You know when you go to knife meetings you pick up some cool ideas. At a past meeting Phillip & Barry Jones shared their nationally if not internationally famous flat grinding jig.

John has used his rendition of this jig often. Last Saturday, Alvin (Oldgrinder) Kinsey got a chance to see it and liked it so he went home and made his own replica of it. (See below)

But women, being what we are, are not patient enough to wait till we get home. Kathleen Tomey sat right down at John's grinder and gave it a try.

It was a hit with both Alvin & Kathleen.
http://www.poythresscustomknives.com/images/GaGuild/flatgrinding1.jpg
http://www.poythresscustomknives.com/images/GaGuild/flatgrinding2.jpg
http://www.poythresscustomknives.com/images/GaGuild/kathleen.jpg

Thank you so much. A pic is worth a thousand words. Fantastic simple idea.

Thanks mrsjoan for posting that, it looks very interesting. I've got to ask though, how does one change belts? It looks like it would be cumbersome to do. Do you have any other pictures from the side and back of the jig by chance you could post? Finally, I assume the aluminum jig backing plate is held vertically, is this correct? What angle is the platen set to? Thanks again! :)

-Darren

John's version of this is:

4 plates side by side, all are bolted to the bar that runs across the bottom on the front. John uses 4 plates to make it long enough to grind long knives. Then, the 4 plates are clamped to the grinding rest. The shaft on the rest (see the pic of the backside) is turned horizontal so that the plates can slide either closer to him or away from him. The bolt, which bolts the rest to the machine, can be adjusted to change the angle on the plate. To change the belt is really easy. Just take the belt off the back and top wheel, then turn the belt sidesways and slide it out between the flat platen and the plate.

ONE WORD OF CAUTION: When you put the belt on, turn the belt with you hands to make sure it is tracking right on the platen. If you don't it could tear loose and pop the fire out of you.

http://www.poythresscustomknives.com/images/GaGuild/jigfront.jpg

http://www.poythresscustomknives.com/images/GaGuild/jigback.jpg

Now you have gone and given away our best kept secret. :rolleyes:

It looks like John has taken the whole idea a bit further than Phillip and I have. I never even considered adding more plates to lengthen it. We just made one huge plate and use that one for it all. We can grind swords on ours rather easily so we really don't need it any longer.

Changing belts is not very difficult on our machine either. We do it just like Joan says. We take the belt off and then kind of twist it to get it completely off. It's really not that difficult.

Kathleen's grind looks very good. Now she needs to try a nice recurve. That will really test her skills :D

Darren,

Our grinding plate is set up so that the angle we want to grind at can be adjusted. We can go as low as about 3 degrees and as high as 45 or more. It looks like John's setup is so that he can go down to zero on his.

Thanks Barry and mrsjoan for the clarification and posting those other pictures...it's much more clear to me now. :) That's a pretty slick set-up!

:)

-Darren

Any chance the pictures could be resurected? I only get small boxes with the "X" in em!

Sounds like something I would like to see more about.

Thanks!

I don't even see that much.