DMT Benchstone, which do you guys use?

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realitycheck

Joined
Nov 24, 2007
Messages
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Hey guys I have been looking at getting a DMT benchstone. After spending like two or three hours on one side of my uncle henry hunting knife trying to reprofile it the other day and still not getting anywhere. Anyway, I've been looking at the D8C which is the 8"x3" Course stone, click for link
Or the D8XX, Extra Extra Coarse Link here
So I do have a benchmade in 154cm which will need to be reprofiled here soon. Im not worried about if I have to spend 45 minutes doing it on the coarse stone. I just dont want to spend hours on my smiths course aluminum oxide or w/e it is. So which stone do you guys use and for what knives or steels, and how do you rate them??? Also how long do these stones last??
Thanks so much guys.
 
smitty good to talk to you again. Hey does it have the coarse stone in your kit?? How well does it handle the harder steels??
 
I have the DMT Aligner kit
I use the course to rebevel D2 on Queen slipjoints.
D2 is very hard.
Needs patience and let the diamonds do their work.
About 20 to 25 minutes.
I get excellent results

I am ordering the extra course for rebeveling, it will be faster.
 
I have the coarse stone. It works good on all my knives. Unless you are going to do a lot of reprofiling I really don't think you need the XXcoarse stone. Coarse works pretty fast. These are the only stones I have used for a long time and I've had my fine 6in stone like that at work for a year now and it gets used 10 times a day by someone and its still in good shape. They will smooth up a little after the first uses but this is common to all diamond stones. For the money you can't beat these. Don't know it you were planning on buying from your links but you can get them cheaper at eknifeworks.com.
 
The DMT XXC and a good medium waterstone in the 700-1200 grit range is IMHO a dream team combination. The XXC will rip in a new bevel in record time. Its cutting speed is nothing short of amazing/scary, but its finish is accordingly equally record setting poor (again IMHO). But with a good medium waterstone, it is very easy and fast to refine the finish left by the XXC. The XXC should be (IMHO :) ) be left for serious stock removal task, but if you have something like an S30V blade that came with a 20+deg/per side edge and you want to bring it down to a reasonable 12-15 deg/per side, the XXC will do it in less than 5 min. The burr you might pull up is of a size I have never seen on a waterstone. So either you stop just short of really reaching the edge, or I take indeed a swipe perpendicular into the waterstone and then pull up quickly a new edge on the waterstone. For me the DMT XXC and the Bester 700 are everything I have ever wished for in the coarse to medium grit range.

Oh and, while I agree that the XC is pretty fast cutting, it seems to me that the XXC is unproportionally faster.
 
I have the Diasharps D8XX and a combo extra coarse/fine D6FX. In retrospect I wish they made a coarse/extra fine, that would be perfect for me.
 
Thanks guys for all the help. I really appreciate it. byers actually i was planning on getting one from eknifeworks.com I just used those links cause it was quickest I knew to get the pics and models. Im with you I wont do alot of reprofiling but when I do I think this will make it alot easier, than using the smiths stone I was using.
 
I use to sharpen my knives to hair whittling
DMT D8XX - Extra Extra Coarse
DMT D11C - Coarse
DMT D11E - Extra Fine

Extra Extra Fine did not make any difference to me. I do not know why - it is same as Extra Fine and did not really make mirror surface as it suppose to at this grit.

I follow this up with Green Rouge and got my results (best video so far):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQPwHu4lxsQ

Thanks, Vassili.
 
I do have the coarse stone in my kit, and it seems to cut ATS-34 like there's no tomorrow. D-2 also.How's the freehanding coming BTW?
 
still working on it smitty. Im sorry to say I got a sharpmaker for my final honing. It works really well for that last step. I am however still freehanding my primary bevel and it seems to be going pretty good but I trying to reprofile that schrade proved to whoop me. So i ordered the d8c, the coarse stone in 8"x3" so im looking forward to it.Sorry I didnt completely stick with the freehanding. We'll see how it goes though like I said im still freehanding the primary bevel maybe one day i'll get better and be able to freehand it all.
 
realitycheck said:
still working on it smitty. Im sorry to say I got a sharpmaker for my final honing. It works really well for that last step. I am however still freehanding my primary bevel and it seems to be going pretty good but I trying to reprofile that schrade proved to whoop me. So i ordered the d8c, the coarse stone in 8"x3" so im looking forward to it.Sorry I didnt completely stick with the freehanding. We'll see how it goes though like I said im still freehanding the primary bevel maybe one day i'll get better and be able to freehand it all.
Click to expand...

For reprofiling you need D8XX. D8C too fine for reprofiling, until you have too much time to spend.

Thanks, Vassili.
 
Practice makes perfect, it sounds like you're off to a good start, in a years time, you never know how you'll be doing things.
 
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