Re: Chosera Vs Ceramic Stones?

[Phil Pasteur]

Ok guys, a lot has been thown out in this thread. What I am wondering is since the 5 and 3.5 diamond paste are ( 5 and 3.5 are microns) and the 1200 and 1600 ceramics are ( 5 and 2.85 microns) won’t you get about the same finish by using either the ceramic stones or the paste as far as a mirror finish goes?

I will look for threads later where we as a community have tossed this around before…
Now I will just say, not really.

One of the things that I really struggled with when I got back into precision sharpening several years ago was separating grit ratings from reality. ( I have been sharpening for over 50 years, and always have been OCD. Alway happpy with my results…then came the Internet and unlimeted DIS-information…damn :unsure: )
The ceramics, the Shaptons, the Choseras, Atoshis… etc… and above all the the different pastes all act entirely differently when applied to steel.

I can’t emphasize this enough, grit size is an extremely rough guide to understanding what an abrasive does at the edge. You need to know the shape of the abrasive, you need to know how it fractures under pressure, you need to know the concentration of the abrasive, you need to understand the binder and the stiffness of the substrate, ..Then you may begin to know what it does at the edge. Then you will have to understand how all of the previous data applies to different steels..
Then you will give in and figure out that you just can not compare abrasives by reading about them or comparing charts of grit sizes.

The ceramic stones do not have a specific grit. They are measured in surface roughness and loosely translated into a grit rating. You simply cannot directly compare them, other than using them and observing the results, to any other abrasive…period.

Clay has talked about this specifically. I can’t now find the thread. I think that Syderco uses the same manufactuer as the WEPS gets the microfine ceramics from, Coorstech… here is a quote from Sal…the owner of Spyderco

“I would be curious as to where you got your numbers for the ceramic stones. All of the ceramics use the same micron size (15-25). the different grits (equivalents) are created by different carriers, different firing techniques and diamond surface grinding.

sal “

http://www.spyderco.com/forums/showthread.php?31188-Ceramic-benchstones-compared-to-DMT-extra-fine

The pastes are also very hard to compare to anything, except other pastes in the same line. It has been well established that a one micron paste from one manufacturer will show significantly different results.. through actual photo micrographs, than that from another. The biggest difference here is concentration of the abrasives. But it goes beyond that. There are mono and poly crystaline diamonds and there is CBN. All can be rated at a specific micron size, but the break down differently. They can all be rated at the same micron size as the mean, but the distribution around the mean will be different.

Bottom line, the ceramics will do a specific thing for you, they will cut consistently. Once you know what they do, you can employ them effectively in your progression. When you try to compare a specific micron size of paste to an equivlently rated ceramic… well you can’t!

The WEPS diamond pastes will give you some polish, and the will remove some scratches…given time. As Clay has shown, they will refine an edge. In any reasonable amount of time, they will not do what the ceramics do as far as removing metal.

Take a look at these links.. hopefully you will get an idea of where I am coming from.

http://www.wickededgeusa.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=5&id=2399&Itemid=63

http://wickededgeusa.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=14&id=4555&Itemid=63

Just a mea culpa here.. I have spent countless hours in the past calculating grit siazes of different abrasives and buying things based on that. I wasted lots of money and time. I have countless stones, slurrys, abrasive papers, coumpounds, glass plates, granite plates…. only to find I don’t use much of it at all.
Better to listen and learn and sharpen more, than to compare charts…
🙂

Phil