Clay, these pictures are great. Perhaps you can also use them for the new website. On the old one you also had as set of photographs showing the effects of each grit on the steel (I think), but these pictures are much better. By the way, which scope do you use for these pics?
We are going to redo all the images on the grit comparison chart with this scope. In the past I struggled to get clean images of the edge at 2000x, but lately it’s been going really well. I could get excellent images of the bevel, just not the edge. I used the AmScope for these images.
This morning I worked on the edge with the 200# stones. First I did 20 edge trailing strokes:
Then I did another 20 edge trailing strokes:
I wasn’t very mindful of my pressure, so I may redo these with light pressure to see what changes.
Next I did 20 edge leading strokes:
And then another 20 edge leading strokes:
I did very light, controlled strokes for the edge leading series.
I did another 20 edge trailing strokes with very light, controlled pressure:
It’s pretty interesting to see the tear out appear again with the trailing strokes. I don’t want to draw too many conclusions until I can find a good way to control for pressure, and also until I start with clean edges for both the leading and trailing strokes, but the difference does seem kind of obvious.
Onward and upward to the 400# stones. This time I switched it up and did 20 very light, controlled edge leading strokes first:
And then 20 very light, controlled edge trailing strokes afterward:
That’s interesting… doesn’t look to take many strokes to erase the 200 grit damage, or is that my mis-conception?
No, I think you’re right. I wish I’d done fewer strokes to begin with just to see how many licks it takes to get to the center of the blow pop 
Then 20 very light, controlled edge trailing strokes:
I was kind of surprised by this series. The first image looked good, then I moved down the blade a little and saw some serious damage, moved a little more, saw more damage, then a little more and it looked pretty good again.
when you say trailing or leading ? is leading mean from the choil or heal of the blade to the tip, or the other way around . thanks for the info and the learning opportunity .
By leading, I mean that I’m pulling the stone toward the edge of the blade continuing on toward the spine. By trailing I mean the opposite; pulling the stone upward in the direction of spine to edge.
wow Clay! Those are some serious chunks missing for a 600 grit stone!
I’m curious… are the edge trailing passes causing this? I have noticed my edges receive more of this type of damage when I am doing edge trailing but it may just be the way I’m using my stones (I may rock more when I trail as I am more stable on leading). Can you clean up the chunks and then see if the damage reappears w/ trailing?
Yeah, this is a little confusing because we don’t know for sure if this is damage left over from previous stones or is being done by the current stones/technique. I just completed the 800# edge leading stage and noticed some pretty sizable tear out there as well. So I went on to the 1000# and did another 20 edge leading strokes. Still had tear out that I could see with my handheld (supposedly) 60x loupe. I could easily see the little chips missing with that, so I continued on to 40 strokes, 80 strokes and up to 100 strokes, looking at each interval with the loupe. The chips gradually disappeared for the most part. So it’s possible that I just didn’t image the big chunks earlier, it’s easy to miss them if you don’t hunt the entire edge… They are big chunks if they’re indeed produced by the 600# stones. In theory, they should only be around 16 microns. Now I’ll check out the 1000# edge with 100 leading strokes.
Okay, 800#:
[attachment file=“800#-Edge-Leading.jpg”]
And 1000# with 100 very light, edge leading strokes:
[attachment file=“1000#-Leading-1.jpg”]
[attachment file=“1000#-Leading-2.jpg”]
You can clearly see a big chunk from the edge in the first image. This was the only one I found on the whole length of the blade. The rest of the blade looks like the second image.
I went ahead with the 6µ diamond films. Man do I love these things:
They cleaned up the edge very nicely, very quickly. These are the same films I’ve been using for 2 weeks, so they’ve had a lot of use and are still going strong. I followed Tom’s (TC) lead and cleaned them off with rubbing alcohol to remove the metal loading and they continue to perform well.
Once the edge was nice and clean from the 6µ films, I went back to the 600# stones and performed 10, very light, controlled edge trailing strokes:
[attachment file=“600#-Trailing-5.jpg”]
Then I did another 20 strokes for good measure. Again, edge trailing, very light and controlled:
[attachment file=“600#-Trailing-6.jpg”]
This makes more sense!
I’d hazard the following guess - the large chunks we saw in the first 600# edge trailing images were leftover from the 200# stones because the size of the chunks fits fairly well. It is possible for a smaller stone to tear out a bigger chunk, especially if the steel is fatigued, so it’s by no means established that the 400# or 600# stones are not responsible, but there is a greater likelihood that the edge wasn’t adequately cleaned up prior to moving on to the higher grits. It does seem clear that edge trailing strokes are good for removing material and that a few edge leading strokes to finish the edge can be helpful.