Tools need sharpening. Small tools are difficult to sharpen and if you go back through the magazines you will find lots of devices to help the amateur. In the confines of my garage/workshop any grinding operation covers everything, including me, with grinding dust. Small lathe tools and drills are difficult to hold and milling cutters cannot be ground by hand to any degree of accuracy. To get a gold or silver medal at exhibitions you will still have to make a Quorn but this is an easy way to sharpen many workshop tools. I made Derek Brown's small drill sharpener, which uses a diamond pad (MEW Jan 1993). This is an excellent little tool that can cope with drills up to 2.5mm diameter using the four-facet method. He also designed a larger model but I never got around to making it. I have used diamond disc cutters to enable me to accurately cut balsa wood and carbon fibre for my model aircraft and a friend mentioned that the discs would put an edge on tipped lathe tools. I don't have tipped tools (apart from masonry bits) but I tried grinding a HSS tool freehand and it worked well. Diamond discs are very reasonably priced from some outlets and are advertised as being suitable to sharpen carbide tools. Experience indicates that they also make an excellent job of sharpening HSS tools. Here an unforeseen benefit arises from the fact that the grinding debris is almost totally composed of the tool material. This contrasts with the results of using a typical grinding wheel, which produces large quantities of abrasive dust.
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