Reply To: Lapping Plates
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Lapping plates are a non-essential and granite blocks are. Plane soles should only need minor refurb once a year IF you use your plane all day every day as I do.Long planes do not benefit too from flattening because they change shape with temperature. Generally you bend them to flatness as you use them. This includes No 5-5 1/2s and on up to 8’s (if anyone uses those long planes any more).
Polishing the larger flat faces to 15,000 takes a few strokes, maybe 30 or so once you’ve flattened the face. This is so for chisels and all plane irons. I generally don’t use a strop for this because the leather bulbs up and rounds the outer edges of the blades or chisels. I generally plane a piece of wood dead flat with a good and sharp plane. I then charge the wood with the abrasive compound. This will work for bevels too, but wood doesn’t hold the compound as well or as long as leather and because I use convex bevels on all edge tools and not secondary bevel sharpening systems the leather is just perfect. Also, once a face is flat and polished I do not touch it again for flattening or polishing again for month if not years. This is generally a one-shot deal at the start. It’s usually not necessary again. I just flip over on the 1200-grit plate, pull so that the burr is forced up onto the bevel side, i only pull about half an inch distance, and then I pull on the strop dead flat three or four times to remove the burr if necessary.
Buffing, abrasive and polishing compound are all terms for the same thing and are usually but not always made up of the same abrasive. There are different types of abrasive that cut metals differently. Some are meant for soft metals like non-ferrous metals, some for hard like stainless steel. We usually use abrasive compound used for polishing steels.
Hope this helps. It’s what we use at the school workshops. Very effective for maintaining our two hundred planes.
Oh, for sharpening cutting edges we do use EZELap 3×8 sharpening plates using the 250,600 and 1200 plates. We stopped using waterstones 15 years ago because of the expense, the mess and the fact that they don’t stay flat