Honing Guides

This honing guide, above, looks simplistic and small, but it delivers outsized performance, firmly holding plane irons and chisels up to 2-5/8" wide—which covers most of the tools we use. The single roller balances well and the jaws provide good grip. Seven sets of accessory jaws (sold separately) attach to hold chisels narrower than 5/16", mortising chisels, spokeshave blades, and skewed chisels or plane irons.

You can't beat the value of this guide, above. It holds and sharpens tools from 1/8" to 2-1/2" wide. The uniquely shaped jaws enable you to hold differently shaped edge tools, such as shoulder-plane and plow-plane irons, that prove difficult to hold in other guides.

Because they're too short for most honing guides, blades from spokeshaves, palm planes, and miniature planes limit your sharpening technique to freehand—until now, that is. This guide, above, holds short blades up to 2-5/8" wide to sharpen at either 25° or 30°. A registration plate makes it easy to set up the bevel angle. The guide comes with a shim for honing a microbevel, but we found it clumsy to use.

We have used and loved the versatile Veritas Mk.II Standard Honing Guide (no. 05M0901) to sharpen 15°–54° bevel angles on chisels as narrow as 1/2" and plane irons as wide as 2-7/8" up to 15/32" thick. This set includes that standard guide plus a narrow-jaw guide for chisels and plane irons up to 1-1/2" wide. You get two rollers: one flat for standard bevels (most of what you'll sharpen), and a cambered one for irons with slightly rounded bevels, such as for smoothing planes (to avoid gouging on overlapping strokes). The set, above, comes with the handy angle-registration jig. A registration guide for skew chisels (no. 05M0903) is sold separately.