Author: huboboe
Date: 2012-05-29 00:52
In following the several reed knife discussions over the last few years, I realized that most of them revolve around the 'best' knife, the choice of a beveled or hollow ground blade, or just 'How the blazes to I get a sharp edge??'
I would like to open a thread that focuses on how we scrape and how that affects the choice of our blade profile and not on how to sharpen a knife.
Here's my two cents worth to open the discussion:
My first reed knife was made from a reground straight razor. (You young'uns go Google 'Straight Razor'). This is the current model for the double-hollow-ground knife in it's many iterations.
Later, when I got a job making commercial reeds, I used the knife my employer provided me which had a tapered blade, fat in the heel, narrow at the tip. I loved it and have used a variation of it my entire career, but that's a different part of the thread.
What most interests me is why the choice between a beveled or double hollow ground blade? The beveled blade has a fixed sharpening angle, but don't we put a similar angle on our hollow ground blades? Or do we?
It seems to me that a gouging machine is a clever adaptation of a wood plane and that a reed profiler is a clever adaptation of a gouging machine. (You may or may not agree with the playing results of a profiler, but you have to admit that the mechanical results are just fine...).
Why, then shouldn't the method of sharpening our scraping knives and the scraping actions of our reed making mimic the proven results of the machines that work so well at the mechanics of our craft?
Members of this forum have discussed making very satisfactory knives from planer blades.
I have always sharpened my blades at an (approximately) 30ยบ angle to the center line of the blade and only later discovered that most plane blades are sharpened to an angle close to that.
I'd like to know what other members of this forum think on this topic.
Have at it...
Robert Hubbard
WestwindDoubleReed.com
1-888-579-6020
bob@westwinddoublereed.com
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