Reply To: Sharpening for luthiers
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Well, thank You a lot for all your comments and bouncing ideas off 🙂 Many, many things for me to consider.
But I must admit I was hoping to get to know a little more about oilstones. I have never used any. And I think one or two traditional, natural oilstones would be perfect combination for a small, early instrument making workshop, because they are natural and traditional 🙂
Let me ask one more thing. Years ago an English lutemaker David van Edwards presented on his website a kind of sharpening “system” (unfortunately, links are dead now). That system had consisted of a bench grinder with an abrasive wheel and a stitched calico wheel mounted, but it had been arranged to rotate backwards (!). So you could polish (with stitched calico wheel loaded with green compound, which had been added also, presumably) a plane iron, or chisel offering it to that polishing wheel in an usual manner. Mr Edwards claimed, that it had done miraculous effect to edge tools, and with macro-pictures included he stated, that it was not only polishing the edge, but “re-arranging” it at molecular level or so. He also stated, that felt wheels hadn’t worked as good as stitched calico ones.
Has anybody seen something like that?
I have experimented a little with stitched calico wheel on a shaft, and loaded with green polishing compound set in an ordinary electric drill. I mean, that it seemed to work just by very gentle but thorough polishing, but it hadn’t enough speed probably, so it was inconclusive to me.
Anyway I am stropping with aluminium oxide white buffing compound (have bad feeling about the green one), but sometimes I use just a leather strop glued to a piece of wood/MDF without any buffing compound. I heard somewhere, that chromium is used in tanning leather (and it might become toxic – beware of East Asia leather!), so the leather may come “loaded” actually. I am not 100% sure which is witch, but some pieces of leather I found here and there really do polish steel when not loaded pretty well. Does anyone agree with me?