My Veritas MK II Honing Guide came today so I thought i’d take it for a test drive and post a review.
First Impressions/ Unboxing: The product came packaged pretty much the same way all veritas products come everything was well protected, easy to get to, and instructions were more than adequate
I’m amazed at the high quality of this guide, its on par with the same high quality of every other veritas product i’ve ordered (no i’m not sponsored by them….they just make good stuff). The metal parts were all well made to high tolerances, all of the screw knobs are brass as is the roller which is nice and wide so that you don’t round over the outside edges of your blades
Next, how does it work? in a word….perfectly
the angle setting device, pictured on the right above, fixes to the roller guide providing you with an adjustable stop for different angles and a reference surface to make sure that your blades are sticking out of the guide at a perpendicular angle.
First put the angle setting section onto the roller using the dovetail shaped slide and then clamp it down with the brass knob, make sure to line it up so that your chisel/blade will line up approximately in the center of the guide when it hits the top block and right reference plane
align the blade so that it runs along the notch on the right side of the guide and up to the stop. Make sure not to jam the tip into the top as this will only make for more sharpening later. This stop block can be set for different angles ranging from 10 deg up to 54. There are three different height settings and three lines on the angle setting block that correspond to each.
This allows you to get exactly the same angle everytime you go to sharpen your chisel/plane blades which translates to much less work sharpening each time, its also very easy to setup and use.
I also tried this out on a plane blade which i found out that i had unfortunately sharpened a few degrees off last time I sharpened and had to go back to the 220 stone to fix it. Next time this wont ‘be an issue because of how precise this new guide sets the angles.
I tried to take pictures of just how perfect the sharpened edges were on my tools after using this but couldn’t get the lighting to work out right. I’ll try again and post pics up here once I do. However you don’t need to see pictures take my word for it if you use this and go up through the different stones to a 6000 or 8000 grit you will have amazingly sharp tools. The biggest reason I decided to upgrade to this guide was that my old guide…the same cheap one everywhere sells was not holding my chisels perpendicular and so they were getting a slight skew during sharpening (plane blades too) and this guide corrected that. I checked the blades after with my high precision square and they were perfect.
Pick one up here if you are looking for the best honing guide I’ve ever used
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