Ceramic bath tile hone

J

JCKT

Joined
Apr 22, 2014
Messages
101
So while watching a video of Mors Kochanski sharpen his newly created survival knife (I'll add links below) he casually mentioned that during the honing process he would go out and buy two cheap ceramic bath tiles and rub them together till they were flat. He would then use this newly lapped bath tile as a finishing stone. "Whatttttt?" I said to myself. So after fruitless googling to see if anyone had done this before I decided to take a trip down to my local home depot.

I picked up a small beveled edge floor tile for about $3. Already having a wet tile saw I cut it into the rough shape of my annoyingly coarse Fallkniven DC4. I then used my machinists block and some 60 grit sand paper to remove all of the grooves and flatten the stone. I started at 60 grit then moved to 150, 320, 600, and then ended on 2,000. Here are two photos next to the DC4:

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So how does it work? Well it seems to work really well. It is extremely fine, I was actually hoping it would be a little bit coarser so I could use it as a replacement to the DC4's sapphire "fine" stone. But what I ended up with was a very fine hone. I am not a very good judge of grits but I'd say its way finer than my Spyderco Fine stone and even finer than my surgical black arkansas stones.

Have any of you done this before? If so, if I condition the surface with a coarser paper (600 - 800) will that make the stone coarser or are these meant for honing purposes only? Are there any downsides to this? It sounds like Mors has been doing this for several decades with no ill effect, however I figured I'd better ask around here too.

Mors makes a survival knife:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzGbwT4qVw0

Mors sharpens aforementioned survival knife (also mentions bath tile thing):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO2vbmdfxuI
 
Spyder59 said:
Cool. I've got to try that! Do you use any water or oil as a lube when you use it.
Click to expand...

Good question. I've used it both dry and with water, both times it worked. It's probably better to use a bit of water to lube the surface, although I'd be lying if I said that wasn't just a guess.
 
I've used old ceramic flue tile tile I found at an abandoned camp up in the Adirondacks as a finishing hone on my hatchet. I don't know how well it would work on stainless, but works great on carbon steel. I didn't do anything to condition the tile before using.
 
So I have a bit of an update, using the scrap from the first time I flattened and conditioned another piece. This time I only brought it up to 320 grit. However the results aren't as clear as I would have wished. It seems to cut a little faster than the one finished with 2,000 grit but not by a huge margin. These are definitely finishing stones. The one I finished with 320 cuts and polishes similar to a surgical black arkansas stone, while the other one finishes quite a bit finer. Maybe different brands of tile use different types of ceramic or maybe the ceramic that they use in tiles is just inherently fine. Either way its a fantastic hone, especially for the $3 price tag. If you are looking for a cheap way to bring your knife to a hair popping edge, this may be the ticket.

Oh a quick note on usage: They definitely absorb water, so these will probably be more effective when saturated.

I do want to note that most of the testing that I did was on carbon steels, victroninox's stainless steels, and mora's 12c27. So I am not sure how effective the hone is on a vanadium laden powder steel, someone else will have to test that.

Enjoy!
 
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