Well, I'm throwing together a drawer box to replace the missing drawer in our kitchen. Off the saw, things weren't quite perfect, so I figured a few swipes on the shooting board would square off those edges perfect.
Of course, I neglected to sharpen that blade, after a few swipes of nothing but dust and poor cutting, I took the plane apart and went to sharpen it.
This of course gave me the impetus to play with my new Cho 3K stone, and remove the remaining adhesive from the bottom (from removing the base)and give it it's first flattening.
I excitedly jumped to use the new 3K, and I have to say, I really like this stone. (My first Chosera) the feel is really terrific to me, and it does what I want a 3K stone to exactly. So I then figured I'd polish off the edge on the 8K Snow White, and get back to work. Something felt off, so maybe I should have looked into it sooner, but the 8K was really raising more of a wire edge than I like, and that edge kept going back and forth from front to back as I worked opposite sides of the blade, and not going away. The edge would kind of work, but not the slice-paper edge I like.
Finally, I gave up, figured I'd just see if I could get through this one set of drawer sides and figure out what was going on later. Figured if it didn't work, I could hit the stones again, but I seemed to have an almost-decent edge, so why not have a go.
I stropped the blade on some duck cloth that was kicking around on the bench, and wondered if that really did anything, loaded up my plane and went at it. It did fine on long grain, but really took a lot more oomph then I remember needing shooting end grain. I haven't really done woodworking in a long while - maybe I'm just really out of shape? And really, I don't work oak much at all, but it's what I had. After some struggle ( the force required kind of had a tendency to knock things a bit of square shooting if I wasn't careful holding the work) I got things how I wanted them, and started picking up.
I wasn't until I was cleaning up around the sink that I realized what had happened - instead of going from the Cho 3K to the 8K SW stone, I had gone back to my 1K Sigma. I have no idea how I managed that, and why I didn't notice. I guess I just read the words on the tupperware I keep my stones in, and missed that they had gotten swapped somehow.
So I guess you can shoot end grain of a 1K edge, but I don't recommend it.
I don't know, I'm kind of face-palming right now, but thought this was funny enough to share.
I've got some dovetails to go cut, now. I wonder what I'll mix up this time.
-J
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