Reply To: Move from water stones to diamonds or not?
Welcome! / Forums / General Woodworking Discussions / Move from water stones to diamonds or not? / Reply To: Move from water stones to diamonds or not?
After a short use, they have become much smoother, still cutting okay, though. I’ve seen this “break-in” to higher effective grits reported here and elsewhere, but this fast?
Never heard of it happening that fast, but just the fact that it does happen is why I left diamonds. For me, it was slow and insidious…first they sharpen your edges fairly quickly, not as fast as good water stones, but do-able. Then they’re a bit slower, well, OK. Then a bit slower, and some months later, you’re spending 10 minutes just trying to get a burr on the finest stone.
The slow boil prevents the frog from jumping out of the pot, right? So that really ticked me off, knowing I’d wasted so much time over months and months, but because it was so gradual, I never realized how bad it had gotten until it was ridiculous.
Anyways, flattening with float glass is probably fine, except for the cost of the sandpaper over time. Those 30 dollar truing stones – I have one, and it’s not flat. How precisely manufactured is it likely to be for 30 bucks? I would flatten with the silicon carbide truing stone, then pencil in some marks, and repeat. I’d then pencil in some marks again, start to flatten with my DMT plate, and sure enough, there was a hollow in the middle of the stone still remaining.
So I don’t trust the truing stone’s flatness, which is the real issue. Float glass, in a water-stone-sized piece, is probably flat to within a few thousandths of an inch over all. I just don’t know how long the sandpaper would last, and that might add up, eventually you’d have saved money buying the DiaFlat…
There’s also the carbide powder thing, but I don’t understand how that works, thus I don’t understand if it works, so I’ve avoided it. Seems to me you’d get some areas where the powder clumps up, and thus those areas would have hollows, no?