That looks like a nice clean pattern.

200, 000 passes.

As light as you have the patience for will give the best results because the force on the edge can cause deformation. This is a particular issue with rods and similar small stones because of the very high pressures that result from the small contact areas.

Makes sense. That's how light I go actually...or have been going out of fear, but it just seems like it wouldn't do much, but when you think about the forces involved in comparison to the area you're talking about I guess it does.

C amber Just take the rods (or any abrasive) and get Bruce to mirror polish a blade and then as light as you can wipe the blade up and down the abrasive just once and see what it does. Abrasives are very hard and are in general shaped to produce very sharp edges (naturals often are not) and thus they will cut with very little force at all.

Good way to put it into perspective

Mesh and grit have many meanings, it is a toss up as to what people mean, the only real way to know is actually look at the abrasive under magnification and see its size/nature. Ha, that Mora is older than KZfaq, I would have reground it a long time ago if I wanted it for performance, I just keep it as a stock reference knife.

Interested to see how that works for you.

If you are just starting out then I would not advocate waterstones because they do have some issues which make them more complicated because of how they wear and the fact they generate a slurry. A very nice stone to start with, which is in generally fairly capable, aside from working on very hard to grind steels, is the very well known combination norton india stone.

Cliff Stamp Thanks, Cliff.

David Aud if it still matters, I profile on 30 with the coarse and fine stones and use the 40 degree with the ultra fine for a micro bevel

The designs look clean, the alloy content is a bit high for the way I use knives. I don't value wear resistance that much on that kind of knife because I never have to sharpen them due to slow abrasion, it is always blunting by impaction/fracture and carbides don't help that at all. The Chris Reeve's knife? Reeve has some odd ways of HT'ing steel from what I have experienced in both is tool steel and stainless blades. I would not judge steel from what I have experienced in them.

Have you tried just putting some high density foam in the vice jaws?

What is the issue with the diamond stones?

I have both sets, they are very similar in finish. See here for some details : - www.cliffstamp.com/knives/forum/read.php?10,26465

Yes, a properly hardened 20CV blade can handle that type of work. My concerns about it are that it will not do that any better than a much simpler steel, so you are paying more money for something which has no return on value. Second, if you do hit something like dirt or grit in the bark and the edge is damaged it will take more damage due to the higher carbide level and take longer to repair. The vast majority of what is posted on Bladeforums has little evidence/argument behind it. Any abrasive can damage any steel if used improperly. A lot of people like to use the Sharpmaker with a lot of force and if you do this on high carbide steels you can cause the edge to fracture. The solution is not press so hard. On low carbide steels the damage is still there if you press too hard, the edge will just deform not fracture.

There are a few worksharps, if you mean the actually powered grinder, I have not used it.

Les Garten Thanks, they updated the forum and broke all links. They are near identical in grit as far as I can tell, observation under 50X magnification and sharpness / finish.

Cliff Stamp So only need one or the other? If so, which would you suggest?

Les Garten I have both, I can't tell them apart. Long term, the diamond should have better wear resistance/lifetime.

Cliff Stamp Thanx, I just read all that thread.

I use various inexpensive benchstones as I get them as gifts and have a lot of them. They will last a long time, as in 100+ flattenings and they cost < $5 locally. You need at least two and you need to rotate them flattening and then flatten them against each other or else you can make your flattening stone uneven as it picks up the reverse hollow of the stone you are trying to flatten.

"However, I am not entirely sure that these surfaces are truly flat" Try taking a metal straight edge (ruler) and place it across your stone dressing solution (sandpaper on block, cheap bench stone, etc.) at various angles / locations to check for visual gaps. Having a light in the background will help ID the smallest of height variations. Also, consider that even during the process of sharpening, your stone(s) will go slightly out of true. So there may be a limit to how perfect a sharpening stone's surface can be prepared (law of diminishing returns).

Cliff, That is an interesting way to flatten stones and makes sense. The next time I am at a hardware store I will pick up a couple of those cheap stones and try it out. I have a couple old ones, but they are in no shape to be used and were my "learning stones." Oh the many things that I did to those poor stones, from using them as an improvised hammer and even for sharpening wooden arrows on them, to their final "death" when I had an oil mixed with metal shavings and another chemical stay on them too long and sort of harden into a shell that caused the stone to lose all sharpening potential on one side. Sometimes my curiosity gets me into trouble, but it's usually worth it in the end. YasumotoUS, That is a good idea with the straight edge. I have used this for my sharpening stones to see how flat that they are. It would be a good idea to try this on my flat sharpening surface as well. I will surely put this into play the next time that I need to flatten. I am curious how my counter top compares to the table, on one hand the counter top has slight water damage in some areas, causing slight unevenness, however, on the other hand, I have worked on engine parts on the kitchen table. A mystery to be investigated :)

Ghost1321 In most, but not all cases, you can just burn out oil. It depends on the type of bond. A less invasive solution is to boil it with a degreaser, but this can also break some bonds and what it releases can be pretty powerful stuff you don't want to breathe.

I have been trying to use the two stone method, however I am running into issues. After rubbing the stones with great force for 20 or so minutes, one was near flat, and the other convexed outward in the center which I cannot seem to flatten. I then began sanding these stones down with silicon carbide 220 grit sandpaper on my countertop which flattened one of the stones, but the other still seems to have this convexed mid section that will not go away. Any suggestions? Should I keep at it with the sand paper? If it matters, below are the stones I am trying to flatten, and I am flattening the coarse side. www.harborfreight.com/http-www-harborfreight-com-combination-sharpening-stone-7345-html.html On a side note, many of the stones were damaged and I had a small crowd of 6 or so people gather around me as I went through 20 or so stones looking for ones that were not chipped or damaged. People are interesting, I wonder if any of them bought a sharpening stone too, or perhaps they thought I was some crazy guy looking for valuable minerals.

Yes, most of the modern very high carbide steels will as well.

Joe, I don't have an answer to that from a user point of view. In industrial use CBN is preferred over diamonds for grinding steel as you can get high wear rates on diamond due to the high heat of industrial grinding (there is a reaction between the carbon in diamond and the carbon in the steel). However I do not know if this happens in hand sharpening. I have both but have not done a comparison of wear rates.

Jaker Blunttaker If the edge angle was less than 20 degrees inclusive that would mean it was sharpened at less than 10 degrees per side. Do you mean that the edge is more than 20 degrees per side?

Cliff Stamp I meant 40 degrees sorry about that. I'm just hitting the shoulders when sharpening on the 40 setting on my sharpmaker.

Jaker Blunttaker Do you plan on doing this kind of thing a lot, or just on that one knife?

Cliff Stamp Just this one at the moment.

Jaker Blunttaker For that, the simplest solution is to buy a sheet of decent low grit sandpaper, W/D, use clips to attach it to the rods, use water and reset the bevel with that. The sandpaper will cost ~$2 a sheet.

I use this method : "In Reaper Man, thinking he might fight back against the New Death, Death (Bill Door) sharpens a scythe blade. First on a grindstone, then on an oilstone, then on a steel. It was too blunt. Miss Flitworth supplied, from her rag bag, satin, then silk, finest white silk, never worn (from her wedding dress). It was still blunt. Then it was sharpened on cobweb. Then on the breeze at dawn. Finally, on the light of the new day"

Wow for someone so against stropping and steeling you sure seem to be doing a lot of it. Is it a scandi grind?

mark a Of course, when you have to prepare for a fight with new death you have to get every last bit of performance.

Are you not concerned that it may take more than one cut to win the battle against the new death. Stropping seriously reduces edge retention. New death uses the three step method, a method proven to give optimal edge retention and sharpness.

mark a Book of Five Rings, only one cut is needed.

Yes, just go very light. The pressure is ramped up in proportion to the contact area reduction so you just need to keep the knife on the corners. I don't recommend using them unless you have to (recurves and such) because it is very easy to over stress the edge.

Heh, speaking of I'm going back on old physics material because of end of high school exams, and I knew like 70% of the stuff just from conversations with you. Hell, at one point I could just imagine your newfie/irish/everything else accented voice explaining it.

shurdi3 You need to take a Shillelagh to class. I always used one to illustrate basic mechanics, works excellent for illustrating concepts like impulse.

No class. We stopped studying physics after 10th grade. I'd argue the shillelagh is better for demonstrating momentum, transfer of force, and Newton's third law. Though I usually use it to demonstrate its great teeth picking abilities for people with big cavities

I would be very hesitant in general of making such conclusions, grits are rarely measured.

@@CliffStamp I am just curious, because I may get the Spyderco cbn bench stone, and I wanted to know scratch pattern compared to say DMT plates.

Amusing, do you actually do that?

Cliff Stamp When you first wrote about ultra-light honing for dealing with problem steels, I tried it. I can maintain the light pressure now without doing it. 2 Crayola fat markers made easy rollers. Too much force without some forethought led to chasing the 204 around the table.

me2bfc That is fairly creative, I may have to give that a try, suggest it to Carter. Maybe it will show him it isn't junk.

Dan, locally, you can get business at the small trade fairs and such which often showcase small local businesses. In fact, the flea markets and such can easily generate enough revenue to compensate for the overhead of a booth.

+Dan Martin All those systems where you clamp the blade have numerous issues -- I'd avoid the Lansky, for sure.

I agree that in general a benchstone would be more suitable however there are people who for various reasons do want a Sharpmaker only solution. if you read the forums you can find people who literally will spend hours (even days) regrinding an edge with the medium rods. Note this is how Spyderco describes the diamond stones : "Diamond hard abrasives are recommended when you wish to remove stock, for restoration purposes and to aggressively re-shape, re-bevel and re-profile a cutting edge. "

Cliff Stamp I have read of someone re-profiling a Battle Mistress on one, they said it took around 6 hours. I'm not exactly sure why someone would ever want to do that. In some cases, I think the desire to use the Sharpmaker for everything may stem from either a complete lack of experience with freehanding, or extreme brand loyalty. I know these are prototypes, but how much is Spyderco intending to sell these for?

Bill22252 Some of the things people do to sharpen are fairly odd indeed. For some though, sharpening isn't really something they are into for any significant time and they are not going to invest in multiple solutions. It is the same approach that leads people to have one shovel to do all digging, weather snow, dirt or ice. No idea, but based on comments on the forum these will be released shortly.

Bill22252 There was a recent comment on the Spyderco forum where a member noted it was days to reset an edge. It is a curious point that instead of that, a few minutes on an internet search could have saved a lot of time (just wrap sandpaper around the rods for example).

There is a real issue with solid CBN stones which are designed to release abrasive due to the binder. Stones like this are designed to be dressed / flattened to retained consistency of shape, if you don't do this with stones in the Sharpmaker you will get angle drift due to wear and then when you try to use the solid sintered rods (which basically wear so slow they stay true flat) you won't hit the edge with them. Yes there are ways to deal with that, but for many people it would be another source of frustration and for people who can understand and resolve it - they would likely have sourced the stones already (MoldMaster for example) and have hillbilly rigged them to work with some combination of duct tape and bailing wire.

Chupacabra bite, they are indigenous to this area.

Ah, so YOU were the one that recently caught a chupacabra. I'm assuming you caught it using a figure 4 trap with one of your scandi ground bushcraft knives

shurdi3 No one traps them, they taste horrible. A lot of people keep them as pets though, you just have to catch them young and train them (hence the bite).

Cliff Stamp I see. They must help with all the orcs that have the curious case of Benjamin Button, that are constantly invading Newfoundland

shurdi3 The Orc's just get eaten as snacks by the giant squid which are traditionally used as bait for the annual Kraken hunt.