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While researching, a number of sources give multiple answers.
So I ask y’all...
At what angle are you sharpening your chisels and plane blades? Micro-bevel or not?



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Between 25 and 30 degrees, paring 25 degrees, bench it varies between 25 and 30 degrees. No

25 for paring (no hitting!) and 30 for hitting. I have tried 20° with success. For planes, with bevel down you are stuck at a 45° angle, so whatever is easy works, I use about 30+°. For bevel up, you can play with it a bit - I have even used a 45° bevel for gnarly wood - this gives a 57° angle when added to the 12° bedding angle. Note that there used to be many wooden smooth planes, mostly English, that had a 55° bevel built in for those woods.

Ed

Depends on what you are doing and what sort of chisels you have. Thats why there are multiple "right" answers..:

For working spruce and cedar - chisels need to be maximally sharp. Fine bevel angles also work best.. So 15-25 degrees. This also means you will be using standard carbon steel chisels. And they work better than anything else by a mile on this stuff because they take fine bevels very well.. Many of the super hard Japanese chisels are actually designed for this use.

Hardwoods that fall in with soft maple, walnut, mahogany, and cherry are very insensitive to perfect setup. Use whatever you have. It will do a good enough job so long as it's not too dull. You can do some beautiful work in this stuff with chisels are too dull or too blunt to cut spruce right. A2 and magic metal chisels will cut this stuff almost forever between sharpenings.

Really hard and really abrasive stuff needs a more blunt bevel for durability. You see bevels with this stuff of 30+ degrees.... Stuff like white oak, mesquite, osage orange, rosewoods, Bubinga, the hard exotic hardwoods and almost everything from Australia... For this work - A2 and the newer super steels are almost mandatory because they don't go instantly dull.. Another choice here is a rehardened conventional carbon steel chisel that's minimally tempered with hardness running around Rc60 sharpened at around 35 degrees.. Unfortunately - this sort of thing means specialized sharpening gear.

On microbevels on chisels...

I started off using them and working very hard to maintain them...

Then I spoke with some very good luthiers and they didn't use them... Primarily because the chisel doesn't register properly for the paring and brace shaving when bevel down.. I tried a conventional single bevel and decided they were right.. So that's what I do now..