Diamond stropping compound grade thoughts

[Bearzilla911]

For a number of years now I have been stropping (leather on wood) with 50,000 to 200,000 grit diamond polishing paste grits, typically Diamond Tech Tools high concentration. I just tried a 3,000 grit diamond paste, and haven't stropped that many knives with it at this point, but I don't see a huge difference in performance, yet. I would think the much coarser grit would maybe remove the burr quicker, even if I don't see much difference in appearance. Is this reasoning sound?

 

[jeffbird]

3,000 grit anything is polishing. Try 300 - 600 grit to clean off a burr. On straight razors, 12,000 - 20,000 grit usually is the stopping point. Hard to imagine 200,000 grit doing anything to most steels.

 

[Diemaker]

In my experience, if you have more than a trace of diamond on your strop, it will create a foil burr, with higher BESS scores. If you have enough to do a good job at polishing the bevel, you have too much for deburring. Aluminum oxide works much better at deburring and increasing the keenness, but doesn't do much for polishing. Just my observations.

Recently, I sharpened a Maxamet blade finishing with a 4k Matrix stone, and it was in the low 70s BESS. I then stropped it with 1 micron diamond and got it into the 140s BESS, but the bevel was polished very nicely. This is from burrs, not from convexing the apex. I then stropped it with a .5 micron soft white aluminum oxide and got it back to the high 70s, low 80s BESS. Right now, I think the only way to get diamond emulsions to work how we want them to is to not use enough for them to do much.