Mirror polish and dlc coating

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Gradyw

Joined
Jan 23, 2017
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Would a dlc coating come off with a 250 grit stone? I've heard these coatings are tough to get off I've never tried but I would think they wouldn't be too bad to sand off.. my next question is how well does S30v polish? Could I achieve a mirror polish on a spyderco blade(not the edge but the entire blade) going threw a set of shapton pros and stripping? 250, 1k, 2k, 5k, and 8k followed by stropping on black green and white compound? Always wanted to finish a blade like this but never had the right knife or grind to do it
 
Mirrored blades look badass to me.. I have a black coated srk in carbon v I was thinking about trying it on just the secondary bevel.. I wonder how 1095 would shine too.. I've had a couple chances to do it but I'm not sure how long it would take on stones or if I could even get it looking right.. I also have a feeling I would skip threw grits too fast being as I don't know when to go up.. only knife I ever tried was a mora.. did ok but had some big scratches left in it I think from diamonds earlier on
 
Oh yah. I can gaurantee you it will come right off. Use a white stone preferably on a grinder.
e.g.,
this is DLC coated and they did a nice job; good and thick (I have seen other knives you could almost read through the coating; more liked smoked chrome than a durable coating.


anyway here we are after a few touches on the white wheel.


Here we are after some serious thinning of the blade.


As far as polishing; as I understand it you will have much better luck getting a nice mirror on S35VN than S30V. That was a good deal of the reason for makers going to S35VN; it is easier to machine and takes a better polish. The S30V may end up with more of an orange peel look to it. I have no hands on experience with those.
 
Diamond compounds, at 6µ and smaller, will work much, much better on S30V, for highly finished mirror polishing. Green compounds don't work well for that at all, on S30V. Black/white compounds will do a bit better than the green, but only to a point, when the vanadium carbides are the only obstacle left for those (hence the afforementiond 'orange peel' effect). They'll also not leave the edge as crisp and sharp as with a diamond stropping compound, for the same reason. They just won't shape the carbides well at the finer finishes.

Use the diamond on a hard strop of wood, like balsa, basswood, etc., for much faster polishing and a much brighter mirror. That'll also keep the finished edge much crisper. Make sure to keep a tight grit progression with the stones down through < 10µ or smaller grit, to reduce the scratch patterns as much as possible, before going to the diamond strop. If done right with the preceding grits, you'll really see the mirror pop when stropping on wood with 3µ diamond and below.


David
 
You saying I need to get a piece of wood to add the diamond too correct? Like don't put a leather strip on it?
 
Gradyw said:
You saying I need to get a piece of wood to add the diamond too correct? Like don't put a leather strip on it?
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Diamond will work much better on bare, smooth wood. Leather is OK with a light touch, for occasional light stropping to keep the edge in shape and for cleaning up burrs. But wood is a whole lot better with diamond compound, for polishing. Being firmer than leather, it'll also tolerate a little more pressure when stropping, with less rounding of the apex, as can happen too easily with too much pressure on compressible leather.


David
 
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Call me dumb but why wouldn't you do this to say..a stonewash or satin finished blade, instead of bothering/worrying if the DLC coating will come off or not?

Or am I REALLY dumb and those finishes don't "polish" up like you want it to?
 
Well it's not the finish of the blade it had on it i was really just wanting to find a full flat ground knife to do it to reguardless of whatever finish it already had on it.. with the dlc I had read one time that it was almost impossible to get off.. It didn't make sense to me but just wanted to make sure
 
And obsessed with edges maybe that's why I never really liked diamonds for stripping.. it works ok sometimes but I've had a lot better luck with the compounds but I will have to try that
 
What about the shapton pro set is that a good progression for a blade.. I've mirrored many edges with it but haven't tried doing a big bevel besides the mora which didn't work out like I wanted but didn't spend much time and could've been a couple different things.. too lazy to find out
 
Gradyw said:
What about the shapton pro set is that a good progression for a blade.. I've mirrored many edges with it but haven't tried doing a big bevel besides
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I have not done this with the Shapton Pros though I have a good many.
You might try using the corner or the end of the stones and let it get kind of rounded.
I am thinking along the lines of how a Samurai sword polisher goes about polishing the blade, at least they did it with small stones like these back in the day and that is why I say use the end.

PS: these are Norton water stones and not Shaptons but this is what I had in mind using these cut offs for (knife polishing) when I cut them off. I cut them after I got a comprehensive set of Shapton Pros. So far I have not taken them very seriously for polishing and mostly use them to sharpen very small / short bladed knives which I can highly recommend them for. Hand held. Good stuff.

 
Knifes vs Knives
Mod : maybe you could bring it to the attention of the computer program pro to fix this.
I am positive I type k n i v e s and the blasted auto correct fills in k n i f e s.

I have a hard enough time not looking like an idiot around here with out extra "help".
t h a n k s !
 
Auto-correct is on your end, not the server.

"Knifes" is a perfectly valid word, so a spell-checker will not flag it. However, it is not the plural of knife. It is the third-person singular present form of the verb "to knife," as in to stab with a knife. "He knifes his victims from behind."
 
jc57 said:
Auto-correct is on your end, not the server.
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What a revoltin' development. :)
One reason I thought it might be on the BF end was I have, on many occasions had "Key words" or "flagged " words lock my post to where I could not post it. I learned to trace the offender and bingo the post would go through. Put the word back and it would not.

On one forum just typing "??????" would lock the post.

anyway thanks for the reply.
 
jc57 said:
Auto-correct is on your end, not the server.

"Knifes" is a perfectly valid word, so a spell-checker will not flag it. However, it is not the plural of knife. It is the third-person singular present form of the verb "to knife," as in to stab with a knife. "He knifes his victims from behind."
Click to expand...

Wow. I had no idea "knife" could be used as a verb. Guess I have to stop giving my wife such a hard time when she asks me to "knife" something!
 
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