How do you sharpen an adze?

12th August 2021


	How to sharpen an adze?


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			Keeping your adze sharp is the best way to make your life easy when planing or sculpting – a sharper adze will always be more accurate and will help you to complete the task you’re working on more quickly.

			Sharpening an adze
			Step 1 – Set up To sharpen your adze, you’ll need a grinder.

			If your grinder is hand-held, you will need to make sure that your adze head is secured in a vice.



			Take a look at your tool to see if it has an outside or an inside bevel. You should be able to see by looking at the tool side on.

			Mark the edge that you’ll be grinding with a black marker pen. This will make it easy to see which parts of the tool have been sharpened at a glance, if you have to step away from the grinder for any reason.

			A 100 grit grinding wheel is ideal for the job.

			Step 2 – Initial sharpening Move your blade across the grinder to make sure it sharpens evenly. If you’re sharpening a lipped adze, you’ll need to twist the tool. If it’s flat, you’ll just be moving it from side to side.

			If you’re sharpening an inside bevel on a lipped adze, you may be able to rest the handle of the adze against the safety guard on the grinder while you’re sharpening the blade.

			This will help you to sharpen the inside curve of the tool without ruining the shape as it will give you something steady to lean on.

			Check that you can do this safely before turning your grinder on. If the handle of the tool comes into contact with the grinding wheel, then you need to come up with a new plan, or you’ll ruin your handle instead of sharpening your blade!

			Once you’ve sharpened your tool to the point where your black marker line has disappeared, you’re ready to move on to the next step.



			Removing burrs
			Step 3 – Check for burr If you check the tool by holding it up to the light, you’ll probably notice that there’s a ‘burr’ along the edge of it, which will need to be removed.

			A ‘burr’ is the name given to the tiny pieces of metal that don’t quite detach when you’re grinding or cutting a larger piece of metal.

			Having a burr on the edge of your tool is undesirable because it will make your tool chew the wood you’re trying to smooth out, resulting in a rougher surface and defeating the object of using the adze in the first place!

			Step 4 – Turn burr back A burr can be ground off your adze blade, but you first need to turn it back, as it will have folded itself under the blade. You can do this with a stick.

			You can also do it with a buffer wheel on your grinder by running the reverse side of your blade across the grinder wheel.

			Step 5 – Remove burr Once the burr has been turned back, use the buffer wheel on your grinder to go over the edge you originally sharpened.

			Step 6 – Repeat until no burr remains Repeat this process until the burr has been completely removed. You can check to see if it has gone by holding your tool up to the light, or by carefully running your fingernail along the edge of the blade.

			Removing nicks
			If there are any nicks in the blade, you can remove them by sharpening it.

			Rather than drawing a black marker line along the edge of the tool, draw one that goes back behind the nick. You can then grind it out of the tool using the process described above.