Sharpening a Spoon Gouge

A bent tool is sharpened the same way a straight one is, with one change. Its bend keeps your fingers clear of the abrasive, and a cradle jig takes over that job. Everything after that, the grits and the compound and the order they come in, is exactly what you already do.

Did you ever look at a spoon gouge and quietly put it back on the rack? Did the bend make you think this one needs some special trick you have not learned yet? Good news. There is no trick.

I carve for a living, which means every hour I spend at a wheel is an hour I am not carving. So I care about two things. Speed, and the result. My setup happens to give me both, and it took me years and several machines to arrive at it.

What sits on my bench, and what I stopped using

• A Tormek that has been in this shop for many years now. Beautiful machine, superb jigs, and I still keep it.
• A Koch grinder from Germany, and a full set of stones for hand work, which I have never given up.
• A Work Sharp 3000, which is what I actually reach for now.
• A bar attachment on the Work Sharp that accepts every Tormek jig I own. That one bar attachment changed the way I sharpen everything.

Why did you move off the Tormek?

Two reasons, and quality is not one of them. A Tormek is one of the finest wet grinders made, no argument from me. But the stone is round, so the bevel it leaves is hollow, scooped out in the middle, and a hollow bevel is a weaker bevel. I would rather have a flat one, and for flat I need a genuinely flat surface.

The second reason is grit. On a wet stone you get roughly two grades, coarse and fine, by dressing the stone one way or the other. My Work Sharp takes sandpaper stuck to flat glass, so the choice is almost unlimited, and swapping one for another costs me seconds.

What you compare	Tormek, the wet grinder with a stone	Work Sharp	Why this matters in real work
Shape of bevel	Hollow ground, because the stone is round	Dead flat	A hollow leaves the edge weaker
Choice of grit	Two grades, made by dressing one stone	Almost unlimited	Sandpaper changes in a few seconds
The support bar	Two legs, so the rest never moves	One leg	Stand still and it hardly matters
Jigs it takes	Its own, and they are very good	The same	One bar carries every Tormek jig

So I use the Work Sharp for its flat glass, and Tormek jigs to hold the tools. Best of both, and if that sounds like a compromise, it has been running in a working shop for years.

That bar attachment deserves its own sentence, because it was the wisest thing I ever bolted onto a machine. Tormek jigs are, in my opinion, the best part of the whole Tormek system. They are beautifully made and there is one for every awkward shape a carver owns. Being able to use them somewhere else, on a flat glass wheel instead of a round stone, is what made my setup work. The machine underneath is only a motor and a surface. The jig is what puts your tool where it needs to be.

Which jig holds a bent gouge?

The one I use is the Tormek SVD-186, and it looks complicated until you have used it twice. A cradle at the front takes the blade, a cylinder at the back rides the bar, and one knob locks the lot. I have the older model. They make a newer, more advanced one now, and the old one still does everything I ask of it.

Today I have a number 26 by Ashley Iles. Those two digits tell you the whole tool. Six is the sweep, meaning how deep the curve of the flute runs. And the 2 in front says it is a spoon, sometimes called a short bend spoon gouge, because it genuinely does look like a spoon when you turn it over.

Slide the shank into the cradle and nip the screw up. One thing here is worth slowing down for. The blade must sit dead straight in the jig, parallel, not twisted a few degrees to one side. Rotate it in your fingers, look along it, then lock it. A tool clamped crooked will grind crooked, and you will blame the machine.

Is the single bar a problem?

Wobble is real and it stops mattering once you know about it. On a Tormek the tool rest stands on two legs, so it cannot move. This bar has one, and two adjusting screws on the back of the machine bring it close to true. A little flex remains.

Plant your feet in one spot and leave them there. That is the whole answer. Keep your body where it is and rotate the tool rather than walking around the machine. In all the years I have worked this way it has never caused me a problem on a carving tool, however awkward the shape.

It does cost me one thing. I would not sharpen a plane iron on this setup, because a plane iron asks for more accuracy than this bar will give me. Carving tools forgive it completely. Bench chisels I still do by hand on stones, the same as I always have.

How long should the bevel be?

Length follows the job, not the tool. Hitting a gouge with a mallet in oak wants a short steep bevel that will not fold. Pushing by hand through basswood wants a long shallow one that lies down in the wood. Hardwood, shorter. Softwood, longer.

I keep the long bevel even on hardwood, most days, because the same gouge crosses between woods in my hands and I would rather not regrind it twice a week. When a tool arrives new I am rarely happy with the bevel it came with. This one was too steep for me and I brought it down.

Which grits, and in what order?

Eighty grit opens the job. Some carvers blacken the bevel with a marker first, which is a fine habit and one I use on other tools, but at 80 grit you can watch the steel coming off without any help.

A word about rotation before you switch on. The wheel can turn toward you or away, depending which side of the machine you stand. Either works. I like it turning away from me, so I walk round rather than reach over, and that is pure preference rather than a rule.

Begin near one corner, though never quite at it. Corners are where a tool gets ruined and an odd shape gets born, so I stay a hair back and creep up on them. Then roll the gouge across the disc, back and forth, one finger doing the steering. Barely any weight.

Check often. What I am watching for is whether more metal is leaving one side than the other, which tells me my roll is uneven before it becomes a problem I have to fix. At about a sixteenth of an inch, roughly a millimetre and a half, the shape is basically there.

Then I stop short. I want to reach the edge without damaging it, and the steel may have a little waviness in it that you cannot see, so I leave something like 1/128 inch, a fifth of a millimetre, and let the finer grits carry it home.

Two hundred and twenty comes next. My sheet is well used, so it behaves more like 280 by now, and it wipes out the coarse scratches in a couple of minutes. Leave the tool locked in the jig the whole time and find roughly the same bar position. Not critical. Helpful.

After that, 3,600, then 6,000, sweeping right to left and left to right. By the second one the bevel throws your reflection straight back at you. Sandpaper lasts far longer than people expect, by the way. Across a whole tool I changed it twice.

One habit runs through all of this and it is the cheapest thing in the shop. Look at the tool. Stop the wheel, turn the blade over in the light, and actually look at where the metal has gone. I do it constantly while shaping a single gouge. The alternative is grinding on faith and finding out at the polishing stage that one shoulder is longer than its neighbour, and by then the cure is going back to 80 grit.

People ask me whether a machine takes the skill out of it. My answer is that the skill moved rather than disappeared. Your hands are still judging the angle, still rolling the tool, still reading the light on the steel. All the machine did was take the ten minutes of rubbing out of the middle.

How do you strop a curved tool?

Leather, and Work Sharp sell both the wheel and the hide that goes on it. The hide on mine is thick, which is one of the nicest things about this machine. Because the leather sits higher than a sheet of sandpaper, drop the bar slightly or your angle changes without you noticing.

Green compound first. Mine is Koch, and I say that name the German way while plenty of people say it differently. The ordinary green bar works, the yellow from Flexcut works, and Woodcraft carries what I buy.

Then the blue, which is not really a paste at all. It is a solid block that melts into the leather as the wheel warms. Koch claim it also cools the tool while you hone, so the steel never overheats. Should I believe that? I honestly do not know. What I can see with my own eyes is the leather going black, and black means metal.

Last comes the felt wheel, and I stack it on top of the abrasive one rather than mounting it alone. Put it on the hub alone and it wobbles, with nothing underneath holding it flat. Sitting proud like that also gives me the wheel's edge, which is what reaches inside the flute of a bent tool.

At this point the bar comes off. I am buffing by hand now, same blue block, working the outside and then turning to the inside bevel on that raised edge. No jig will do this part for you, and none needs to.

One more reason I settled here, and it is not romantic at all. I carve for a living. Every tool that comes off this machine ready to work is time I get back at my panel, and across a year that adds up. Somebody carving for pleasure can spend a whole evening at an oilstone and enjoy every minute. I have work waiting.

What takes off the last burr?

Wood does. After all that machinery, the final move is a scrap of soft lime on the bench. Rub the edge along it and whatever burr survived the strop comes away against the fibres. Costs nothing, and it works every time.

Then try the tool. Push the gouge into a piece of basswood and watch what comes off. Pale ribbons, and a bright surface behind them. Nice and clean. That is the only report card that counts, and no stone or machine or grit number can argue with it.

Every other shape in this course goes the same road with small changes at each turn. A straight gouge needs no cradle at all. The V-tool has three surfaces instead of one, which is why it beats so many people, and there is a whole separate lesson for when it still will not behave.

Bigger work goes to large gouges across four videos. Then fingernail and back bent shapes, a skew bent shape, seven videos on stropping and honing, plus micro tools and diamond discs. I even show you the L-bracket I bent so you need not buy the Tormek bar at all. The whole course runs thirteen lessons deep.

I am going to be honest with you about the money. A decent jig costs real money. Good steel costs more. And the hours you will stand at a wheel before any of this feels automatic are hours nobody can hand you. You have to be real about that. But a carver who cannot sharpen is not carving, he is fighting, and he will blame the wood for the rest of his life. Come and learn it properly.

Shall we carve?