Japanese, bevel-edge, skew and mortising tool.
With the exception of your two hands, there is no such thing as the perfect honing guide for every shape and size of woodworking tool.
Some guides are great for short tools. Some are great for chisels. Others excel at gripping odd-shaped tools. But none of the guides handle all the tools all the time.
During the last decade, I’ve taught a lot of people to sharpen chisels and plane irons, so I’ve gotten to use many of the student’s honing guides. Some of these guides I’ve purchased for our shop at Popular Woodworking. Other guides haven’t impressed me much.
The honing guides in this article are four models that I’ve found to be useful and commonly available. Now, I don’t think you need to buy four honing guides to get your tools sharp. Depending on your work, you might need one or maybe two.
Or, perhaps if your hands are willing, you might not need any of these guides at all.
The Case for Guides
More often than not, I use a honing guide when sharpening. Though I can (and do) sharpen without them, I find them to be brilliant at providing repeatable and quick results. And when I teach sharpening, I like to show students how to use a guide. Many woodworkers sharpen infrequently and have difficulty training their hands to do what they want every single time.
I’m not hostile to hand-sharpening. If you like the process and your results, please don’t change. But I also bristle when hand-sharpeners run down people who use guides. The act of sharpening already causes enough anxiety among woodworkers.
About the Dull Tools
Hand tools come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes, so I selected a broad range of shapes that have been both easy and difficult for me to secure in honing guides.
Some of the tools are common and are (usually) easy to secure in guides, such as 2"- and 21/4"-wide plane irons, a 1/2"-wide bevel-edge chisel and a 1"-wide Japanese chisel.
Other tools are tricky because of their shapes, such as a short spokeshave iron, a T-shaped shoulder-plane iron, a fishtail-shaped bench chisel and a skew chisel.
And I threw in one tool, a traditional English mortising chisel by Ray Iles, that gives almost all the honing guides a fit.
About the Guides
Honing guides have, in general, two ways of going about their job of holding the work. Some guides clamp a tool on its sides; the others clamp a tool from above and below.
Neither system is superior in all cases. The side-clamping guides exce...
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