shows all of it at the real pace, including the parts where I stop to look. The V-tool and the notch it grows are next door, and the tuition opens all of them.

Shall we carve?