Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
I’ll revive this old thread to report that my own Eze-lap coarse diamond plate, which I bought a few years ago, wore out almost immediately and is now useless. It’s definitely not coarse anymore. I can get a mirror-bright polish from portions of it! Unfortunately, a non-uniform plate that produces ultra-fine scratches some of the time and giant scratches 2% of the time is the worst of all worlds, so I guess the plate is destined for the trash.
On the other hand, my medium and fine Eze-lap plates seem to be working fine and I’m using them routinely.
Back when I bought these plates, I couldn’t find a dealer other than The Usual Online Retailer, so I used them. The medium and fine plates came in one package, and the coarse plate was a separate order. So, in addition to questions about Eze-lap’s own quality control, I have to wonder if my coarse plate actually shipped out of Eze-lap’s front door, or if — for example — some enterprising people rescued a rejected plate from a skip and repackaged it as new.
Anyway, I now have a used bench grinder equipped with a Norton 60-grit 3x wheel to touch up damaged edges, and I have 80-grit sandpaper belts on a big marble tile to flatten things with, so I’m not bothering to replace my coarse diamond plate at the moment. If I decide I do want such a plate again, I’ll try DMT, which I can buy from a reputable dealer.
Dave Fisher in the USA has advice on finishing spoons and bowls: http://www.davidffisher.com/usecare — he usually uses flaxseed oil or a blend of that with beeswax.
@hugonotti: I’ve sharpened a drawknife to the point where it got actual shavings from end-grain pine. They weren’t 12-inch-long shavings or anything, but they were shavings.
In fact, the sharpening class I took used that as the acid test: If a tool can cut shavings from end-grain pine, that tool is sharp, and you can stop worrying about sharpening and get on with the rest of your craft. If the pine crumbles to dust, the tool could be sharper.
That said, we performed this test on Eastern white pine, not oak. I have yet to try shaving end-grain oak. I also have yet to sharpen any plane blades to this standard, but at least I now know it is possible!
I am even more of a beginner than you, but I did just take a sharpening class with Tim Manney in the USA, so I’ll dare to offer some second-hand suggestions:
If you’ve discovered the technique of “chasing” the burr from one face to the other, you can keep doing that — plenty of people sharpen that way, polishing first one face, then the other, and gradually refining the burr until it is gone or nearly gone. (It’s okay to polish the back face during this process — just use the finer grits and keep it flat.) But I was taught to use fine stones for this, not an untreated strop.
http://antiquetools.com/sharp/sharpchasingburr.html
Or you can master the Paul Sellers technique by emulating him exactly, in which case I’d apply some polishing compound to the strop. As Joel says in this link, you can think of a polish-charged strop as a kind of hybrid between a plain strop and a fine stone:
https://www.toolsforworkingwood.com/store/blog/529/title/The+Tools+of+Stropping
- This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by mechfish.
- This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by mechfish.
I found some rave reviews for a product called Evapo-Rust and have been trying that. It seems to work nicely and, much like Diet Coke, it is not scary unless you try to drink it – it is biodegradable. I have wondered, though, if it is basically just citric acid plus a few handy additives.
(The Evapo-Rust add copy claims it is “not an acid”, but I wonder if what they mean by that is “this is not one of those SCARY acids like naval jelly or phosphoric acid”, rather than “this is literally not acidic in any way”. Maybe I should find some litmus paper or a pH meter.)
Hi Kevin,
You might find the recent discussion of York vises to be useful.
Besides Eclipse, other recommended brands that came up in that discussion were Jorgensen and Wilton. In the used market in the US, there’s Columbian and old Craftsman vises from the 1960s, which apparently were rebranded Columbians.
Just to keep all the notes in one place: Bahco is part of “Snap-On Industrial Brands” and I found their where-to-buy page:
http://m.snaponindustrialbrands.com/50/mobile-where-to-buy.htm
Here is one example, from that page, of an online dealer selling Bahco files:
http://www.protoolwarehouse.com/cat-19-1-361-0/sharpening.htm?SortOrder=2
Meanwhile ICS cutting tools does look interesting.
I’m a beginner, two weeks in, who has yet to file his first saw. But the first thing I noticed after learning that saw files exist (!) is that they’re apparently in danger of not existing anymore (!!), so I decided to get ahead of myself and buy some.
The secret to finding Bahco files seems to be this blog post by Paul, where he gives exact part numbers:
https://paulsellers.com/2015/05/saw-files-lasting-qualities/
You can Google the part numbers. To find out what the numbers mean, one can try reading the manufacturer’s catalogue, which seems to be here:
http://extranet.snaeurope.com/ProdBlock.aspx?sectionID=15&CatalogueID=5
I’m not sure why I didn’t find Abolox or Blackburn in my searches, but I found the Bahco files for sale on Amazon. Amazon’s inventory system is a huge mess in this case. Notice how hard it is to figure out that the following link is for a saw file:
On the other hand, when I overcame my suspicions and tried ordering this, it turned out that the little image on the photo which says “10 pack” was not kidding, at least not as of two weeks ago. I now own considerably more saw files than saws.
-
AuthorPosts