Strop vs Lapping Film
- This topic has 30 replies, 9 voices, and was last updated 05/05/2017 at 6:09 am by
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I modified my stones a long time ago to tighten the slop between the rods and the handles. Unfortunately, I didn’t hit the distances between the stone faces and the bores consistently, so I’ve been using the Variable Stone Thickness Adapters for several years (and with great success.) It only takes a few seconds to set the micro-adjusts to compensate for any errors, however, I have found that I’ve occasionally missed the angle by something around 0.1 degrees, especially at the higher grits. The scratches from the previous grit are still visible either at the apex or at the shoulder. About one-third of a turn of the micro-adjust screws makes the necessary correction. The key is to get the VSTA to tighten onto the degree bar without skewing too much and to always be consistent in the technique.
Lately, I’ve been using a Gen 3 Pro, which doesn’t have provisions for variable stone thickness. I still have the problem with my stones though, so I’ve had to resort to my angle-cube. I switched to the DXL-360 a while back and it seems to be faster and more accurate than the Igaging unit I started with. It’s a bit of a pain with non-ferrous platens, but I’m not really annoyed by it. The adjustment knob with the 0.1 rev scaling marks makes it easier to make an adjustment, once you know the error. The photo is for the Gen 2, but I done it the same on my Gen 3 Pro.
I buy the knob hardware from McMaster.com. I have a Wixey angle cube, but I never liked it. The DXL-360 seems faster, more accurate, more convenient and it doesn’t need to be zeroed every time you turn it on.
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I fully understand. I just wanted to confirm that the base was sitting level if the angle cube was not being zeroed to it. If the base was out of level, and the angle cube not zeroed, as you know, it would throw everything off by that angle. Some may have read that and not understood…
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I’ve always powered my AngleCube down with each use to preserve battery life. More so with the DXL-360. I now have three different WE rigs and I certainly re-zero the anglecube I’m using for each rig. The rig doesn’t move, once it’s been put in place. My Wixey is about five years old and reads out only to 0.1 degrees. My Igaging ‘cube reads out to 0.05 degrees and needs to be tapped a few times to get it to settle into a final reading. My DXL-360 reads out to 0.02 degrees and doesn’t seem to need as much jostling to get it to settle onto a final reading.
If you’ve read my posts over the past few years, you’d know that I only concern myself with relative angles. With my modified handles, I can see 0.1 degree differences in the scratch patterns of higher grits and will correct for such errors if appropriate.
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Going back to the second post and the reference to the Science of Sharp article (one of my favorite blogs). There’s one thing I don’t understand. It says stopping increases keenness at the cost of edge width: the edge is slightly convexed and thus becomes broader (although the convexing is far less than we sometimes think: if done well, the increase in width only concerns the top few microns). However, what I don’t understand is how this increases keenness. The main reason is that English is not my first language. I always thought keenness was a synonym to sharpness. Even my dictionary seems to explain it this way. But apparently it is not. Can anyone explain this to me?
Did you see these pages?
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