Making a ultra fine Ceramic stone

[SwissHeritageCo]

The "full mirror" or rather polishing the surface of the UF to a shine is not a great idea, IMO. This is in effect glazing the hone, which will make it act in a very dull fashion - which means very high polish on the steel, but very little material removal, and mostly it will be through a burnishing or plastic deformation mechanism rather than cutting, which means if you do more than a very little bit of work on the edge you're going to be riding the A-train to Burr City.

So is not advisable to use a diamond stone to lap with at all then? My ultra fine side is definitely shiny and slick.. I guess I've glazed it.. but it still seems to remove quite a bit of metal.

I mainly use it as a strop.. but the times I've polished with it there has indeed been a burr, though I never made the connection.

 

[eKretz]

So is not advisable to use a diamond stone to lap with at all then? My ultra fine side is definitely shiny and slick.. I guess I've glazed it.. but it still seems to remove quite a bit of metal.

I mainly use it as a strop.. but the times I've polished with it there has indeed been a burr, though I never made the connection.

Let's put it this way. In my experience loose grit is best, and a sharp new diamond plate is better than a dull, well worn one. All of these will work, it's a matter of degree in terms of how well. My advice would be to use what you've got, you can always upgrade or improve later if you choose to... However if you are considering this but haven't done it yet, why not start with the best method right off the bat?

 

[FortyTwoBlades]

Even very coarse diamond plates will only lightly scratch sintered ceramics. Because sintered stones function a lot like a file you end up leaving a very very fine surface with a slower cut rate that ends up pushing into the range of being less useful in most contexts than ones formed by the loose grit method, in part because you're abrading the grains themselves with the diamond rather than forcing the grains to loosen from one another like the loose grit method does.

 

[SwissHeritageCo]

It's been educational boys, thank you.

Apologies about momentarily highjacking your thread M Maxlord

I'll be ordering another fine spyderco pocket stone and some loose diamond powder to test this shortly. I'm curious to see the difference between my ''glazed'' uf stone and the non glazed uf stone in person; polishing was my main motivation for lapping to begin with.

 

[eKretz]

Right, the diamond plate lapping is a form of two-body abrasion (2 surfaces siding over each other, one more abrasive than the other), which produces a sort of mostly mean flat plateaued surface with most of the peaks knocked down and linear scratches leaving valleys in the surface.

Loose grit lapping is what is known as 3-body abrasion, which means that two surfaces are moving over each other and a third item (the loose grit) is rolling and sliding around between them, abrading both surfaces by sort of "scooping" out particles as they roll. This leaves a surface that has high (relatively, we're still talking microscopic) sharp peaks as well as valleys. So you get nice sharp cutting edges and also with the valleys somewhere for the swarf to go.

You might want to try a few different grits of loose abrasive to see where you want to end up. You may want to watch which kind of diamond you get too... Ideally you'd want monocrystalline. Polycrystalline will be more likely to break down finer in use as it cleaves easier.