Struggling with Paul's sharpening method – any tips or things to look out for?
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Welcome! / Forums / General Woodworking Discussions / Tools and Tool Maintenance/Restoration / Struggling with Paul's sharpening method – any tips or things to look out for?
One other question, how do the micron sizes of the film match up with grit sizes? Lower micron sizes would mean smaller particles which means higher grit?
They don’t match up precisely, because “grit” is an arbitrary designation. One company’s “grit” can be larger or smaller than another company’s “grit”. A micron, however, is the same size the world over.
Having said that, there are many tables online you can find which purport to relate grits to microns. I don’t know if any of them are accurate, but they all seem to generally convey the idea that fewer microns is equivalent to a higher number “grit”.
For anyone new to “scary sharp” or microfinishing films, I’d recommend you peruse the entirety of Brent Beach’s website: http://www3.telus.net/BrentBeach/Sharpen/index.html
Quite a bit of excellent information there.
yes the smaller the micron the finer the grit.
micron is its own scale/system, forgot to mention that the common name is scary sharp, you can buy a set of sheets from workshop heaven, I’d recommend 100, 40 then 15 micron, as a starting point, it might seem expensive but it’s well worth it, especially if like me you were having problems getting it absolutely perfectly flat.
Just for contrast: One sheet of 120 grit from your supply of sandpaper that you already likely have on hand will probably get you through this. Since you already own diamond stones, you are then done. Normal sharpening will be entirely on the stones. If you don’t have paper on hand, a few sheets of Norton 120 and 180 will almost certainly be used in your work over time.