V-Tool Problem

That notch in your V-tool edge is not your fault. It comes from the factory, in every price bracket, because a V-tool's two walls are almost never machined to exactly the same thickness. Sharpen the thinner wall and you reach the thin spot before you reach the edge, and a little step appears.

Have you ground away at a V-tool for an hour and watched a small notch appear on one side? Did you decide your hands were the problem and put the tool in a drawer? I get emails about this. Some people have tried to grind the fault out, failed, and bought a replacement that did exactly the same thing.

So let me say the important part first. You did not cause it. You cannot prevent it by being more careful. And it will happen on the next tool you buy too, unless you know what you are looking at.

What the fault actually is

• A notch or step turns up somewhere down one side of the V, most often near the bottom.
• It shows up while you sharpen, not when the tool is new and the factory edge is still on it.
• The cause is uneven wall thickness, which comes from how the flute was machined.
• Price does not protect you. The cheapest and the dearest tools both do it.
• The cure is an order of operations, not more skill and not more grinding.

Where does the notch actually come from?

Uneven metal is the whole answer. Pick your V-tool up and look along it, closely, in good light. One will be thicker than its partner. Not by much, and you may need to hold a pen against it to see anything at all, but the difference is there and it is enough.

Think about how the tool was born. A maker starts with a solid block of tool steel and machines the flute out of the middle of it. A bit goes in and removes the waste. Let that bit sit a fraction off centre and one wall comes out thinner. If it also runs slightly twisted, the thin part migrates toward one edge.

Now sharpen it. You take metal off the outside, evenly, the way you should. The thick wall has plenty to give. Its thin partner runs out of metal and you reach the hollow inside before the edge is finished, and where those two meet you get a step. That step is your notch.

A second version of the same story exists. Instead of wandering sideways, the bit goes too deep, and then the thin spot lands at the very bottom of the V rather than along a wall. People see it right at the point. Same cause, different address.

One detail that surprises people: the fault stays invisible while the tool is new. Makers put a factory edge on before it ships, and that edge sits on the outside where the metal is still full. You can carve happily for months. Then the day comes when it needs sharpening, you take the outside back to fresh steel, and the thin wall finally shows itself.

Which is why so many carvers blame themselves. It worked, then they touched it, and now it does not. The sequence feels like cause and effect, and it is not. All that happened is that a fault built into the blade finally came within reach of the abrasive.

Which brands have this problem?

All of them, without exception. Cheap steel out of China, Ashley Iles, Henry Taylor, Pfeil, and the one I was holding while I filmed this happens to be Swiss made. It makes no difference whatsoever.

Nor does the method of manufacture. The finest CNC machine in the world, or a smith forging by hand, and you will still not get two walls of identical thickness on a V-tool. Getting a bit down the middle of a narrow trough and keeping it perfectly centred and perfectly straight is simply hard.

Thing you notice	What is actually going on in the steel	Whose fault	What you should do about it
A step appears	Steel runs thinner along one side	The maker	Shape the keel before the walls
Step near bottom	The cutter travelled deeper than intended	Also machining	Treat it as your reference point
Expensive tool too	Every maker faces the same narrow trough	Nobody really	Stop shopping for a cure
It keeps returning	Grinding harder simply moves the step along	Wrong order	Blend down to it, never through

How do you inspect a V-tool before you buy?

Turn it so you are looking straight down the flute, then tilt it until light travels down one side at a time. Compare the amount of metal each wall carries between its outer face and the hollow inside. Hold a pen against the steel if your eyes want a reference. Mine do these days.

Another way is to look at the tool end on, from the tip, the way you would sight down a chisel. From that angle the asymmetry is often obvious, and you will see immediately that the V is not sitting symmetrically about its own centreline. Most tools fail this test to some degree. Your job is to spot the one that fails it badly.

Grinding a small flat across the very tip is another honest way to check, though obviously nobody does that in a shop before paying. It shows the cross section directly, and one wall will be visibly fatter than the other. I mention it because it is worth doing to a tool you already own, so you know what you are dealing with before you ever start.

Worth saying out loud: none of this means the tool is ruined. A notched V-tool carves perfectly well once the three surfaces agree with one another. Blend the walls level with it, slowly, and you are fine. One sentence, and it is the entire cure. Worth more than any amount of theory about why the fault exists in the first place. What kills tools is not the fault. It is the hour somebody spends grinding furiously at it.

How do you fix a notch in a V-tool?

Change the order you work in. Everything else about sharpening stays the same, and I have a whole lesson on the method if you want the full sequence. Only the order changes.

Remember what one of these tools really is, underneath the shape. Three separate tools which happen to share a single handle between them. At the bottom sits a keel. It behaves like a very small gouge and never comes to a sharp point, because a curve runs across it. On either side of it sit two chisels. One gouge and a pair of chisels, all of it ground out of a single piece of steel, and you sharpen each of them on its own terms.

A tool with even walls lets you start wherever you like. Most people do the two chisel walls first and finish on the keel, and that works perfectly well when the steel is even.

Where a notch exists, reverse that order. Grind the keel first, the back of the tool, and establish whatever slope you want down there. Do that even though the notch is still sitting in plain sight. Then go to the walls, working one before the other, and take them down very slowly until they arrive level with that notch.

The keel leads for a reason. It is the part that actually rides the timber when the tool travels, so its bevel governs how the whole thing behaves. Getting it right first means that whatever compromises you then have to make on the walls, the tool still runs properly through the wood.

The other reason is arithmetic. Establish the keel and the notch becomes a fixed, known point that you can measure the walls against. Start on the walls instead and you are grinding toward a target that has not been set yet, which is how carvers end up taking off a quarter of an inch of good steel and still not arriving anywhere.

Why work toward the notch instead of removing it?

That notch marks the thinnest point of the steel, and the thinnest point is the limit of what the tool has to give. Grinding past it means chasing a moving target: take more off the wall and the notch simply reappears further along, and you have thrown away good steel for nothing.

Treat it instead as a datum. Everything else comes down to meet it. Once both walls and the keel agree with the notch, the edge is continuous again and the tool carves properly, and nobody looking at the finished cut will know there was ever an argument.

Slowly. Little by little, checking constantly, because a wall that is already thin will surrender its whole edge to one careless pass. Patience beats technique at this stage, and it is the only stage where I would say that.

None of this depends on what you sharpen with. A Work Sharp, a Tormek, a bench stone, a scrap of abrasive paper glued to glass. The order of work is the whole trick and it applies equally to all of them, and that is my reason for showing no machine in this lesson at all.

Finish the same way you would finish any other tool. A strop folded into the flute for the inside, compound from Woodcraft or Flexcut on the outside, and the last of the burr wiped away on a scrap of basswood. The fault we have been discussing changes none of that.

How bad can the mismatch be? Small enough that you may need a pen tip beside it before you believe the difference is there at all. That is the frustrating part. A gap you can barely photograph produces a fault you cannot ignore, because everything at the edge of a tool happens at a scale where fractions of a millimetre decide the outcome.

There is one small irony in this lesson. I could not show you the fault on a real tool of mine, because I do not own a bad one any more. I have several V-tools and every single one has already been dealt with, which is why you are looking at drawings instead of steel. Take that as the best evidence I can offer you that the thing is genuinely fixable. Every tool in my rack was once sitting exactly where yours is now.

Should you buy a V-tool at all?

Yes, and I use mine constantly, but I understand carvers who avoid it. The V-tool is not standard equipment in every workshop and never has been. Plenty of very good carvers go their whole lives without one, and this problem is a large part of why.

That is a shame, because the tool itself is excellent. Outlining, setting a line before anything else happens, undercutting: when I am carving it is almost the first thing my hand reaches for. Abandoning it over a manufacturing quirk means giving up a great deal of capability.

So my advice is simple. Buy one, expect the fault, and know which surface leads before you ever put it on a wheel. That knowledge is worth more than the difference between a cheap tool and an expensive one.

One practical note while you are shopping. Look along the walls before you pay, if the shop will let you. You will not find a perfect tool, but you can certainly avoid the worst one on the rack, and five seconds of looking saves a long evening later.

The rest of the sharpening work follows the same three stage road, shape by shape. Start with the straight gouge, because everything your hands learn there carries over. Then the V-tool proper, across four videos.

Bent shapes come next: a spoon gouge, a back bent whose slope sits on the outer face, a skew bent. Then a fingernail for flowers, a large gouge, the micro tools, diamond discs, seven videos on stropping and honing, and the L-bracket I bent myself to save the price of a Tormek arm. Thirteen lessons in the whole course.

I am going to be honest with you about why this lesson exists at all. It exists because enough of you wrote to me, and because I was slow to answer. Somebody out there is sitting in front of a notched tool right now deciding they are not cut out for this. You are cut out for it. The tool was made wrong and nobody told you. Come and learn the whole thing properly.

Shall we carve?