Reply To: Back to water stones
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@ed — she uses (and now I do, too) a combination of the Naniwa Professional Series and the Sigma Select 2. The SS2’s are amazing, you use them and steel just flows off your blade. They dish and flatten back up super fast. They leave a matte finish and their edge is pretty darn good if you go to their highest grits. The Naniwa Professionals leave a mirror polish and an excellent edge, and neither dish nor flatten as quickly as the SS2’s.
So the SS2’s are the low grits, then the Pro at the end for that great edge and polish.
I’m flattening them with my DMT coarse stone. Mark them up with a pencil. The SS2s take about 10 seconds per side…I do 5 seconds, then re-mark the pencil lines and rotate the stone 180 degrees to hopefully ameliorate the many flaws which doubtless exist in my flattening technique, 5 more seconds. A couple of times I have needed 10 seconds x 2 (when 5 seconds doesn’t remove all the pencil lines), never needed more than that yet. The Pros take 30 seconds a side, give or take.
I should note that all the bevels are hollow ground, so ymmv, but it goes like this: 5-10 strokes or so on the 3k SS2. Then 10 or so strokes on the 6k SS2, and 10 on the 10k SS2. Finish with 10-20 on the 10k Pro. The 3 minutes for the SS2’s to soak is far longer than it takes to actually sharpen a blade, so I usually wait until I have a handful of edges to sharpen, soak, do them all, and that will usually dish out both sides of the SS2s to the point where I’m justified in flattening them, and since they’re soaked, they’re ready to flatten. Wipe them dry and they all get stored dry.
She has a 240 and 400 grit SS2 for flattening backs and changing bevel angles quickly. I haven’t used them yet. When doing rougher work like hogging out mortises, she’ll often go back to work straight off the SS2 6k, but for establishing the edges of a mortise, the edge always gets the full Monty.
So I’m following her example wrt stropping, and only using it to touch up. Pulling burrs off with the 10k Pro after sharpening.
Often what’s good for someone of exceptional skill and talent is not optimal for a hobbyist hack like me (for example, she sharpens by hand like Paul and recommends it to others; no way I’m leaving my Mk2 jig, even though she calls it a “training wheel”). But so far this system has improved my edges and does have me spending less time sharpening (even adding in the high frequency of stropping).
Oh, I get some of the SS2’s at LV (woodworking college gets us a discount there), but the Naniwa Pros and the rest of the SS2s are from https://www.fine-tools.com/naniwa-chosera.html and https://www.fine-tools.com/sigma.html. I get them there because LV doesn’t have a complete selection of SS2 grits and because it’s often difficult to differentiate between the middle-of-the-road “Sharpening Stone” line from Naniwa (https://www.fine-tools.com/naniwa-stones.html) and their Pro line (link above). If you look around Amazon, for example, you’ll quickly see how misleading some sellers can be (perhaps by accident, IDK).