Improve your whittler knife in 10 minutes.

For people who do not like long winded essays;

"I re-sharpened my whittler blades single-beveled at about 20 degrees angle, and it cut better"

There.

For windbaggery fans:

Four score and seven years later, the whittler knife remains mostly unchanged. Abraham Lincoln was a whittler. He used a six bladed ivory scaled Congress made by a Sheffield cutler. My post today is the result of my purchase of 3 whittler pattern knives. I felt that a change is in order.

I will attempt to whittle away the logic behind a whittler blade, a sliver at a time.

Most Whittlers are made for collectors

What makes a whittler a whittler is their ability to cut wood with ease.
The type of steel, the heat treatment and the way the steel is shaped / sharpened affects the cutting characteristic of a whittler to a large extent.
Unfortunately, many folders sold today have collectors as their primary target, not wood carvers.  As a utility steel for cutting cardboard boxes, strings, oranges etc., 440 steel is as good a steel as any other. They do not rust, oxidize, darken or discolour as easily as plain carbon steel, and they require little maintenance. You can etch a nice diagram or wording (e.g.. "Tuff Muthercutter" ) on the master blade, and decades later, they will still be crisp. You do not need to wipe your finger oils after you handled them.For handles, you have a choice of stag, bone, walrus ivory, pearl, abalone, exotic woods, etc. Nice scales and shiny steel. Combine the two factors and you have a collectible knife to keep in your vault. But we are looking at whittlers here. Knives for carving wood.

A properly heat treated 440 series steel may take and hold a fine edge, but if you have any experience sharpening any 1095 High Carbon, you may not go back to your "surgical steel" , "high carbon stainless", "Rostfrei" again. Plain carbon steel are very easy to get a VERY fine edge on (they do not burr left and right stubbornly during sharpening) Ease of sharpening here.
And when they get dull, a dozen strokes on a Washita (or medium India, or fine Carborundum) usually does the trick. Finish by Stropping on leather or your palm, and you're ready to continue.

 Whittlers are made for soft woods.

Bold statement here. Allow me to say this: Most people whittle for fun. I cannot imagine myself having much fun with a piece of Lignum Vitae or ebony or burlwood. Bleeding fingers and chipped blades are not my idea of fun.Those woods people do carve and I call those people carvers. Different profession using different tools. If one day I decide to do the last supper scene on a peach seed, I probably would be using modified dental implements. So if you whittle pine, cedar, basswood, poplar, balsa, firewood, offcuts etc, you are likely to pick a moderately carvable piece. Whittlers are for soft, easy woods.

Whittlers should be sharpened with a single bevel

Have you seen one before? Neither have I.
All whittling knives are factory sharpened on both sides, each side bevelled about 12 to 20 degrees. The resultant wedge cross section of the blade can be as high as 30-40 degrees. To make a cut, you further raise the blade by a few degrees. You are better off using the knife for scraping meat of lamb ribs.

We all agree that it is easier to slice wood at a low angle of approach with a tool having a smaller included angle.* see diagram below for I meant by "included angle"

On top of this, with a lower angle of attack, most of the forces exerted by the wood is transferred to the spine of the slip joint, not the sides.

Take a foot-long plastic ruler. Try to carve your palm at 45 degrees. Push hard.
See how the ruler twists?

Now....lower the angle of attack to 10 degrees.
Note how you can exert considerably more force before the ruler twists?

This is true for push cuts and slicing cuts on all soft or green wood. The exceptions are curly grained wood and turning cuts made on concaved surfaces . We do not slice such woods. We scrape them, with the angle of approach close to vertical.

From the drawing, it makes sense that out of the 3 blades commonly found in a whittler, at least one should be single beveled for detail cuts. It should then behave like a regular chisel. It is also possible to lower the cutting angle of the single beveled blade without losing the clearance. Dunno what I'm saying? Below please:

How would you like to whittle? Slicing cuts with ease or jerky scraping cuts? If you have any experience with a Japanese cut-out knife (Kiridashi-Kogatana), you will appreciate what I am putting across.

Ready to start messing with your 1972 Case XX Stag split-backspring whittler....?
Great.

The caveat
As with any activity that mess around with tradition, there will be side effects. For this little grinding exercise, the total included angle is reduced by half, hence a more fragile edge. I did say that whittler are for soft wood, no? And try not to dig and twist in the wood.

The last word:

I have yet to whittle with one such modified blade. So this could be hogwash or this may be something worth a try.

May 30, 2013

Well...not hogwash. Cuts a little easier, and delicate cuts are possible with less force applied.

 Tried the performance on the lowly task of pointing up a pencil.

Lastly, it's more like an hour's work rather than the 10 minutes I perceived. Flattening the blade completely took most of the time.