When a file is used on soft material like aluminum, you can use the same material to remove the the filings that stick. Holing the file in your left hand, stroke the material parallel with the teeth - pushing away from you. This was taught to me by lifetime tool and die/mold and jig machinist.(born 1938)
Old Sneelock's Workshop As a machinist and tool maker since 1975, I used files of all types. Wearing them out was a common issue. When I became supervisor and was charged with purchasing files for the tool room and maintenance it was common to go through several boxes of files a month. The tool makers and machine repair people tossed the dull ones in a bin and they went out with the scrap. At $3.00 to $5.00/ file it was considered a cost of business. In my own shop I found myself going through files at the same rate. I wasn't buying them new. I was getting them at auctions, garage sales, and flea markets. They were worn to start with and didn't get better in use. A friend of mine told me about sharpening files with acid. I was skeptical when I first heard of it. After trying the method and refining it a bit I accepted that it worked. I have been using acid to sharpen files for 15 years or more. Here is a thread from Build Something Cool. He had tried the method and we discussed the pros and cons of the method while fielding questions from the group. This link will take you to his demonstration. th-cam.com/video/rRakH7TrE2E/w-d-xo.html 6 years ago Thanks for finding the Popular Mechanics article. That answers the "I won't believe it without photomicrographs crowd." I wonder what their next objection will be? Reply Build Something Cool · 5 replies Build Something Cool Build Something Cool 6 years ago LOL Reply DajjaD DajjaD 6 years ago funny thats the only article that says this is sharpening that ive seen Reply Stanley Chang Stanley Chang 5 years ago Thanks for your comment. I wouldn't have looked in the description otherwise. Why doesn't this work for knives, chisels, or drills though? Reply Evan Penny Evan Penny 4 years ago Hey guys, if you don't like the idea of acid sharpening don't use it. It does not matter to me whether you need to find reasons to contradict the idea or not, but some of your comments are really a bit thoughtless.
Technically you probably could use acid to sharpen knives etc, but you would not use it. The knife is a thin tool and eroding away some of its thickness is unhelpful. Chisels do not suffer from a lack of thickness, but eroding metal would alter its dimensions, also the erosive process is not very uniform, so getting a nice even sharpen will not happen. Drills also do not want to have their dimensions altered. Also with the drill bit the angle of the cutting area is quite large, unlike the angle of the cutting part of a file. The result would be minimal sharpening for significant loss of metal and loss of dimensional accuracy of the tool. Surely, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Just try it. ▼ Reply Old Sneelock's Workshop Old Sneelock's Workshop 4 years ago The idea of sharpening drill bits as a test of the process has been brought up before. The differing actions of a file and a drill bit are the reason it isn't used to sharpen drill bits. Drills use the width of the point to define the diameter of the hole that is drilled. Acid removes metal from every surface it comes in contact with. The drill bit will become smaller in diameter just as fast as it becomes sharp. You end up with a drill bit that is sharper but with a random sized diameter The same, two surfaces being eaten away, process exists because the diameter is the measure of the distance between the two sides of the bit. It will work on a knife but who wants a thinner shorter knife? Besides each of the other suggested arguments against using acid, points out a device that is normally sharpened in a different way, as an example of the acid process being a failure. If it were as easy to run a stone down the edge of the files teeth as it is a knife we all wouldn't bother with the mess of acid sharpening. Milling cutters are ground on center grinders because they have fewer flutes than a file would have in the same distance. The operation of the file doesn't depend on it's width or thickness as long as it is sharp and strong enough to not break during use. 😊 If you would like a good history of files, how they are made, and used I recommend The File It’s History Making And Uses by Henry Disston & Son. Upload of a copy from the Stanford University Library is available here. play.google.com/books/reader?id=1mNBAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA7
Hace unos años vi aquí en YT este método y lo probé. Lamentablemente decía que las limas debían estar solo una hora en vinagre por lo que el resultado no fue muy bueno . Voy a probar dejarlas tres días. Gracia.
I just started restoring files now for a month with white vinegar and it work some but have found cleaning vinegar at dollar tree when added half and half with white vinegar 1 foam forms when the files are cleaning and 2 foamgets brown at the top after sitting 4 days I then clean them with awesome cleaner and it brings the Grey back on some of the files to a new look.
Lets call it rejuvenating the file. I have been doing this for years with full sftrength white vinegar overnight. I clean the file with a piece of copper pipe. Good for use on swiss files.
I have been testing with electrolysis and a Constant Current power supply so I can dial in the voltage and current. I used a fine brass wire brush afterwards to get rid of the black gunge. It kind-of works if you wind the amperage up high enough so that the rust "pops" off the surface. On badly rusted files you can see where the teeth are chipped and eroded, so whilst they bite it's not as good as a new sharp file. Some people say that Citric Acid is better than Vinegar (mild Acetic Acid). Paint them in Phosphoric Acid after cleaning to re-establish the grey anti-rust coating.
With the vinegar soaking, you're actually cleaning out the teeth areas that have been plugged up with both rust and dirt. By soaking your cleaning and exposing the cutting teeth again in a more proper cutting manner. That's why they now cut again.. Plugged up teeth doesn't cut properly.
Colouring wood uses vinegaroon which is something like steel wool soaked in vinegar for a couple of days. You need a high tannin wood before it works. It will work on leather too.
Wow that is amazing....like magic! Ha! How does the vinegar make the "teeth" come back?? I am definitely baffled...but science was never my strong suite! I am definitely amazed!
Whilst not technically sharpening, you are unclogging, and therefore returning the file back to whatever sharpness it had, but that's a mouthful, so sharpening as a title works.
maybe higher acid conc might have helped? when you tested them thinking should have rested one end of workpiece on table and then filed. Once saw a thread on PM I guess the question is still unanswered. Thanks.
Henley’s Formulas for Home and Workshop, that 100 year old book, has a procedure for this using nitric acid. I don’t know a source for the acid though.
You said that you put in vinegar 3 days but I would like to know average temperature. I put in files today and temperature is 0 ~10 degrees celsius so I plan to leave it 4~5 days.
Vinegar doesn't attack aluminum aggressively enough to dissolve it. A better way is to soak the file in a lye (sodium hydroxide, crystal drain cleaner) solution. Sodium hydroxide dissolves aluminum, but not steel. If you do this, do it with good ventilation: the reaction is exothermic, and it releases hydrogen gas.
Why would you nit start with a file card and use the stiff wire to remove material in the file and then use the acid. It the karge particles are there tge acid cannot clean the file steel.
That will not sharpen your files, it may get some dirt out of the file teeth so the file will work slightly better. For a real cleaning of your files just purchase a quality file card and clean the files frequently.
Hello Grant, of all the posts I have read about sharpening files yours is the only one I can agree with. When a file is dull, there is nothing you can do to sharpen it, but when a file is rusty and dirty you can use rust remover or vinegar to clean it, but a file card will do the same and the file will work better again. There is no sharpening. To make your files last a long time, never use your file on material harder than your file. I am 80 y/o and started my apprenticeship to become a Tool and Die Maker on April first 1959 in Hamburg/Germany, and I am still learning even though I can not work any more for health reasons, Grant, you are the only one that is not spreading the B/S about sharpening, Thank You.
@@hansnielsen7206 great to hear from you. Seasoned workers like you and I (I'm 71 years old) seem to have a bullshit detector that younger generations seem to have lost because they don't think but instead they rely on what 5hey read on the internet. The internet can always be relied upon and can be totally trusted. That last statement for sure set off your bullshit detector, I hope.
@@hansnielsen7206 - absolutely correct. Good files are really hard to find, and expensive. Grobet and Barco are what I currently try to find, but the Nickelson that I grew up with got outsourced to foreign lands and seems to be made of far lesser material, or the heat treatment just is wrong 😢. Files are precious precision cutting tools that should be time life items and current Utube creators don’t understand what and why the process works. Us oldtimers understand.
Respectfully, everyone in this thread is ignorant of the mechanism through which acids sharpen files. Picture a triangle - that's the tooth of your file. Over time, the tip of that triangle gets rounded over, lessening its ability to cut. When you subject the triangle to acid, it eats away at it from all sides it has access to: you can picture this as an inset perimeter within the triangle. When this happens, the radius of the triangle is shrunk, bringing the walls closer to one another and through that reducing the radius of the triangle's rounded over tip, effectively sharpening it. Another way to picture the process would be to start with an axe head with a convex grind, and putting a hollow grind in it. With this understood, the process is less like conventional knife sharpening, and more like chemical stropping. Note however that, because acids sharpen file teeth by essentially putting a hollow grind on them, it only works if the tooth hasn't been mashed flat. If the triangle has been truncated in such a manner, the acid will simply etch a pit into that top surface, because the sides are no longer present.
It doesn’t actually sharpen them, it just removes the rust, crud and chips….it will then obviously cut better…acid dissolves metal, including the sharp cutting points…
@@kep-kraftindustries3759 That is my preferred method of cleaning pinning from a file. I do that before soaking the file in sulfuric to do the actual sharpening. If there is pinning or junk in the teeth of the file, the acid has to eat through the junk before it can sharpen the teeth. It acts to mask the file and cause spotty sharpening. 😁😎
Using acid to 'sharpen' files does not work -- common misconception. They remove material from all surfaces, they cannot leave a point for the teeth. What it does is remove all debris and gunk off the file, allowing it to cut cleaner, and have clear grooves/teeth which aid with chip removal. It just makes them feel sharper, well until they get dirty again.
When you say: _"This one is pretty bad...not nearly as bad"_ why do you suddenly slip into 1980s "valley girl" UPspeak? It's bellittling for an adult who should know better. It's insulting to your audience. KNOW WHAT you're going to say and have conviction when you say it - otherwise it doesn't need to be said.
![fellow fellow - พรุ่งนี้ไม่มีใครรู้ feat. INK WARUNTORN [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/QP6JyjYx_W0/mqdefault.jpg)
When a file is used on soft material like aluminum, you can use the same material to remove the the filings that stick. Holing the file in your left hand, stroke the material parallel with the teeth - pushing away from you. This was taught to me by lifetime tool and die/mold and jig machinist.(born 1938)
HOLDING the file
Old Sneelock's Workshop
As a machinist and tool maker since 1975, I used files of all types. Wearing them out was a common issue. When I became supervisor and was charged with purchasing files for the tool room and maintenance it was common to go through several boxes of files a month.
The tool makers and machine repair people tossed the dull ones in a bin and they went out with the scrap. At $3.00 to $5.00/ file it was considered a cost of business.
In my own shop I found myself going through files at the same rate. I wasn't buying them new. I was getting them at auctions, garage sales, and flea markets. They were worn to start with and didn't get better in use.
A friend of mine told me about sharpening files with acid.
I was skeptical when I first heard of it. After trying the method and refining it a bit I accepted that it worked.
I have been using acid to sharpen files for 15 years or more.
Here is a thread from Build Something Cool. He had tried the method and we discussed the pros and cons of the method while fielding questions from the group.
This link will take you to his demonstration. th-cam.com/video/rRakH7TrE2E/w-d-xo.html
6 years ago
Thanks for finding the Popular Mechanics article. That answers the "I won't believe it without photomicrographs crowd." I wonder what their next objection will be?
Reply
Build Something Cool
·
5 replies
Build Something Cool
Build Something Cool
6 years ago
LOL
Reply
DajjaD
DajjaD
6 years ago
funny thats the only article that says this is sharpening that ive seen
Reply
Stanley Chang
Stanley Chang
5 years ago
Thanks for your comment. I wouldn't have looked in the description otherwise. Why doesn't this work for knives, chisels, or drills though?
Reply
Evan Penny
Evan Penny
4 years ago
Hey guys, if you don't like the idea of acid sharpening don't use it.
It does not matter to me whether you need to find reasons to contradict the idea or not, but some of your comments are really a bit thoughtless.
Technically you probably could use acid to sharpen knives etc, but you would not use it. The knife is a thin tool and eroding away some of its thickness is unhelpful. Chisels do not suffer from a lack of thickness, but eroding metal would alter its dimensions, also the erosive process is not very uniform, so getting a nice even sharpen will not happen. Drills also do not want to have their dimensions altered. Also with the drill bit the angle of the cutting area is quite large, unlike the angle of the cutting part of a file. The result would be minimal sharpening for significant loss of metal and loss of dimensional accuracy of the tool.
Surely, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Just try it.
▼
Reply
Old Sneelock's Workshop
Old Sneelock's Workshop
4 years ago
The idea of sharpening drill bits as a test of the process has been brought up before. The differing actions of a file and a drill bit are the reason it isn't used to sharpen drill bits.
Drills use the width of the point to define the diameter of the hole that is drilled.
Acid removes metal from every surface it comes in contact with. The drill bit will become smaller in diameter just as fast as it becomes sharp. You end up with a drill bit that is sharper but with a random sized diameter
The same, two surfaces being eaten away, process exists because the diameter is the measure of the distance between the two sides of the bit.
It will work on a knife but who wants a thinner shorter knife?
Besides each of the other suggested arguments against using acid, points out a device that is normally sharpened in a different way, as an example of the acid process being a failure. If it were as easy to run a stone down the edge of the files teeth as it is a knife we all wouldn't bother with the mess of acid sharpening.
Milling cutters are ground on center grinders because they have fewer flutes than a file would have in the same distance.
The operation of the file doesn't depend on it's width or thickness as long as it is sharp and strong enough to not break during use. 😊
If you would like a good history of files, how they are made, and used I recommend The File It’s History Making And Uses by Henry Disston & Son. Upload of a copy from the Stanford University Library is available here.
play.google.com/books/reader?id=1mNBAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA7
Hace unos años vi aquí en YT este método y lo probé. Lamentablemente decía que las limas debían estar solo una hora en vinagre por lo que el resultado no fue muy bueno . Voy a probar dejarlas tres días. Gracia.
I just started restoring files now for a month with white vinegar and it work some but have found cleaning vinegar at dollar tree when added half and half with white vinegar 1 foam forms when the files are cleaning and 2 foamgets brown at the top after sitting 4 days I then clean them with awesome cleaner and it brings the Grey back on some of the files to a new look.
Grobet USA has been in business since the early 1900s. They primarily make tools for jewelry, dentistry, engraving, etc.
Lets call it rejuvenating the file. I have been doing this for years with full sftrength white vinegar overnight. I clean the file with a piece of copper pipe. Good for use on swiss files.
I have been testing with electrolysis and a Constant Current power supply so I can dial in the voltage and current. I used a fine brass wire brush afterwards to get rid of the black gunge.
It kind-of works if you wind the amperage up high enough so that the rust "pops" off the surface. On badly rusted files you can see where the teeth are chipped and eroded, so whilst they bite it's not as good as a new sharp file.
Some people say that Citric Acid is better than Vinegar (mild Acetic Acid). Paint them in Phosphoric Acid after cleaning to re-establish the grey anti-rust coating.
I wouldn't use Electrolosis on files (or axes and knives) because of hydrogen embrittlement.
With the vinegar soaking, you're actually cleaning out the teeth areas that have been plugged up with both rust and dirt. By soaking your cleaning and exposing the cutting teeth again in a more proper cutting manner. That's why they now cut again.. Plugged up teeth doesn't cut properly.
You can use that vinegar for darkening wood as a chemical dye
Depending on the quality, vinegar is also good for flavoring food.
Colouring wood uses vinegaroon which is something like steel wool soaked in vinegar for a couple of days. You need a high tannin wood before it works. It will work on leather too.
Thanks I intend to give it a try
Wow that is amazing....like magic! Ha! How does the vinegar make the "teeth" come back?? I am definitely baffled...but science was never my strong suite! I am definitely amazed!
Whilst not technically sharpening, you are unclogging, and therefore returning the file back to whatever sharpness it had, but that's a mouthful, so sharpening as a title works.
Many years ago I read that soaking a file in a 50/50 mixture of sulfuric acid and water will sharpen an old file. I never tried this though.
Thats how I clean mine, I use 100% vinegar then wash them with baking soda, oil them up with 30 weight oil and wrap them in burlap.
maybe higher acid conc might have helped? when you tested them thinking should have rested one end of workpiece on table and then filed. Once saw a thread on PM I guess the question is still unanswered. Thanks.
Henley’s Formulas for Home and Workshop, that 100 year old book, has a procedure for this using nitric acid. I don’t know a source for the acid though.
Use the Cleaning vinegar. It’s like 40% as apposed to the other stuff which is 10%
A friend of mine that owns a garage stores his files in a jar of vinegar in the garage
Ótimo trabalho com excelente informações.
Thank you
You said that you put in vinegar 3 days but I would like to know average temperature. I put in files today and temperature is 0 ~10 degrees celsius so I plan to leave it 4~5 days.
I took it a step farther and added a splash of Evaporust. The file looks and cuts like new
A file card is the easy way.
Why would you dilute the vinegar with water??
Good question, because vinegar is already diluted with water when you buy it at the store. (almost nobody reads labels!)
Have one clogged with aluminum how would that work?
Love that it had dbl cut action.
Vinegar doesn't attack aluminum aggressively enough to dissolve it. A better way is to soak the file in a lye (sodium hydroxide, crystal drain cleaner) solution. Sodium hydroxide dissolves aluminum, but not steel. If you do this, do it with good ventilation: the reaction is exothermic, and it releases hydrogen gas.
Why would you nit start with a file card and use the stiff wire to remove material in the file and then use the acid. It the karge particles are there tge acid cannot clean the file steel.
That will not sharpen your files, it may get some dirt out of the file teeth so the file will work slightly better. For a real cleaning of your files just purchase a quality file card and clean the files frequently.
Hello Grant, of all the posts I have read about sharpening files yours is the only one I can agree with. When a file is dull, there is nothing you can do to sharpen it, but when a file is rusty and dirty you can use rust remover or vinegar to clean it, but a file card will do the same and the file will work better again. There is no sharpening. To make your files last a long time, never use your file on material harder than your file. I am 80 y/o and started my apprenticeship to become a Tool and Die Maker on April first 1959 in Hamburg/Germany, and I am still learning even though I can not work any more for health reasons, Grant, you are the only one that is not spreading the B/S about sharpening, Thank You.
@@hansnielsen7206 great to hear from you. Seasoned workers like you and I (I'm 71 years old) seem to have a bullshit detector that younger generations seem to have lost because they don't think but instead they rely on what 5hey read on the internet. The internet can always be relied upon and can be totally trusted. That last statement for sure set off your bullshit detector, I hope.
@@hansnielsen7206 - absolutely correct. Good files are really hard to find, and expensive. Grobet and Barco are what I currently try to find, but the Nickelson that I grew up with got outsourced to foreign lands and seems to be made of far lesser material, or the heat treatment just is wrong 😢. Files are precious precision cutting tools that should be time life items and current Utube creators don’t understand what and why the process works. Us oldtimers understand.
@@wrstew1272To me it’s obvious. How could you possibly sharpen grooves that cross cross? Not possible. Not like a knife.
Respectfully, everyone in this thread is ignorant of the mechanism through which acids sharpen files. Picture a triangle - that's the tooth of your file. Over time, the tip of that triangle gets rounded over, lessening its ability to cut. When you subject the triangle to acid, it eats away at it from all sides it has access to: you can picture this as an inset perimeter within the triangle. When this happens, the radius of the triangle is shrunk, bringing the walls closer to one another and through that reducing the radius of the triangle's rounded over tip, effectively sharpening it. Another way to picture the process would be to start with an axe head with a convex grind, and putting a hollow grind in it. With this understood, the process is less like conventional knife sharpening, and more like chemical stropping.
Note however that, because acids sharpen file teeth by essentially putting a hollow grind on them, it only works if the tooth hasn't been mashed flat. If the triangle has been truncated in such a manner, the acid will simply etch a pit into that top surface, because the sides are no longer present.
nice job
thank you!
All you have is a clean blunt file
Save your effort and get a good file card & look after your tools. I don't think you can actually re-sharpen files
It doesn’t actually sharpen them, it just removes the rust, crud and chips….it will then obviously cut better…acid dissolves metal, including the sharp cutting points…
Soak in lye to remove aluminum from the files.
I heard you can use a piece of copper pipe pushing parallel to the teeth to remove stubborn items lodged in the teeth
Put CHALK on files to stop aluminium from sticking as you file it. Prevention is better than cure.
@@johncoops6897One of the files he found already has aluminum stuck in the teeth. A bit too late for prevention.
I use a soft scribe to push the pinning out.
@@kep-kraftindustries3759 That is my preferred method of cleaning pinning from a file.
I do that before soaking the file in sulfuric to do the actual sharpening.
If there is pinning or junk in the teeth of the file, the acid has to eat through the junk before it can sharpen the teeth. It acts to mask the file and cause spotty sharpening. 😁😎
😂 You've just clean thème NOT RESHARPENED
Sorry, you can't sharpen files, maybe clean them a little, that as about it.
Using acid to 'sharpen' files does not work -- common misconception.
They remove material from all surfaces, they cannot leave a point for the teeth.
What it does is remove all debris and gunk off the file, allowing it to cut cleaner, and have clear grooves/teeth which aid with chip removal.
It just makes them feel sharper, well until they get dirty again.
Yes that's my experience also.
Cleaning yes…sharpening…definitely not..🙄
When you say: _"This one is pretty bad...not nearly as bad"_ why do you suddenly slip into 1980s "valley girl" UPspeak? It's bellittling for an adult who should know better. It's insulting to your audience. KNOW WHAT you're going to say and have conviction when you say it - otherwise it doesn't need to be said.