Sharpening is a problem that all carvers have initially, freehand sharpening is definitely a skill requiring lots of practice, but if you take freehand out of the equation and use jigs and guides it becomes easier.
There are two stages under the heading of sharpening
1 The hard grinding of a damaged cutting edge to get back to an edge to sharpen
2 sharpening and honing the edge to give a razor sharp and polished cutting edge.
The most important part of the process when using machine sharpening is to prevent overheating of the steel to prevent removing the temper,l therefor quenching in water is paramount in the process and should be done approx every couple of seconds to be sure, also has you go down in grit size of sharpening medium there is greater heat generation.
That's the scary bit over.
I purchased all of my standard carving chisels from car boot sales and made a right mess of trying to make them into good chisels
I looked at all sharpening systems available Tormek, and derivatives,. and thought great but I can't afford one so I decided to make my own for the smallest outlay, looked at all systems and applied parts of all the principles into my cheap portable (I spend the summer at the coast In the caravan) system, and oddly enough it works.
The system is based on a horizontally spinning abrasive with an adjustable tool rest to set the sharpening angle
The set up and a damaged chisel resharpened using this,(The blue tac is not an integral part it's my third hand for photo)
This was my initial set up, the abrasives are varying grades of velcro backed carborundum disck on a backing disk easily swapped without affecting set up I even did a stropping one by gluing a piece of leather to a 500 grit pad .
This has been updated by the purchase of a chisel holding clamp (Record tools app £12) this allows the curved contour of the gouge to sit in the tool rest so that you are turning the gouge in perfect sync with its shape.
The sys. is cheap (but not nasty) it works, it also gives the added advantage that you can buy a or some cheap chisels and practice, ie sharpen cut off resharpen, this also allows you to asses how much pitting on an old chisel is too much (you can;t get an edge.
Hope this has been helpful .
If anyone would like a more in depth piece on how I made it please ask I will be more than happy to do so