TomD
"If the search function works one can find a question I posed on Badger Pond that got a friend and I involved in "better" steel. I don't remember how long ago Badger Pond was active but it has been a while. I asked how come we used long edge lived steel like M2 for jointer knives and not hand tool blades? The response from the experts of the day was, and still continues to be in some quarters, for example Chris Schwartz's Blog, "these steels CAN'T be sharpened to as high a degree as carbon steel". We now have ample evidence, even scientifically validated evidence, that this claim is baloney. Yet the myth persists even today in some parts."

Back in the early 80s I bought my japanese HSS chisels and planes. These were marketed by an outfit that advertised in FWW every issue. Mark distributed the catalog here last week. There were also euro sellers of HSS plane blades, for example, they sold them to handle man made products. LV stocked those. As I have said here about every month since I got here from BP, the opriginal tr12 router I bought had a razor sharp carbine blade in it. TR12s were the plunge router to have. Everyone who bought one could clearly see that the claim the carbides were too big to take a razor edge was baloney. Wood turners have been making their own tools using HSS for decades. These are often stock removal tools. They take a razor edge. They are made, in most early cases, by companies that also made regular chisels etc... Like Henry taylor. LV has been green compounds, replacement grinding stones for bench grinder, for decades. All sorts of people sell diamond stones. Loose diamond was news to me, but not really a game changer, a definite improvement.

Yeah myths are persistent, even though many know they are wrong. The situation is not improved by substituting new myths of dubious veracity.

"The facts are that few were willing to challenge these myths with experiments to reveal the utility of these metals and abrasives. And even today many won't accept the results and even dismiss the efforts to investigate these areas."

This is your blinders showing Bill, you are out there doing, or plundering research, and coming up with new products that have been in the marketplace, and in my shop in some form for 35 years I know of. I live in Canada, we get stuff decades after the US. Your friend Frink was selling HSS plane blades, when, 10+ years ago? Stock removal. When does it end?

"Without doubt in the tool rooms of machine shops the properties of higher performance steels and the means of abrading them was well known. But this information has only recently been infused into the ultraconservative woodworking community."

That is just not true. HSS, even carbide hand tools have been in the home shop for as long as I can remember. Dry grinding, for ever. The woodworking revival started mid 70s. This stuff has been around that long, and probably longer, but I was not interested, so I leave that to others.

" I now have references to using diamonds on tool steels that date to the 1940's. But I never met anyone using this information to make their life easier in a wood working shop until most recently."

Loose diamonds, don't know, but it only recently arrived improved my life. No argument here. However I have sunk a lot of cash into a hole called DMT for a long time. And there are dozens of other products out there from that low quality to stones costing hundreds. I don't know the history of loose diamonds, myself, I learned that here. But I don't actually consider it a game changer for HSS it could be if you are talking hand sharpening only. Never lost any sleep over sharpening HSS tools of very high quality with the regular stuff in the shop. Just not a problem. And nobody selling the stuff who could have sold a lot of diamond ever mentioned it that I recall. Indeed, in the machinist community the skinny is to only sharpen carbide on diamond, and nobody seems fussed about using hard arkansas for HSS. For turning I buff, and the Japanese tools are laminated and come up easily on stones.

So if the loose diamonds are a big recent advance, the ubiquity of HSS in the workshop over the last 30 years goes to show they aren't critical.