TESTED: Veritas side clamping honing guide
1. The Veritas guide is very well made and detailed with aluminium body and steel components. The brass thumbwheel applies pressure to clamp your blade in position. The small allen screw within this can be tightened to further lock the mechanism in place for wider blades when more clamping power is needed.
Reviewed by Raf Nathan
Simpler honing guides like this have been around for years. The most famous is the Eclipse style and its variations, and given its usefulness is readily available at low cost.
The Eclipse style is aluminium and has two positions to lock a chisel or blade in place. What I’ve always found a bit weak in this design is that the rolling wheel is rather narrow and you have to concentrate to not rock around when honing.
Made in Canada, this Veritas version costs more at $84 but you do get a lot more for your money. It has a painted aluminium body that is more heavy duty and there is a substantial steel threaded mechanism that clamps your blade. The blade to be sharpened sits in tiny ledges that clamp on it. It has upper and lower ledges and a wide brass rolling wheel which helps greatly to avoid any rocking when in use. It holds chisels and plane blades ranging from 1/8" (3mm) to 2-1/2" (63.5mm) covering all your sharpening needs, except for Japanese chisels with their shorter blades.
2. The brass roller is a good width which helps to avoid rocking the chisel around when honing. Wipe away any water if using wetstones and using a touch of oil occasionally will help.
For most chisels the upper ledge works best, and with shorter blades the lower one. Always check the blade is seated positively in the guide as the small holding ledges work, but are in my opinion too small so it’s easy for a blade to mis-align.
Once seated in the guide, you tighten the tool with a large brass thumbwheel. For wider plane blades it’s recommended to further tighten this with the small allen screw that sits inside the thumbwheel.
3. Your chisel or plane blade is grasped with the small angled ledges. The upper position is better for longer tools like chisels. Care is needed to ensure your blade is seated properly. by retracting the blade a fraction.
To speed up setting the blade angle, a supplied chisel angle registration template is included. This is paper but easily replicated with ink on a piece of wood or ply for permanency. It works really well as you simply extend the chisel to the desired mark on the template.
This gauge won me over with its consistent and straight honing ability, and using the template to set the angle made it quite a quick operation. Whilst the achieved sharpness of the chisel straight from the honing guide is good it still needed a very tiny micro bevel. You can do this using the guide by retracting the blade a fraction.
However I gave a few freehand laps on a fine stone to get it razor sharp. The only downer for me was the inability to sharpen Japanese chisels.
Veritas tools available from www.carbatec.com.au
Raf Nathan @treeman777 is a Brisbane based woodworker and AWR contributor.