Grinder Improvement

It's been almost three years since I got my hand-crank grinder.  Its clamp doesn't open wide enough for me to attach it to my workbench, so I clamp it to a chunk of wood and clamp the wood in a vise.

My grinder, clamped to a 2x8, clamped in the end vise

The original tool rest is an "L" bracket bolted to the side of the gear box.

See the bolt?

The tool rest is fairly flimsy, so early on I made a new tool rest from a few pieces of oak and pine.

My first homemade tool rest

The adjustable rest is bolted to the gear box on one side and to a pine upright on the other

In use, I held the tool flat to the surface of the rest and brought it to the wheel

There were some problems with this.  First, it took a bit of practice before I got good at using it.  Second, if was never as accurate as I wanted it to be.  I wasn't getting an even grind across the width of the chisel or plane iron.

Here's an example: this chisel had been sharpened a few times after being ground,
but you can still see that the grind marks were not consistent

A while back I saw a grinder attachment that someone made and I'd been wanting to make something similar.  It's basically a platform with a movable stop that will hold the butt end of the chisel or iron a fixed distance from the wheel.  I can move the stop to get the grind angle I desire.

Half inch plywood extension screwed to the bottom of the 2x8, with a slot
down the middle for the movable stop

The stop keeps the chisel a consistent distance from the wheel
(the ruler is laid in front of the stop to keep the chisel from getting stuck in the slot)

Another view - see the sparks?  Ooohh!

And another view, in line with the wheel showing the alignment of tool to wheel

This is a far more even grind than I've ever gotten

The stop does double duty.  One side is straight so that I can slide chisels side to side, and the other side has a "V" groove for grinding gouges.  I've had much more difficulty grinding gouges in the past.  With this helper, the gouge's butt end stays seated in the groove while I twist the gouge to grind the entire bevel.

Bird's eye view of a gouge on the grinder

This allowed me to get an almost perfectly consistent grind all across the curved bevel.

Now that came out great!!

For plane blades, I can use it just as I did for chisels.  But it looks like the iron is held at a weird angle.  So I made a riser to hold a plane iron at a much more reasonable angle.

Plane iron in the jig

Plane iron on the riser

As it turns out, the riser isn't necessary and I quit using it.  That upright angle of the iron doesn't matter - what matters is the angle that the wheel grinds on the bevel.

This was an easy project to make.  It just took a little thought about how to do it.  And it works fantastically well.  I'll still need the other tool rest I made for other kinds of grinding work, but fortunately the two jigs are removable.

I'd seen another variation on this somewhere, possibly made for a powered grinder.  In that one, rather than have an adjustable stop, the whole platform was adjustable, sliding in and out through a slot under the grinder.