>I'm considering switching from Scary Sharp to waterstones for plane and chisel blades, but I'm looking for a bit of helpful advice first.
Will a 1000 / 4000 combination stone work OK, or do I need to get an 8000 too? Roughly what micron size are these anyway?
Is there any benefit in stropping with something like Lee Valley's green compound on MDF after a 4000 waterstone? Or after an 8000 stone (if that's the concensus recommendation)?
Will sandpaper on glass work OK to keep the stones flat? If so, what grit paper would you recommend?
I do not support getting a 1000/4000 combination stone. Stones from 1200 down should be stored in water, while those 4000 and above should be stored dry (and spritzed with water before use). Get separate stones instead.
In any event, a 4000 stone will not produce a fine enough edge for smoothing planes or paring chisels. It is fine for general work. Rather get a 8000 waterstone. It does not take any more time to hone with the 8000 if you are using microbevels.
I use King waterstones, which are good value for money. My selection is a 220 (for grinding), 800 (for removing nicks), 1200 and 8000. The 8000 Gold is an excellent stone and you can use this directly after the 1200. In the Norton range, the King 1200 is replaced by the 1000.
A cheaper substitute for the 8000 is a 6000. This will still give you a good edge, particularly if you then hone with Veritas green rouge.
If you use the 8000, the green rouge will add a little more smoothness (going from 1.2 microns to .5 microns), but I find it more useful on a strop (leather glued to hardwood) to remove the last vestiges of the wire edge.
>I have a ton of waterstones. I moved into a cold shop, and had to put them up over winter against the possibility they might freeze on a really cold night, not to mention the fact that wet hands are pretty miserable anyway. I tried all new oilstones, on the basis of the Krenov FWW article. And then scary sharp. I have to say scary sharp is hard to give up at the end of the cold season, so I wouldn't be pushing you to try waterstones.
4000 is not very sharp. 6000 is marginal lower end razor sharp, and the 8000 king or better is pretty eyepoping. I stay away from the combination stones myself, if you love them and wear them you can glue a regular stone to a block whereupon it is good to the last drop, you will loose a lot of good use on the same basis with combos, and you can't true them against each other. Some people rave about contamination problems and they won't like combos. If you don't worry about contamination then you might as well rub them flat together, which you can't on the waterstones.
Despite all the hype about the various newer better waterstones, the best edges I have ever prepared came from the King 8000, I was probably more careful back then, but having tried bester and takenoke, and norton, and shapton, even shapton 12000, I can't see the difference unless you are into titanic polishing times.
The LV green compound seems roughly in line with the 8000 stone. I use it for power buffing mainly. Stones allow wonderful sharpening while maintaining perfect edge geometry, once one get into buffing or stroping one is rounding the edge, which is fine with me, but it does sound like a waste of time to have spent all that time on stones...
220 paper used dry is pretty effective. I prefer the two rough stones used to flaten each other, most of the time. You use one to flaten the next finest stone, and so forth. I also have a concrete block that seems flat and is very fast at truing stones. Someday someone will start seling (ROB!) the ceramic flatening stones, and I may try one of those (I said ceramic not chrystalon). I tend to stay away from the Gaijin-tech kluges people come up with, like sandpaper and laps. People seem to keep coming up with new solutions to better existing solutions. Using the whole stone surface effectively will also save a lot of flatening.
>I'm not really recomending it one way or the other, but you can store all the artificial stones in water if you like (not the nagura, in my opinion you don't really need a nagura if you are in the new tech camp of constant stone flatening). I have had my water stones in a pail since about 1980, and even the wood bases seem to tolerate it rather well. This is one of those things where guys like Majors kept changing their mind with every trip, depending on with whom they last stayed, so I assume the camps are split in Japan also. I have never had the guts to try storing my natural waterstones immersed, and assume it is true they will fall appart. Constantly immersed finishing stones seem to cut better. Some of the later versions now have plastic bases. I glue my stones to cherry bases that were saturated in epoxy. They are stiffer than the plastic bases, and hold up well in water (just for finishing stones that don't have a base). With the right pond you can flip them over so the bases stay dry.
>I made that switch a while back and purchased the Shapton stones from Joel.
You could definetely just get two stones and I spend very little time on the 4000 after the 1000 stone.
The Shaptons I keep flat with a DMT duosharp course.
The Norton stones work great as well, I took a class from Rob Cosmann and as long as you soak them for about 20 minutes prior to usage you are good. Rob uses TWO 1000 grit stones to keep everything flat.
>in my opinion you don't really need a nagura if you are in the new tech camp of constant stone flatening
Thom
My understanding is that the nagura is to raise a slurry, not to flatten a stone. The high grit polishing stones, such as 6000 and up, have a much harder clay composition and this needs a little extra help to loosen things up, which is what the nagura does.
>I still use SS for flatting the backs of chisels and blades. I use King stones also 1000, 4000 and 8000. Then green honing compound on a piece of masionite. For flatting 'nutin beats a drywall sanding screen on a flat surface IMHO. Sandpaper loads up too quickly also IMHO.
>Based on all the advice so far, looks like I should get an 8000 stone as the finishing stone. So my grinding and sharpening schedule will be something like:
1 - gray 36 wheel for shaping (when modifying tools)
2 - white 120 wheel for hollow grind (as I do already)
3 - flatten and polish backs using Scary Sharp (as I do already)
4 - hone bevel on 1200 waterstone
5 - hone microbevel on 8000 waterstone
6 - undecided, but maybe experiment with rouge as final step
7 - flattening undecided, so experiment with rubbing stones together and also with using sandpaper on glass.
I'm accustomed to progressing through all the Scary Sharp grits, so the jumps from a 120 wheel to a 1200 stone then to an 8000 stone seem daunting.
Do I need a 4000 stone between the 1200 and 8000?
Do I need an 800 stone between the 120 grinding wheel and 1200 stone?
My wallet is really hoping the answer is: "No, they aren't needed." but I'll go with quality advice from the forum and spend the dollars if I have to.
My reason for changing away from Scary Sharp is that I'm a sucker for following a crowd.
It seems to me that a reasonable majority of people on this and other woodworking forums use waterstones. These are people I have come to respect and trust.
Scary Sharp has worked well for me, but I believe waterstones may help me get even sharper edges for much the same effort and mess. The optimist in me hopes the effort and mess may even be less with waterstones.
>The problem with waterstones if that you have to have, in essence, another sharpening system to keep them flat. Scary Sharp works great in keeping a waterstone flat.
It also works great honing cutting edges. If you want to keep it simple, then keep what you've got. Scary Sharp works fine, why add another layer of complexity? I can assure you that SS will give you just as keen an edge and with a lower oveall time investment to boot.
A lot of time blokes get caught up in the minutiae of sharpening 'systems' and it ends up being a net detraction from actually working wood. I'd venture to say that sharpening can almost become an end in itself. Sandpaper on a flat surface is the essence of simplicity. I'd stay with it if I were you.
>I have read with interest what people do (time and expense) that use waterstones. It is enough to make someone figure out some way to get hold of a flat piece of cast iron and $20 of 1 micron diamonds. See diamond post below for details. In this particular case: cost of a set of water stones - $20 and that is what you could spend to convince your local machine shop to flatten a piece of cast iron and break even. And then there is no water in the shop to mess with, and no periodic stone flattening.
>1 micron approximates to about 8000 grit in waterstone parlance. Have you tried going finer than that, say 1/2 or 1/4 micron? Does it make a difference?
Konrad Sauer now uses 15000 Shapton stones and he says it makes a noticeable difference over 8000 stones. He might even experiment with 30000 stones.
I'm looking for the keenest edge possible, and so far LV's 9000 grit paper has given me the best edge. If there's anything better I'd like to know...
>I don't believe in the slurry concept, though it may be true, I just haven't seen much evidence of anything left the tool doesn't squeegee out of the way, or any performance improvement. What a Nagura does do is remove the glaze that occurs on smoothing stones in particular, the black tool tracks. So my point is that if you flatten often your stones will often stay free cutting regardless. There a some people who seem to flatten their stones with every sharpening. Sorry not to be clear.
>I think you are going to be disappointed on both major objectives:
There is no way you will get better results with the stones, because the buffing at the end means you aren't finishing with the stones at all and whether you use a 6000, 8000, or whatever will be completely irrelevant.
And waterstones are very messy, they aren't oil, but much worse than the better sandpaper You have buckets of water, wet stones, slurry, and hands getting stained black from the sharpening. The messyness of the system is one of my major complaints. The advantage of water stones is that they can be geometrically purish with little distortion of the surfaces being ground; cut fast, though not as fast as sandpaper; Do not damage precious tools; and can produce superb, arguably "best" edges. Also when they first came out they were cheaper than oil stones by quite a lot, thought hat has flipped.
It seems to me like you are overdoing all this. If you have a grinder you can grind on something like an 80 grit soft stone, and go straight to a green buff. If you aren't cutitng dovetails as well as Tage Frid, it won't be because of your sharpening method; or you can use just waterstones; etc... seems to me like your process is not linear or logical. With all respect really meant. For instance one reason I use water stones is to preserve precious chisels that can cost 300 a pop, I would never grind or buff those. Other chisels I happily grind. There is a tight perpose to each product use.
>Wow, a whole lot more useful advice just came pouring in. And that advice can be partly summed up as: don't bother stropping with rouge and yes you can progress from a 1200 stone to an 8000 stone without using intermediate stones.
So far, so good - but I�m not ready to spend cash yet. I still need to properly compare speed and convenience.
I can see the messiness of both systems being about the same, because I use water as a lubricant for Scary Sharp, just like I would with waterstones. So much for my optimistic hopes of something cleaner. I guess its just a fact of life that all sharpening is messy. Cold isn't an issue because the temperature here never gets that low.
For Scary Sharp I use is 120 wheel then a progression through 320, 400, 600, 1000, 1500, and 2000 paper. Sometimes I have to skip a grit because small-ish towns in small island nations at the far end of the world don�t always have always have well-stocked shelves and mail order supplies can get mighty expensive when you�re not earning greenback dollars.
I guess the real advantage I�m hoping for with waterstones is that if I can go from 1200 to 8000 and consider the blade finished, then the time saved not progressing through the grits is time I can spend woodworking. The convenience of not have to plan ahead to always have enough of each grit of paper in stock also appeals.
But these potential advantages only exist if the cutting speed of waterstones is almost as fast as (or faster than) sandpaper.
I�ve had great advice from people who use waterstones. And I�ve had great advice from people who use Scary Sharp. But has anyone here actually used both systems to any great extent? If so, can you advise about the comparative advantages and disadvantages of each?
>Diamond is gound to finer particles than 1 micron and these finer sizes could be used down to the limit imposed by the steel morphology. I have no experience with finer diamond. Steve had some comments on this issue in his reply to the diamond post below.
>"But has anyone here actually used both systems to any great extent? If so, can you advise about the comparative advantages and disadvantages of each?" Yes, they are both slower and more costly than using diamond. diamond>>abrasive sheets (the 3M mylar kind)> stones. Water issue , you should not be doing more than misting water on your abrasive sheets. I use an atomizer, obtainable at pharmacy store for misting medicines.
This diamond thing is not my hair-brained idea. When I was investigating tool grinding, and talking with abrasive experts at 3M and the like, the answer to the question of what to use to grind tool steels was always the same- use diamond. It took a while to accept this advice because I thought diamonds were expensive(not so) and I didn't know that they could be used (have been used for centuries) on flat lasts-forever cast iron substrate.
You have mastered the hard part- the wheel grinding for initial shaprening. You are 30 seconds from there to a finished honed edge if you have a diamond charged plate by the bench. You will buy one tube of 1 micron diamond ($15 US) and that is the last abrasive you will ever buy for honing.
>I guess the only thing worse than having a shop full of sharp edges and not having a clue what to do with them is having a shop full of dull edges and not having a clue what to do with them.
Most people spend too much time sharpening and fettling tools.
I think the first warning is when one sees these posts that go something like "I'm giving up such and such system to go to this or that system."
I think there's another running post about boiling the oil out of an old oilstone so that water can be subsequently used as the lubricant. I about choked on my coffee when I read that one. I've moved that to No. 1 on my list of "How To Do Anything in the Shop Except Work Wood"
A fresh, blank canvas is the scariest thing in the world to a painter. A pile of rough sawn lumber can be intimidating to a woodworker. Unfortuanately for the painter, he or she has precious few items to *fettle* Not so with the woodworker. Months, if not years, can be spent accumulating a kit of tools and tuning them to utter non-sensical perfection.
>I think it may be a mistake to view sharpening as being as simple as speed and grit size. I know that some tools have been designed to be sharpened with diamonds. But to take Japanese plane irons as an example, the steel, the manufacturing techniques, the heat treament, the sharpening stones (grit size, composition, binder ) and the techniques for using them were all developed in concert by dedicated, thoughtful people. In a like manner, most American tools were designed to be used with oilstones until rather recently. With any system there is a big difference between the results obtained by a person with lots of experience and a person used to another system.
>When it gets cold up here I do my sharpening on sandpaper. I get a razor edge, and use only two grits. I don't microbevel sharpen, nothing wrong with it except I need a jig to make it work, but my point is just this system is fast enough cutting that I can polish out scratches with only two grits. I use it dry. Scary sharp is a dry proces. Nothing wrong with wet sanding if you must, but it isn't necesarry with the better papers we have, not for sharpening. And dry SS paper lasts for ever. I rarely change a piece year to year, it does seem to get finer. So one way to save on the mess would be to go dry SS sharpening, all you end up with is powder. no hand washing, no rust, no contamination of the work.
As I said, I use both systems, depending on weather. I have been using water stones, natural and mostly artificial since 1978, before that oil stones, and scary sharp only in the last 5-10 years. Just about every other system too. But for hand sharpening wood working tools, which is my preference paper and japanese stones have been the staple. Sandpaper is a lot faster if you ask me, both in cutting speed and the lack of mess. The right sandpaper is designed to cut steel without lubrication so water is not required unless the metal galls the paper. The disadvantage of sandpaper is that while it stays relatively flat (the thickness of the paper), it isn't hard and sometimes one feels as though the tool is hard to index on the surface. A good fine and flat water stone is a better index, and super sharpening is probably easier on one, but this is not a time and money kind of deal for me it seems a bit of a luxury to mess with the better tools and stones. If I had to bust out hand work for pay, I would probably use O1 based tools and either dry grind them on a wheel and buff them on my felt wheel, or dry grind them on my KMG belt sander. Even with the choices above one needs special stones for the really small chisels, usuallu oil or ceramic.
The fact I have tried "everything" (haven't got my hands on diamond paste yet), really goes to show it is a mater of pros and cons no mater what you use.
You can go from 1200 to 8000 if you use something like the Lee Valley jig that allows a modest micro bevel bump, you only need two stones. If you are sharpening by hand on the whole bevel you need a 4000 or 6000 stone, etc... depending on the set. Otherwise you will waste a lot of time on the finishing stone.
On the diamond stuff, and I would like to try it. 30 seconds, though, for the hone, which I realize is just an expression, is far longer than it would take with green compound, or any decent buff, and a wheel mounted on the other side of the machine, or sandpaper would do the buff also. I can grind and buff freehand on sandpaper in 30 seconds ona 1/2" chisels.
It all works. In the real world the sharpening method only rarely carries over to the finished piece.
I think Bill Tindall has arrived at an extremely compact, fast, and economical system, and one which is independent of what steel you're sharpening--it'll handle anything from cast steel to M2 or S53. To me, the key step in Bill's system is the grinding, noting that he not only hollow grinds, but also grinds to a burr on the primary bevel.
Your question focused though on 'keenest edge'. If you're going for the keenest edge, it begins with the bevel angle. If you're not already doing it, I would suggest that you hollow grind. (Something tells me that Bill T. may publish a piece soon with some details.) What you are after is the most acute angle that the steel will stand up to in the application you're about. Hollow grind so that the overall primary bevel is slightly less than the lowest honing angle you will use. For example, on plane blades, I like to set the overall hollow at 25-27 degrees; then hone at 27-28. But it's easy to vary the hone between, say 27 and 30, and back again, provided the hollow is low enough. You may need 30 or 32 for A2.
You asked about comparative grits. In my experience, which includes looking through a 20X scope a few times and a whole bunch of planing and observing, diamond is way more aggressive than the same-rated stone. 1 micron diamond is quite noticeably more aggressive than an 8000 (nominal 1 micron) stone. Because the cutting actions and friability are different, the particle size ratings do not compare well. The ratings are further confounded by the statistical distribution of particles. What you experience on your blade is likely a couple of standard deviations above the mean particle size, and the distribution will be different for the stone and for the diamond. The way I think about it is that diamond is faster than anything and will cut alloyed carbides; whereas stones give a more refined edge than diamond, meaning smoother. Bottom line: you have to experiment, as between stones and diamond, to find what works with your steel and your sharpening technique.
You asked about keenest edge. First off, as Warren points out, after a point, it's all about technique. Finishing up with a light touch is way different than finishing up with a heavy touch. Secondly, 'keenness' is defined by the test you're using. For me, the sharpest edge I want is when planing marquetry (inlay)--there has to be zero tearout or else you're toast, and who knows which way the grain is oriented in each piece of a banding or a pictorial inlay? In that situation, I am starting with a blade honed at less than 30 degrees. I use diamond down through 1/4-micron on cast iron, and then go to a high-grit stone to finish up, which for me is a natural Japanese stone.
I'm sure you're getting great edges with the 9000 grit paper. If you want to try something, I would suggest you (a) review the honing angle you're using; and (b) try a real fine stone after the 9000 grit paper, using a very light touch, and see whether it's sharper (in your test!) than before, or not. Try two techniques with the stone, in addition to light touch: small circles is one, and skewed angle or sideways presentation is the other.
