Sharpening the skewed blade on the Lowfat Roubo Cutting gauge

One of the things that held me back from producing a cutting blade version of my marking gauges was finding a suitable blade. I’m not a blade maker for a start and have no desire to be one so it meant finding one from stock elsewhere.

Amongst my tools I have a few blades that aren’t as easy to resharpen as say my planes and chisels and if I’m being honest, it really bugs me. For some time now – let’s say at least a couple of years – I’ve tinkered around with jigs to complement the Lie-Nielsen honing jig to take some of the variables out of sharpening.

Nothing fancy, just a plain old depth gauge block for angles between 20 and 50°. Last time I looked there were plans on their website if you want to make one your self.

When it came to buying into the LN guide as opposed to other makes the clincher was the ability to swap out jaws of different angles to accommodate skewed blades.

I don’t have that many but I even went as far as having a set of 30° jaws machined to accommodate the 15° skew on a Veritas rebate plane.

It wasn’t a huge leap to make the connection between cutting gauge blades and honing guides but it’s certainly one of my better eureka moments. The set-up is as follows.

Take 1 x LN Honing Guide, attach the pair of 30° jaws (left or right handed as required). Set the appropriate projection for the desired angle, 20° in this case, and hone away. If secondary bevels are your thing tuck a slither of veneer between the blade and depth stop or move on up to 25°.

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