 Today, we're going to compare two of the best honing jigs on the market. The Richard Kell Jig, that's from England, and the Veritas MK2 System. Hola, woodworkers, Paul Carlson here, small workshop guy. Let me make a couple of quick announcements before I get into the review of these two honing guides. I signed up for a Patreon account, and so you'll see a Patreon link in the description of my videos, and that's to hope that maybe a handful of you will volunteer, will generously donate, you know, $2, $5 a month, you know, and you know how to do that forever to help support the expense, the overhead expense of my producing videos. In addition, I have set up a group on Facebook called Small Workshop Woodworking Community. Small Workshop Woodworking Community. Just go to Facebook to put that in the primary search bar, Small Workshop Woodworking Community, and then become a member. It's a public group. It is going to have content that deals with surviving in a small workshop. It's how we might organize things, how, what tools we might use being hobbyist woodworkers. You know, if you're a weekend warrior, then you want to, you want to have a bandsaw, you want to have a drill press, you want to have a thickness planer, you want to have a jointer, but which one is reasonable if you're just a hobbyist and you don't have tons of money that you inherited to burn? To encourage some Patreon links, I'm going to do a drawing on September 30th of only the people who are a Patreon and give this away. Now realize this folks, I will probably only have two or three patrons. So if you'd become a patron for a dollar a month, you have an extremely high chance of being the winner of this 50 or 60 or 70 dollar Richard Kale honing guide that you might really, really like. When I first started out woodworking, I bought this little MyTech guide and this is traditional design. It's got a single roll around the bottom. You widen it for plane blades in the top, chisels in the bottom. Unfortunately, it has some limitations. A lot of times when I would squeeze it down, my blade would get a skew and then I'd straighten it out and squeeze it down again and that would be a skew again. So I was constantly getting weird angles on my sharpening and also this little thing for chisels won't accommodate chisels of a certain thickness. In addition, this guide would not accommodate my mortising chisels, which of course I like to keep those sharp as well as my others. That is a no go in my shop. I upgraded or I bought the Richard Kale system primarily because of a really good write up that I read in this book called The Perfect Edge by Ron Hawk. Ron is a blade maker out of Fort Bragg, Northern California and he really wrote a phenomenal book. His research must have been incredible. This will tell you how to sharpen just about anything you can imagine. Knives, scissors, chisels, plane blades, card scrapers, all of your various tools for your lathe, so forth and so on. Very, very good book. I'll put a link to it in the description down below. I do not own so I'm not going to include a review of the Lee Nielsen. It's of the traditional type. The Lee Nielsen is very well machined. I saw a couple reviews on it. You can buy optional jaws and so it can be customizable to different things and a lot of people really like it. But at $125 and this is not the Lee Nielsen, this is like a $20 MiTek, at $125 starting price and then $25 for each set of separate jaws for different applications. It gets pretty expensive pretty quick. Now, this Richard Cal guide is somewhere I think around and I forgot exactly what I paid for it. I sort of remember maybe $50, $60, $70 somewhere in that range. It, let's talk about it first. It's got some really nice smooth rollers on it. It'll accommodate very narrow up to relatively wide, meaning maybe two and a half inch wide blades. It is extremely simple. There's only one knob to fool with or to turn to get it set up. You just put the blade in against these bars and then tighten it down and then you would set the distance from the bar to the edge depending on what angle that you want. Richard Cal gives you a little handwritten set of notes saying what distance for which angles or you could create yourself a block with the little stops on it for the different angles. Very nice. I like it. I've used it for quite a while. Here's my one complaint with it that if I get wider than this, then it won't, the rollers won't fit on my stone, so I find myself running off the edge of my stone, even with my number seven wood river number seven blade in here. I solve that by building a cradle for the stones and then that levels it out, then I can run the rollers on this. I don't like that because then I can't put my chisel sideways to do things. I have to stop and take my stones out of the cradle and then do my additional sharpening. So that's a disadvantage for this one. Everything has its advantages and disadvantages. Now this is a complete system from Veritas. In the $125 deluxe package, you get a holder that will accommodate wide blades, I think up to two and a half inches. You get a holder that will accommodate narrow blades such as chisels. You get with that package a cambered roller so that you can camber the edges of your blade and you get a straight roller if you don't want to do the cambering. So you get four different things there. In addition, it comes with this little guide that is used to set your angle. It will accommodate both high angle devices, standard angle devices such as chisels and so forth and even back bevel work. So it's got nice positive stops in it. The majority of the time we're going to redo a chisel at 25 degrees and then we're going to put a microbevel on it at 30. But everybody's got their own preferences so it's got 25 and 30 and 35 and 40 so whatever your preference. The way that works is you put it in a positive stop, in this case I've got it at 30. To set this up, this has got kind of a dovetail little slot here and you put that over that, slide it on. You kind of set it to a difference, there's a gauge here of what size of a chisel or a plain blade you're working with, in this case this is the narrow one and so if I'm going to do a half an inch then I put it there. Then to insert the chisel you put it into the narrow guide here, let me widen it a little bit, you put it into the narrow guide, move it up to the stop block and then tighten down. The beauty of this system here is it's self-centering and it's going to hold things very flat and very solidly so I like that. So I guess what you say here is there's a lot of fiddle factors involved, you are setting this to a certain level for standard chisels, you are tightening down here, you are sliding this on, you are setting this but realistically you are probably going to have this set maybe at 30 degrees at a great majority of time, you get very good at sliding this on. You like it to be able to self-center and hold the chisels and there's one more setting here which is on the roller, you make sure you have a dial indicator here at high noon and then you do like maybe your 25 or your 30 degree angle and then without putting this back on so once I've got that set up I remove this, now I can do my sharpening at that angle with this at high noon and then you pull this out and turn it and that basically changes shortens up the distance here and therefore increases the angle ever so slightly and there's about three or four positions so you can decide how much you want that microbevel to be different from your base bevel. Got a lot of fiddle factor to it but I personally this is what I'm going to use because I like the confidence of once I set it up of everything being locked in really really solidly so that I can start to get some consistent results. I'm actually having to take a couple of days here and go through all of my plane blades and all of my chisels and fix all of my prior problems. That's my review. I hope you found it educational and helpful. Stay safe in your workshop, small workshop guy, signing off.