David Weaver
..no hard felt.

The koch system (which this caused me to re-look at) uses hard felt for grinding and soft felt for honing, but it uses the felt at low speed.

I have used a hard felt wheel off and on, but for something this fine and at the speed of a bench top buffer, it can damage an edge. Or I should say more specifically, I've damaged edges with it.

A review of the koch wheels found that those, too, would damage edges at high speed (and those are small wheels).

Felt has a lot of persuasion when loaded with abrasive and can draw a wire edge, too.

From the forthcoming article:

The method is simply this (for chisels and gouges other than mortise chisels):
• A primary grind of 20 degrees
• A freehand honed secondary bevel only slightly steeper; low 20s to a maximum of 25 degrees
• Buff the honed edge with a buffer for about five seconds on a stitched cotton wheel that has been charged with a relatively fine (super fine isn’t needed) aluminum oxide-based buffing compound. Buffing is done approximately at 45 degrees. The buff doesn’t cut like a stone, so you don’t end up with a 45 degree microbevel.

The buffing wheel should be a stitched cotton or yellow cotton with shellac with somewhere around 1/2 inch of free loose cotton after the last stitch.