Thank you for choosing SharpMate.

You’re in the right place. Most units work straight out of the box, but some may need a small tweak. If yours does, the instructions below will walk you through it easily.

Sawinery’s SharpMate is designed to work with a variety of different sized honing stones. These stones can vary in length, width and thickness; both depending on each individual manufacturer’s design criteria and slight variations in the manufacturing of the stones themselves. We wanted to be able to accommodate third party stones, should any of our customers desire to use them.

As designed, the SharpMate’s platform can accommodate stones up to 80mm wide x 220mm long. However, this width is somewhat immaterial, as the blade holder can currently only accommodate chisels or plane blades up to 50mm (2 inches) wide.

This advisory has been prepared to provide information on using stones which are in the upper part of the jig’s range. Changing width doesn’t require any special action. Just replace the stone.

The stone is held in place on the platform by two clamps, a fixed clamp at the far end and a movable clamp at the near end. To accommodate the full range of stone lengths the SharpMate is designed for, there are two holes for mounting the movable Honing Stone Clamp, as shown in the photo below.

• Hole 1 allows the Honing Stone Clamp to accommodate stones from 160 – 198mm
• Hole 2 allows the Honing Stone Clamp to accommodate stones from 182 – 220mm

We here at Sawinery have been working with our manufacturer to revamp the stone making process, improving the quality and consistency of our whetstones. However, the new version of the stone has ended up being a couple of millimeters longer, making it so that it doesn’t fit into the jig, with the Stone Clamp in Hole 1, as shown in the picture above.

Some units may be shipped with this new stone, but the Stone Clamp mounted into Hole 1. If you receive one of these units, all that’s needed is to remove the Honing Stone Clamp, by first removing the brass thumbscrew, and relocate the Clamp to Hole 2.

Here's a quick video tutorial of the process: