Reply To: Preventing Micro chips while sharpening
This has been a most valuable insight offered by tcmeyer on two points – one is the problem caused by an unbroken in stone. Two knives I sort of really care about had some unique deep scratches that I ultimately traced to an unbroken in 1500/2200 diamond stone that I had added to my collection of stones without really breaking it in well enough. An easy fix once I realized which stone was causing the problem; lesson learned!
The second point is really interesting in light of Tom’s experience with ZDP-189 only my experience was with M390. I had sharpened it pretty well (or so I thought) all the way to strops when I noticed a reflection off the edge apex that shouldn’t have been there; a USB scope showed what looked like chips or irregularities that I couldn’t remove with films or leather strops. I finally discovered that anything I tried that involved edge trailing strokes caused these reflections and I couldn’t get rid of them – it only made things worse. I went back to 600 grit and cleaned up things and then went in a progression to 800 / 1000 / 1500 / 2200 and then 1.4/.6 ceramics but only using edge leading strokes. I could even get away with scrubbing as long as I followed with edge leading. The secret for me is very light (weight of the stone) edge leading strokes with stones that can actually be used in edge leading (which leaves out films and strops). The knife is super sharp but not necessarily pretty.
