Black/Translucent Arkansas stones vs Water Stones

Frank, a lot of the "waterstones" today, like the shapton pros, do not need to be soaked. Just sprinkle a little water on the top and go. In the long run cheaper than paper.
 
Hi Bros

Broos said:
Frank, a lot of the "waterstones" today, like the shapton pros, do not need to be soaked. Just sprinkle a little water on the top and go. In the long run cheaper than paper.
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You are right. I never used to soak me arkansas stone either but I am told that the superfine fast cuting Japanese stone have to be. I sharpen knifes on a need basis and just reach for the stones whenever they get blunt. I bought an Edge Pro and some very fine abrasive stick on paper came with it. I dont know what grit they are but they sure give a very fine finish. I imagine that the very fine grit Japanese finishing water stones would give a similar finish. Me old black hard arkansas was OK, but me spyderco superfine is better.

Regards
Frank
 
Jeff Clark said:
You really don't need to keep a water stone all that flat if you are doing ordinary knife sharpening. A slight concave curvature of the hone will simply give you a very slightly convex finish to your edge.
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The only issue I have with that is if you use multiple stones and the final one is a lot flatter. This can make maintaining the edge angle awkward.

-Cliff
 
The black, followed by the translucent and a Spyderco Ultrafine bench stones will put a hair poppin edge on just about any blade. The grits of each get progressively finer. Each stone removes more of the previous stones scratches and gets you closer to a mirror finish. Its worth the time and expense to get and use these stones after your initial sharpening if you want less of a toothy edge.

NJ
 
Hi,

Would someone be able to tell what is the gri of the syderco ultra fine ceramic stone? I seems to give the same kind of finish as the Lansky saphire which is sold as 2000 grit.

Cliff,

You are absolutely right. Being a toolmake I know how important it is always to have all abrasive stones dressed and if not round then completely flat. The first thing I do with any sharpening stone is to dress it flat. The only ones that that I couldnt flaten were the ceramics until someone said that I must use diamond and it worked.

Regards
Frank
 
There is no specific grit on the ceramic hones. The medium, fine and ultrafine all start out with the same grit: 35 microns, but they are fired differently which ends up in a different effective grit size. The F and UF are actually the same (fired the same) but the UF stones get tumbled afterwards which further reduces their effective gritsize. The only way to assign a grit to them is by comparsion with other sharpening stones. I have tried to keep track of the assessment of the Spyderco stones by the people on the forum and the is not a single consensus. The impressions vary by +/-1000 grit, but I would rate the UF stone based on my own impression and by something like an average over other peoples impressions as about 4000 grit (japanese waterstone equivalent).

Soaking an Arkansas stone wouldn't make any sense since it is an oil stone. Waterstones need indeed be soaked but the finer they are the less water they need and even the really coarse ones don't need to be soaked for 1/2 hour. A fine stone between 6000 to 10000 grit requires maybe 2 minutes. When it comes to the real fine grit, personally I don't think there is a substitution for waterstones (well maybe the diamond slurries that Nozh has been talking about, I am very curious to try them out). There is just nothing that is as fine and consistent as a good waterstone.
 
Hi HoB


Thanks for that information on ceramic stones. How do they tumble a 6x8 stone like the spyderco? And how does the tumbling refine the grit or what we think of as grit?


Its interesting what you say about the arkansas stones. I got mine from my father and we always used it with water. A couple of times I tried it with oil but it did not work as well. When I used it with water, the water turned black from the stones own material. Maybe it wasnt an arkansas then tho I always thought that it was. It was black, quite hard and very smooth and heavy and a natural stone. Íts size was 6x8. According to my father, it must be around 60 years old by now. Gave it away to a friend.

Regards
Frank
 
How Spyderco tumbles a ceramic benchstone, you have to ask Sal. I don't know, seems not so easy. He said they actually lose money on the UFs and just keep them in the program for the "affis" (afficinados). Well I would guess tumbling does the same to a stone as water does to a pebble, it polishes it smooth. Ceramic hones don't wear (well the white ones that are sintered to closed pore structure don't). Wouldn't work on a waterstone.
 
Hi HoB,

HoB said:
How Spyderco tumbles a ceramic benchstone, you have to ask Sal. I don't know, seems not so easy. He said they actually lose money on the UFs and just keep them in the program for the "affis" (afficinados). Well I would guess tumbling does the same to a stone as water does to a pebble, it polishes it smooth. Ceramic hones don't wear (well the white ones that are sintered to closed pore structure don't). Wouldn't work on a waterstone.
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Thanks for your thoughts. What gets me is that I dressed my Spyderco stone with DMT corse/fine diamond and it still remained ultra fine. The dressing removed a few high spots that caused galling. Did the same to my Lansky ceramic stones and removed a fair bot of material to make them flat. Again their polishing did not change. I think that there must be something in the ceramic itself that makes if coarse or fine.

Regards
Frank
 
Frank Hillary said:
Hi HoB,




Thanks for your thoughts. What gets me is that I dressed my Spyderco stone with DMT corse/fine diamond and it still remained ultra fine. The dressing removed a few high spots that caused galling. Did the same to my Lansky ceramic stones and removed a fair bot of material to make them flat. Again their polishing did not change. I think that there must be something in the ceramic itself that makes if coarse or fine.

Regards
Frank
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Well, the fine ceramic is not tumbled. You can always ask Sal directly. If he is traveling, it might be a while till he gets back to you, but he usually responds. Just post that question on the Spyderco forum.
 
Hi HoB,

Thanks for the tip. Went to the Spyderco forum and did a search and this is what I found:

No rating on the descriptions at spyderco, but axminster uk said this about them: "Available in medium, fine and ultra fine (rated approximately 800, 1200 and 10,000 grit respectively". 10,000?! that must be on the Japanese scale. They also call no wear on the fine and ultra fine.

Spyderco has never specified a grit on any of their ceramic rods/stones. The reason is that it is very difficult to define a grit. In traditional stones, grit referes to the size of the abrasive particle, however, the sintered cermics all start with the same particle size (30 micron IIRC), but during the sintering process the particles fuse and reduce the effective particle size. This is why Spyderco has never given any other specification than medium, fine and ultra fine.

Comparing the sharpmaker rods against japanese waterstones purely by looking at the finish under a microscope and by the way they feel, most people (this has been discussed on bladeforums several times) seem to agree that the medium compare to about 700-800, the fine to something like 1500-2000 and the ultra fine to 4000-5000. Of course this is a rough judgement and some people may find one a little finer or coarser than the numbers I gave here, but these numbers seem to represent a general concensus. The UF are definitly not as fine as 10000. The grits are all in the japanese system.

Looks as if you ware on the right track. They start out at the same grit size but when they bake them the grit reduces.

Regards
Frank
 
Well, what I wrote, including the tumbling is essentially what Sal stated at one point or another to the best of my ability to reproduce from memory.
 
This is a great thread.

Mostly it proves "different strokes...."

I, for one, love translucent Arkansas stones. The black ones I have are a bit "too fine" for me, that is they are only good as final stones. The translucent, on the other hand, remove a fair amount of metal while also leaving a very polished edge.

I also don't like the galling, dishing, puddles, etc. of waterstones. But I don't mind wiping up a bit of odorless, smokeless lamp oil mixed with a bit of baby oil. Just personal, I know.

John
 
I have been reading tonight about the best way to sharpen a knife by a university study...

Turns out that after testing nearly all the many different sharpening systems, they found that the very best way to sharpen a knife was
2 different Japanese water stones, then a leather strop with green crome rubbed into it.

This worked the fastest and left the fewest scratches http://mse.iastate.edu/fileadmin/www.mse.iastate.edu/static/files/verhoeven/KnifeShExps.pdf
 
Hi Allan,


Allan Molstad said:
I have been reading tonight about the best way to sharpen a knife by a university study...

Turns out that after testing nearly all the many different sharpening systems, they found that the very best way to sharpen a knife was
2 different Japanese water stones, then a leather strop with green crome rubbed into it.

This worked the fastest and left the fewest scratches http://mse.iastate.edu/fileadmin/www.mse.iastate.edu/static/files/verhoeven/KnifeShExps.pdf
Click to expand...


Thats the same article I put up in this forum a few days ago. Yes I took note of that finding. Now figure this out:

I went over to a mate who a little while ago bought a Ice Bear 10000 grit Japanese water stone. yep 10000. He does not like using it because it is too soft and the blades cut into the stone when push honing. OK on the draw but not on the push. Anyway I took my Spyderco superfine and we honed a knife on one side with the spiderco and the other on the water stone. Gues what? the sypedrco gave a much finer finish. We repeated with the Lanski saphire and again the Japanese stone was coarser. They must use a strange grading for grit because to my eyes it gave a finish more like 2000 grit wet and dry paper.

I dont know anythiing about this brand of water stones but am loosing my interest in water stones very fast. Had a look on the web and the ice bear brand turns out to be aliuminium oxide held together with some stuff. How they got to the 10000 grit beats me.

Back to the spyderco. By the way does anyone know what those sticky backed abarsive papers that come with the Edge Pro are? They are very fine.

Regards
Frank
 
Diamond produced a finer edge than chromium oxide in that study. A study which did not cover many sharpening systems, not many kinds of steel. The cutting ability and durability of these edges was not tested either.

Ben Dale says those tapes are 3000 grit, but I don't know what convention he is using for that number. The average size of the particles would be more useful, imo.
 
hardheart said:
The cutting ability and durability of these edges was not tested either.
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Yeah there is a lot of that, it would be useful to actually measure the sharpness by the amount of force required to cut something and actually correlate that to the image to verify it was indeed sharp. This would lead to as Swaim noted over ten years ago, sharp means something different depending on what and how you are cutting. But still people miss this point and propogate the chestnut that polished = sharp.

-Cliff
 
Well, I 'd say thin + polished is sharp, as I do that with my edc folders with good effect, but I also know that leaving a toothier edge on my workhorses left me with very good performance as well. I figure polishing thick edges isn't all that useful, since more force is needed on the cut because of the geometry to begin with. No need for a push cutting edge if the grind sucks for push cutting.

IMO, finish from a machine is finer than by hand, this I've noticed not just from edges, but and sanding/grinding done on metal and wood. Just run a belt/orbital sander on a block of wood for a little bit, and then take the same abrasive in hand and sand some more an the difference is clear, even though you're using the same abrasive. I don't know what it looks like under magnification, but you'd probably have to go maybe three or so times finer in grit for a hand honed edge to match one on a sander. When I worked on my JYD, I sanded the spine with a coarse Alox belt, it looked like hand rubbed 320 to me.

I'd say this is mostly from the sheer speed and amount of material removed. The finishes should match eventually, but how long do you need to rub that block of wood by hand to match the belt sander. But the time and effort needed I think is why makers sometimes say hand rubbed finishes are the worst part of the process.
 
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