All,
I recently bought an extra balde for my #4 to have for smoothing some curly maple for my upcoming project. I am going to try a 10* back bevel on it. I also bought a #3 blade and chipbreaker. Both of these blades were A2 Hock blades and a Hock Chipbreaker.
Out of the package, the back of the blades appeared polished. However I went ahead and hit them up with a 4000 and then 8000 stone. As I started on the 4000 stone, I noticed the polishing pattern was not even, indicative to a non-flat back. It was like this on both blades. So I went through my entire sharpening regime to get them setup as I expect them.
I really like Hock blades, but I hate how long they take to get setup. My question is, how could the blades have come to me appearing to have a nice uniformed polished flat back, and in reality they were not. Is it possible they are buffing the backs on a buffer? Or am I just being to anal-retentive about the backs? My goal with sharpening is to keep everything as consistent and repeatable as possible. If everything has been through the same process, quick touchups and re-honing works out to be very fast.
Just because it will be asked, I use Norton waterstones (1,000, 4,000, and 8,000) and flatten the stones before and during each use. I am confident I am working with a solid sharpening setup.
I have reached the point that I will likely be ordering the LV setup next time as I don't like spending that much time setting the Hock's up.
I think I saw on here a while back where someone built a back flattening jig, essentially a block of wood with magnets that allowed the user to put a lot of pressure (significantly more than you could get with just fingers)on the blade as the back was being polished. Is this a good approach or amintroducing problems by applying that much pressure?
Any ideas about the Hock backs or suggestions for me with getting them setup?
Thanks,
Josh