Coarse Stone and Flattening Plate

[David Weaver]

Indeed!

I think I read that when I was researching stones, but must have missed that part about different folks hair. Mine is very fine so that could be the culprit - I imagine coarse hair works better. Sometimes I think about going totally off the deep end and trying out straight razor shaving - especially since my fiancee made me shave off my beard so now I have to shave more often. If I've got to do it, might as well find some amusement from it, and once I order a 13k I'll be very equipt to sharpen them. Bah! As if I need something else to distract me from the things I should be doing - maybe I'll add straight razor shaving to "next years list" - it will be just below building a moxon vise and just above building an infill plane.

If you are not overly sensitive, you'll be able to shave straight off a 13k without anything other than a good quality and very smooth bare leather strop (you can do with less, but good smooth leather is important for shaving).

Straight off of any of the good synthetic stones (with leather only) my face will light up like a christmas tree. But with a little bit of hand american chromium oxide, i can shave comfortably. Still might make a couple of weepers.

I have only one stone that allows sharpness > SP13k and is a little bit smoother than chromium oxide powder yet, no weepers.

Shaving with a straight razor can be another slippery slope, but you can do it relatively on the cheap, too, if you make your own strop and just add the green chromium oxide to whatever your synthetic stones are.

[les winter]

The Norton 120 grit stone arrived today. I used it on my Norton 1000, 4000, 8000. Great results. The 8" size is no problem. I'm going to keep it dedicated to the water stones. I hope it lasts.

Les

[Rob Lee CT]

Brain surgery?

Wow, that difficult?

A little secret of mine is that while I have oodles of stones, a couple of bench grinders, belt sanders and various other gadgets and doohickeys there are 7 things that get pulled out most often when I've got to sharpen something, up to and including preparing new chisels and plane blades, repairing small nicks and chips and all the other minor surgery that blades need as part of their daily grind. They'll fit in a shoe box, need no special care, no power and need no special skills other than a little stamina and (when things are in bad shape!) time...
Stu.

Illuminating thread(s) here - and as noted elsewhere, a tad challenging for newcomers to sharpening mania.

What would you recommend for a weekend wordworker who wants sharp...and has no running water in the shop? Is there a similar "gang of seven" that would work for me?
Thanks,
Rob

[ian maybury]

Another. So if it's accepted that coarse waterstones chew up diamond plates, then what's the best method of flattening them? (even if my problem is only a wimpy Shapton)

ian

[David Weaver]

Loose grit on a hard surface or very coarse sandpaper. I'd vote for using the coarse sandpaper instead of the stone in the first place.

[Harold Burrell]

Loose grit on a hard surface or very coarse sandpaper. I'd vote for using the coarse sandpaper instead of the stone in the first place.

How coarse is "very coarse"?

[David Weaver]

How coarse is "very coarse"?

1/3rd the grit of the stone or so. Anything similar to the stone ends up grading the surface to a higher grit if a stone isn't friable.

A 2 foot run of PSA 60 grit sandpaper (decent quality stuff, like mirka) makes a better grinder for anyone who doesn't like to use a power grinder, anyway. Always has for me at least. I tried that route with a 3 foot run actually. You can grind pretty well with it, but then you have to put it somewhere when you're done. The virtue is that you never worry about flatness and once the initial "smartness" of the paper is gone, it works on bevels effectively at the same pace for quite a while.

I would never forgo a grinder if I didn't have to, though - only if I was in a place where I absolutely couldn't afford to have grinder swarf floating around anywhere at all.

[ian maybury]

Ta David...

[Jonathan McCullough]

I'd just like to add that David knows sharpening and that it would be hard to go wrong following his very sensible advice. There's a lot of info out there about sharpening but David has personal experience with almost every technique and medium. Some might say he ought to write a book.

[Bob Deroeck]

Hi,

I'm new to Neanderthal land, making a slow creep from powerville. This thread has been very educational.

I'd like to followup on Ian's question about what to use to flatten coarse waterstones since they seem to chew up diamond plates. I've used wet/dry sandpaper on glass with water to flatten an 800 grit waterstone and it worked fine, though it's a bit messy. Assuming a coarse waterstone only needs to be used infrequently for grinding, I don't see using wet/dry sandpaper as a problem for flattening that stone. But, it would be more convenient to use a diamond plate to flatten medium and fine grit water stones since they are used more frequently. I'd appreciate recommendations for the minimum grit size water stones that you would flatten with a diamond plate witihout fear of significantly shortening the lifetime of the diamond plate. For purposes of this question let's consider two diamond plates, the Atoma 400 and the DMT duosharp coarse (325 grit).

Thanks.

Bob