Andrew:
I agree with Leonid on this one: nevermind the fancy grinding
machine, it’s more than you need right now.
(and I have one. Love it, but I do this a lot.) (Somewhere north of
$750. You can buy a lot of carbon gravers for that.)
Don’t waste your time trying to hand grind and temper your own
gravers. Carbon steel gravers are cheap, and are actually better to
learn on anyway.
(They should be around $10 ea, plus handles. Not worth your time to
try to fake it.)
The carbon steel ones wear faster, but that won’t be an issue for
you when you’re learning. The bigger thing is that they sharpen much
more easily than HSS or carbide, which will be a big issue as
you’re learning to sharpen. When you get too acute, and the tip snaps
off, it takes much less time to polish your way back to a sharp point
with a carbon steel graver than it would with an HSS graver.
Don’t ask what angles to sharpen to: most of the hand sharpener
types don’t know. What they do know is that if they sharpen it to
this angle, the tip snaps off, but if they back off just a little,
it doesn’t. So, you want the edges as acute as you can get them
before they fail. The built-in feedback system of hand sharpening is
that if the tip snaps off, your inbuilt tendency to focus on
polishing out that great huge snapped nose will automatically cause
you to reduce the angle for the next try. Eventually, you’ll get to
the point where the edge gets dull before it snaps off. Keep using
that angle.
The reason I say not to make your own is that you don’t know what
shapes you want, or how they should cut. So in addition to trying to
learn one of the most technical techniques out there, you’ll be
trying to do it with tools that may (or may not) be right. This can
only end in swearing, blood and fire.
Once you know what you want, and how it should work, then you can
make your own, but I really, really wouldn’t suggest it for a
beginner.
Shapes? depends on what you want to do. I can never remember the
sizing conventions (as in which numbers mean what in which country.)
but middle of the road sizes would be fine for beginning. Get a
round, flat, knife and ongilette (point or spitstick) Oh, and a
lozenge for letter engraving. Should run to a little north of $50 or
so. (Contact some of the tool houses to see if they have any used
gravers. Gravers are one of those things that seem to always float
around in the backs of drawers and boxes. There are always used
gravers floating around. Could probably be had cheaply that way
too.)
As far as polishing them goes, (polishing the sides) yes, they come
with crappy grind marks on them. If you’re doing bright cuts, you
care. In learning? Not enough to worry about until you get better.
Leonid was right, in that the tempering on the older Eastern European
tools tended to be spotty. The modern ones are pretty consistently
good. Not worth fussing with baking them in the oven for modern
tools. (especially HSS & carbide: won’t do a thing to those.)
FWIW
Brian