tcmeyer

Diamonds can also get dull.  The sharp edges tend to eventually get rounded over.  In fact very few of my old platens show a loss of diamonds, but they don’t cut very well anymore.

I’d be wary of used stones unless I was confident that there was relatively little mileage on them.  A very active user could wear out a set of stones in a year or…[Read more]

I had a problem once with a friend’s Buck 110 folder in 440C and again in August of ’18, when I sharpened a couple of Buck 120’s (a fixed blade hunter) in 420HC that were stubborn buggers.  Both times, the problems appeared in the coarser grits.  Whereas other knife alloys seem to “machine” nicely, with the grit cutting nice scratches with each p…[Read more]

My best guess is that the blade is sharp, but at 600 grit, there’s going to be a lot of “tooth.”  When I started out on my WE I treated every blade as “finished” at 600.  When I moved up to 1000-grit it was a woo-hooo! moment.  Sharpened all my knives to 1000-grit and stropped them to 3.5 micron diamond paste on leather.  Then, one day I tried to…[Read more]

The two pins that hold the jaws in can be pushed out with a smaller pin.  Hold the jaws together while you do this so as not to let fly the small spring that holds the jaws apart.  You should be able to lift the jaws right out.  After cleaning the jaws’ cam surfaces, you can also blow out any debris from below.

Most of us have stumbled onto th…[Read more]

The Gen 3 vises have pads located at the upper, outboard corners to grip the blade, and there is some flex built in to the design to allow the vise to conform to variations in blade configurations.  Current models also have adjustable clamping force to aid in adapting to variations in blade thickness.

High school physics taught us that clamping…[Read more]

Thanks to Mr Wizard for the image of what appears to be a Japanese hand plane cutting really, really thin shavings.  They actually have competitions over there.  It’s amazing to watch a continuous ribbon flowing out of the plane as it’s pushed (or pulled) along the wood plank.  I always wonder what sort of wood they use that would slice so thinly.

I always hold the handles near the bottom – my thumbs placed at the second finger-groove.  Mainly to keep from letting the pressure point to move above the edge, but also to keep my other fingers away from the edge.  The only time I’ve ever cut myself while sharpening was the first time I did a really long jerky knife and let my pinky (little f…[Read more]

It’s absolutely normal for you to notice a change in angle when switching from leading to trailing.  With leading strokes, your grip spends very little of the stroke above the edge and as a result, you’ll see very consistent angles throughout the stroke.  When you switch to trailing, a much larger part of your stroke has your grip above the e…[Read more]

Thank you, Eugene:  The video shows me exactly what I was asking.  “Settling time” is the length of time required to “settle” down to a final reading after having made an adjustment.  Some examples tend to bounce quite a bit, and then settle down to a reading which might or might not be consistent.

Sorry to have sent you off looking for other ex…[Read more]

Eugene:  Thanks for the new vocabulary addition.  “Faffing” was a new one for me.  I watch a lot of BBC cop shows on PBS and am always hearing new stuff, but this was new, for sure.

Also, I hadn’t seen this new Angle Cube before this and am impressed by the 0.001 resolution.  The 0.01 res is more than enough for our purposes, so I can’t jus…[Read more]

Welcome aboard Johnny!  Don’t be in a hurry to add the 50/80 stones or the ceramic stones, as you may find you really don’t need them.  I’ve gone nine years without the 50/80’s and don’t miss ’em.  Take that with a grain of salt, though, as I have a 1 X 30 belt sander to fix the really, really badly damaged edges.  It just goes a lot faster.   So…[Read more]

I have to speak up in disagreement with Bandaid on the “suckiness” of the W100 vise.  I have one and have had no problems working with all kinds of knives except heavily-beveled daggers.  There are solutions to mounting almost any knife and reports of bent jaws are almost certainly caused by users “cranking” unnecessarily on the jack screw in a…[Read more]

There are two points I’d like to emphasize, and Marc alluded to both:

“When you think you’ve done enough and time to move onto the next grit, do more strokes”

At a microscopic level, each grit must eliminate all evidence of the previous grit.  You can generally see the scratches left on the bevels, but you probably don’t see fractures left at th…[Read more]

I tried to post a comment on this earlier, but apparently had a brain fart and it somehow didn’t show up.  I bought a collection of antique wooden hand planes last year, hoping to restore ’em and give ’em away as gifts.  They all were rusted to some degree, but two of them had fairly deep specks along the edge.  After tons of stoning, I finally di…[Read more]

Ever since I began, I standardized on 20 dps, unless there was a reason not to.  In any case, I keep an Excel sharpening logbook on the computer running my microscope, on which I record everything about each knife;  owner, description, type of steel, which vise I used, high or low key position, distance from tip to vise, the original angle, c…[Read more]

That’s really interesting.  I’ve never had to try the high end of the angle range.  I’ll have to check mine out.  I would think the WE-manufactured parts would have a similar problem, but it stands to reason that they would have tested the full range of angles.

Technically, that’s not the cam lobe, which is part of the shaft that rotates with the crank arm.  I’m not sure what WE calls it, but mechanically, it would be a “wedge.”  It pushes up on the lower end of the jaw extensions, pushing them apart and forcing the jaw faces together.

I think the wear you are seeing on the wedge is pretty much to be e…[Read more]

That really does sound like the finer strops are rounding the edge a bit.   If you like the polish you get with the finer grits, drop them down one or two degrees to see if you still get the polish you want without reducing the keenness of the edge.

Looks really good, NorCalQ!