what's going on everybody welcome to assess project my name is Seth of course today we're gonna be going over the initial preparation of a Japanese chisel of the blade and we're gonna be getting it nice and sharp and super polished it's not very hard luckily I had a pretty flat bevel and a pretty flat back so this process was very quick but some chisels that you guys have will take much longer so first things first I'm starting with a shaft in glass stone it is 1,000 grit I would recommend starting at 1,000 just to see how flat your bevel is and you also want to flatten your stone I use a flattening plate I need to get a better one but that's neither here nor there so I'll wipe off the remnants and then I will put my hands in the water and I will just kind of wipe it over the surface just get all the little particles off and and really make sure that there's no debris on the stone so I will actually Rock the chisel and make sure that I'm registered exactly on the primary bevel you do not want a micro bevel on a Japanese chisel it will pretty much ruin the chisel in my opinion so you want a dead flat bevel from the back all the way to the cutting edge and from left to right so the first thing that I want to do is I want to see just how out of flat the bevel is and in my case it wasn't too far out but if it is you want to go to the bench grinder and you want to grind it out and I want to do a separate video on this because I feel like this is super important and it can save you a whole bunch of time but as you can see I'm high in the middle and low on the outside corners which is not awful but do need to do a little bit more work to get that dead flat and it was probably only like two or three extra minutes to get that dead flat from where I am so here I'm showing you exactly how I'm holding the chisel I got my pinkie and ring finger wrapped around the back for support and the rest of them are pretty much holding it in place to make sure I'm not rocking the bevel and making sure I'm staying dead flat my right hand is pretty much doing most of the work my left hand is really just balance I'm showing you the two finger technique here but I end up using just one finger later on so here I'm kind of showing you how I would flatten the bevel on a bench grinder I don't use like the round part I use the side that is flat and I will register a block on the bottom to kind of get the distance I will go much more in detail later on about this probably in a separate video so here I'm kind of demonstrating I'm kind of going at it and more of an angle some people like to do this it's not really my preferred way but this also works you don't have to go completely sideways like I do you really want to spend as much time as you can on the lower grist to get this bevel completely flat because you will find on the higher grits it will be much faster to get a really good polish so kind of spend more time on these much coarser grits to get it pretty flat and as you can see I've still got some low points on the corners but I'm getting there and it's not taking me very long so here you can see I kind of switched over to my quote-unquote one finger method I see a couple people sharpen like this and I find it so much easier to add really hard downward pressure right where you need it using this method and I can kind of see more of what I'm doing and I'm not blocking so much and it just feels more natural to use just one finger and kind of press down I can really get more accurate results that's just for me you guys could find a better way to do it I would also like to mention that I get my chisels and my Japanese tools from a guy named Newberry the link to his website will always be in the description to all my videos so if you guys would like to go check him out make sure to go to the description so as you can see I've got a dead flat bevel from left to right and from the cutting edge back this only took me about five six minutes total and that's not very much time so this bevel was pretty flat to begin with but as of right now this the polish on the bevel is actually pretty nice so after you get the bevel flat is now time to get the back of the chisel flat and I usually go about 15 mil in from the cutting edge and I don't flatten the whole back there's no real point for me to do that because for what I use to chisel for I don't go past 15 mil so if you guys are doing like timber framing where you're going way down into the wood I would probably recommend flattening the whole back but it is not necessary to flatten the whole back unless you know you're gonna use the whole back obviously so again I'm going to be doing just a couple passes here and kind of checking it to see how flat that I am and like I said before this this chisel came pretty flat on the bevel and the back so it didn't take much work to get this flat and yeah we'll just continue going on the thousand grit and then next we'll go all the way up to 8,000 grit this is my first chef Dan class stone and I really loved it and I wish I'd have got the glass stones from the start but I got the shaft unprofessional which they aren't bad but the chef Dan glass stones are my preferred stone now I really like this thousand one and I will probably get the much higher grits later on but as you can see here on the back I have a low spot on the top and left corner and it's not very much but I want this to be dead flat so I'm going to continue going on with a thousand grit before I move up any more grits make sure the bevel and the back of the chisel are dead flat because you're gonna save a whole bunch of time also I don't know if you guys can tell but I'm pinching the side of the chisel and that's kind of like it 15 mil depth and it's that way I don't go past it but it's not really a huge deal but the secret to this is to not stay at 15 mil depths the whole time so don't use that as a guide kind of go from 10 mil to 15 mil and that way you don't create a ridge on the bottom of the chisel it's really for aesthetic reasons but it gives you a much more transition from the more gray finish to the polished finish and you guys will see that a little later on so now that we got the bottom in the bevel completely flat we're gonna move on here to 8,000 grit I'm not gonna worry about going to 5000 or anything in between because I know that the bevel is flat so it's not really gonna matter I could actually skip all the way to 12,000 but just in case I'm not dead flat I will go to 8,000 and then go on to 12,000 but the process here is the exact same as the 1000 all I'm gonna do is just work on the bevel and get it dead flat have that polish go from left to right and from a lead edge to the back one thing that I forgot to mention when you're working on the bevel on the thousand grit you want to make sure that you can fill a burr from left to right on the cutting edge before you start working on the back so that way you know that the the bevel goes all the way down to the cutting edge and you know you're gonna get an extremely sharp chisel so at this point is the first time I've really got to see the chisel really polished and this is only eight thousand grit and when I go to twelve thousand it's it's like a mirror it looks really really nice so now here I am on the 12,000 stone and I made sure obviously that it was dead flat there's really no need to hurry in this process you want to make sure that you're being as accurate as you can because hey you're gonna save time in the end is if you stay accurate you want to make sure you're not rocking that bevel so just kind of take it slow well there's no reason to hurry that's when you start getting into trouble so here I'm doing the arm shave test and it takes all of the hair off my arm you can't really see it was kind of out of focus but you saw the little hairs but anyway there is the absolutely dead flat bevel super polished same thing on the back so hopefully you guys learned something and if you did make sure to subscribe I'm going to be doing a couple more videos on how to prepare chisel and maybe how to set the ring and stuff like that and maybe one day I'm going to upgrade a couple chisels and maybe turn some handles for them and cool things like that so don't miss it make sure to subscribe if you learned something make sure to LIKE the video and I will see you guys next time you